God and the Pope under attack (P1)

THAT CERTAINLY IS AN ATTENTION-GRABBING headline that, some critics say, is this newspaper’s flavor. But I assure you, it’s accurate. And it is certainly news in a country where Masses are held even in malls, where prelates pontificate on politics, and where a jogging cleric’s rants are news sound bites.

The 21st century is seeing the most intense attacks on belief in God in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. The siege is both on the intellectual level, the subject of the first part of this column, and on the cultural and institutional level, next week’s topic.

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Why we’re not into soccer (2)

A RECENT TIME MAGAZINE COVER STORY ON the World Cup 2010 games observed: “One reason why football is the world’s most popular game is that it is just so accessible, you can play anywhere.”

That’s not exactly true. Basketball is the more accessible game for one major reason: a basketball court is 10 times smaller than a football pitch, and therefore much easier to find.

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Why we’re not into soccer

WITH THE WORLD CUP 2010 MADNESS AT ITS height, when European capitals stand still as their national teams compete, you are likely to ask yourself: “Are we so different that we don’t play the game everyone’s playing around the world?”

It’s not a trivial question. Nearly one billion human beings are said to be watching the World Cup 2010 games, and we’re not. We’re very strangely not participants in what an American columnist termed as the “human family at play.” If football, as a historian pointed out, is “the new religion,” then we Filipinos are weirdly the fringe group atheists. And it’s a game we Filipinos can dream of excelling in some day, unlike the tall man’s game, basketball, in which we are genetically handicapped so that we’ll never stand out.

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