Harvey Cox of Boston Globe wrote a great article entitled “Why fundamentalism will fail: A seemingly unstoppable force is being undone from the inside” (November 8, 2009) .

His premise is that beneath their squawking–abetted and further legitimized by a media who loves violence and paranoid individuals flooding the internet and television with warnings of religious-inspired doomsdays–fundamentalist groups, incapable of providing real solutions to poverty, spiritual thirst, and nationalist or tribal sentiments, will soon perish in the hands of reason and the rising sense of global multiculturalism.

And here below, I list some of the observations and reflections I have of my own country in relation to his thesis:

1.   Already, we have more and more Moslem women in our part of the country wearing the black burkah, a custom adopted from fundamentalist Islam sects in other parts of the world, and certainly not a traditional practice in Mindanao.

In an international women’s conference I recently attended, I learned that the whipping and stoning to death of women (and men) as punishment for adultery are being revived in Indonesia and Iran in the name of Allah and His teachings.

2.   On the Christian front, more and more ordinary people are claiming to be Messiahs or the only son of God or the only true messenger of God, or Jesus’ medium. With enough flair for drama and some media connections, these once unknowns turn into celebrities and millionaires with a massive following in just a few years.

3.   How paradoxical, I think, that the more consumerist our world becomes, the more the longing for divine connection. One can never underestimate the power of the soul to search for its original source even as the human body is intoxicated with the chaos of stocks exchange and the bad-girl, bad-boy subcultures of the paris hiltons and chris browns of the world. Yet perhaps it is the combination of this intoxication and spiritual starvation that makes people vulnerable to mindless devotion, clinging to anything and anyone that provides an ounce of salvation.

4.   Perhaps we now live at a time when the contradictions are even sharper so that while the call for religious fundamentalism is getting louder, the consciousness to adopt a more universal spirituality is becoming more pervasive and popular.

And so it is such a relief to know that there are theories out there saying fundamentalism will not survive. At the same time, the surge of spiritual or religious consciousness of the open-minded, liberal kind is testament to the fact that we are all starting to come full circle and become one, as we, in fact, are.