Friday, September 3, 2010

Oh my god!

Good morning to everyone!
As I used to do in my old blog I'm gonna try to write the posts for so on in english.
I said I'm gonna try cause, as you'll be able to realize, I am pretty bad using Shakespeare's language so I hope I can improve it using it more often.
Today I was thinking to write a post about religion in Puerto Rico. I discovered during last few weeks that religious believes here, are very different than what you can find in Spain, at least it is very different than what I think you can find there.
In the island and because of those 400 years they shared under the spanish corona, Roman Catholic Church is the most popular belief and, as we can see in most of countries, here you can find churches of the following religions as well: United Brethren, Presbyterian, Methodist, Disciples of Christ, Congregational, Christian, Baptist, Seventh Day Adventists, Pentecostal, Church of Jesus, Lutheran, and Christian, Missionary Alliance......
Because of the arrival of african slaves and their mix with the Taino indians which were the original inhabitants of Borinquen(Puerto Rico). There is a presence of traditional african religion in here. Puerto Rico is located very close to la española and religions which use Vudu (specially in haiti) are somehow present here as well.
Besides those I've seen a lot of small churches everywhere, all of them with different names and owners.... You read it correctly, owners. This churches and its believes belong to someone, usually a company owned by a person who is the "pastor".
It was weird to see that usually these "pastores" make a lot of money with its religion business.
During the weekends the churchs and its parking lots are crowded of people who are afraid of something they did or did not and want to clean their mind of bad feelings praying and paying.
There is a story about a guy who founded a church, got rich and now lives like a king in Florida, his children are now taking care of the business(church) he built.
It is a place to pray and to have fun. In the building there is plenty of staff to spend an afternoon; museum, play room, restaurant, cinema,....

"All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours. "
Aldous Huxley

No comments:

Post a Comment