Shabait.com (Asmara)
24 December 2008
Asmara — His Holiness Abune Dioskoros, Patriarch of the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahdo Church, is currently conducting a spiritual visit abroad. Eritrea is geographically placed at the center of a region which is the origin of the major faiths in the world. Consequently the Eritrean people are among the first to accept and follow the Christian and Islamic faiths. In different parts of the world, new religions or faiths were enforced along with invasion and occupation and in some cases people were lured into believing a certain faith through various forms of incentives.
However, the Eritrean people have no history of forcibly accepting or being drawn into accepting any religion or faith. They adopted and believed in both the major faiths for the content and message they represented; for there has been no change in the original message of both faiths and indeed there will never be any change, for it will be a cardinal sin to attempt to introduce any change, the Eritrean people have thus far remained faithful to the religions handed down to them from their forefathers.
Today, super power exploiters are engaged in hatching countless new religions or politics-based religions to be exact in an attempt to corrupt and weaken people's moral and ethics. They spare no effort in their scheme to infiltrate and create division in countries that are firmly struggling to remain true to their original faiths. As a result of these efforts every year in Africa alone six million people abandon their original faiths and adopt the aforementioned modern politics-based religions.
In their struggle to secure the right to self-determination, the Eritrean people fought and bled together which further bolstered their unity. Hence, it is only natural for enemy forces to feel threatened by such an unshakeable unity. Failing to break this unity with bullets and fire, they sought to weaken it by employing divisive political schemes focusing on the people's faiths. Their primary agenda is thus to create religious division and mistrust, thereby weakening the people's unity and harmony, which is the very essence of Eritrean identity. Considering the fact that the main objective of the politics-based religions that seek to lure people into believing new faiths through monetary incentives is to destroy national unity and harmony, their advent into our society should be challenged with awareness and firm adherence to in the faiths of our forefathers.
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For years, My cousin and his best friend fought hard and dedicated their lives to free Eritrea from Ethiopian colonization. My cousin's friend died during the war of liberation so he did not see an independent Eritrea. But my cousin today says his friend is lucky to die before Eritrea became independent because both of them are evangelical christians. He thinks his friend would have been ashamed to have fought for what eritrea has sadly become. Thankfully, my cousin has escaped and now lives in America but many thousand evangelical eritreans are still stuck inside the country, most in jail (some probably dead).. Thank you Mr. Isaias Afwerki, our "hero."