The misuse of religion

People say that it is taboo to talk about/argue about religion, if this is true we apologize for any who may be offended. 

What is the big deal about religion? One day I just stopped and thought about it. The things I thought about  were where it came from and what it was for. For now let us forget about the first thought and go straight to the second one. What is religion for? I believe that religion is simply a tool used to pacify the masses. In this context I believe that Christianity was used as a tool to colonize the Philippines. Colonizing a whole archipelago is not a easy thing to do, what better tool is there to use than religion? Some people would say brute force, but that would involve quite a bit of hassle. Religion could be used not only to pacify the people being colonized but also as a somewhat leash on the people. I say this because people would do almost anything for something that they truly believe in. For example a small city in the middle east holds a major significance for three major religions, and what has it gained from this significance? A few crusades in which a lot of people lost their lives, and a couple of burned down temples never to be rebuilt.

The reason for my view on religion is how religion can become somewhat hippocratic. What I mean is a certain religion preaches about loving your neighbor as you love thyself, but why is it the same religion tells its followers to go and purge a city of those who don't believe in the same thing. Another example for this hypocrisy is how the Spanish friars treated the native Filipinos with a certain disgust during the colonial time of the Philippines.

Pre-Colonial and Colonial Philippines (Culture)

The pre-colonial Philippine society had their own sense of culture and their own sense of identity even before they were colonized by the spaniards. They spoke their own language and had their own systemized way of writing. They had their own rituals and practices when it came to marriage, burying the dead, and other various activities. When the Spanish arrived, they washed away all the culture from the Filipinos and replaced it with their own. All the practices, rituals, and tradition was lost in the storm we will call colonialism. For example, the use of the manunggul jar is one of the long forgotten customs of our people. 

Pre-Colonial and Colonial Philippines (Economics)

During pre-colonial times, the Philippines were open to trade with their different neighboring countries, but the most frequent one was China. They had a healthy trade system and maintained healthy relations with the countries they traded with. Since the Filipinos main source of labor was farming and fishing, the item mostly sold or traded was agricultural. It wasn't until the Spaniards came when they started taking the Filipinos earnings for themselves which led to the economic hardships of the colonial era.

Pre-Colonial and Colonial Philippines (Politics)

Pre-colonial Philippines did not have a single government, instead it composed of different tribes with their own sovereignty. There have even been written accounts of the different sovereignties being recognized internationally. The countries that traded with the pre-colonial Filipinos like China were the ones that recognized the individual sovereignties that existed then. But the arrival of the Spanish brought about a change of how the Philippines was. The Spaniards, this being the time when a country's strength is somehow measured by the number of colonies they possessed, arrived in the Philippines looking for treasures of the new world (spices, gold, and etc.), but also they were looking to colonize the archipelago. In order to facilitate in the colonization the Spaniards organized the different sovereignties they have taken control over into one centralized political system, of course this being under Spanish control. The Spanish colonizers primarily thought of their own well-being and this often lead to the neglect of the welfare of the native people of the archipelago, because of this the Filipino people often suffered through many abuses and situations like when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.