Rizal as a Rational Thinker

Rizal as a Rational Thinker

During his life, Jose Rizal was described as a heretic and subversive, an enemy of both the Church and Spain. He has made tremendous contributions to the progress of the Filipino society. His political works and essays, being anti-clerical and anti-colonial, frankly aimed to expose the maladies of his time and cure the Philippines of what he calls “the social cancer”. Rizal had been the progressive radical thinker, and promptly answered the ailing call of his Motherland, who cries for a cure.

Rizal had been a subversive in his own time. The Church had him excommunicated, and the Spaniards had him imprisoned, and then executed in Bagumbayan. However, that does not mean that he will always be a subversive, provided that he lives in a time aside from his, as if it really is his own identity, rather than an act or decision based on the call of situations and events. And in the first place, Rizal