“I didn’t set out to give hope. Not. It would be unrealistic and unfair” – Wole Soyinka, Nigerian Nobel Literature writer in an interview with the newspaper “Público”.
Imagine yourself as an apparently healthy person. One day he notices strange symptoms, he excuses them with his way of life, then they start to bother him so much that the person goes to the doctor and ends up discovering that he has a cancer that has developed in silence for years. Here is the current state of the world. Were we better before? If so, wouldn’t it be because we didn’t know the evil or prefer to neglect it? Are you happy only in a state of ignorance? For those who chose to postpone the consequences, it was like having bought a decade’s vacation in exchange for paying all the costs today, with interest; for those who didn’t know them, the revelation appears in the style of the naked king of Anderson or the biblical Adam. It is when we are confronted with evil that we lose our innocence, and whatever you think about whether life is better supported with illusions or if it is not worth having them, there will always come a moment when not even the unconscious escapes, at least for the time being. the trial will learn the facts. Yes, we are in exam season, it has become all too evident to everyone that justice is unfair, health is sick, education promotes miseducation, and despite the world producing enough wealth, the poor are poorer. There is chaos, confusion or inversion of old values.
After half a year of gaffes, episodes of incompetence and dismissals, it is clear that the PS, a so-called “left” party after all, was not awarded, was punished by voters because it was not prepared to have an absolute majority, and how it formed the government that governs us means that we punish ourselves; it’s pathetic because we’ve always been aware of this. After a month and a half of taking office, the so-called “right-wing” government in the United Kingdom has collapsed. Nothing extraordinary, governments are like the fruit of the 21st century, they last 2 or 3 days, we know that they are contaminated by the germ of rapid obsolescence and yet we are resigned to the lack of alternatives, in the British case embodied in Boris Johnson’s impudence to return. Since I speak of the United Kingdom, since 2019 I am convinced that after Johnson we will know the true face of the new order that promoted Brexit, and Liz Truss will have been, after all, an appetizer to make the next most desired, the savior messiah (hail Sunak?) . Sweden and France, champions of refugee rhetoric, will close their borders in November, at least until April 2023, citing an increase in illegals and terrorist threats. The moderate governments of Europe are like sand castles by the sea, they crumble with every wave, the solid alternatives (I would say with blood on the gills) seem to come from the extremists, it has been like this in the central/eastern countries, now in Italy, but I also bet that the government of Giorgia Meloni that took office a few days ago appears tomorrow with resignations, and before Christmas it has rotted away.
In Brazil, a country whose wealth of a minority is galactic compared to the poverty of the majority of the population, the level of demagoguery of the presidential campaign resembles the choice of a leader for Kidzania, and the violence of the personal attacks suggest a Kidzania from the dark web: Bolsonaro accused Lula of being a friend of drug dealers, and Lula, in a baseness capable of making the king of Baixaria himself blush (Bolsonaro), accused him of being a pedophile! In the first round, there was a priest allegedly from the Orthodox Church (which denies that he is) who accepted the rules of the political game, but when he felt attacked by his opponents, he was outraged demanding more respect… for being a priest; the clothes in which he presented himself would thus be a kind of superhero cape that protects him from enemies, that is to say what he feels like but doesn’t want to hear. For better or worse, Brazil sounds childish, gullible and violent, just like Coral Island in the soap opera “O Deus das flores”, a remote island inhabited only by children and disastrously ruled by them. Whatever the winner of the elections, the social drama will worsen because the majority of the population will remain poor and the only comfort will come from evangelical religions, a rapidly growing business. His implantation is so strong that Lula had to take an unbelievable accusation seriously, being forced to officially declare that he “has no pact and has never talked to the devil”; those who were inclined to vote for him but were afraid of such a pact can now sigh with relief… Not even Bolsonaro, an assumed evangelical, escapes the irrationality of religious fanaticism after having leaked a video where he appears to speak in a Masonic temple that Catholics and evangelicals associate with Satan . Today it is rare for the average Brazilian citizen to talk about anything without including God or Christ in the conversation. In a world on the edge of the abyss where there is no point of reality to hold on to, those who have nothing, have nothing to lose, cling to the straw that provides them with the expectation of keeping them afloat, and along this path of associated misery to religion, Brazil risks becoming a Confessional State like many Arabs. Certainly, the same issues that are causing the social upheaval in Iran will never be discussed, but the differences are only cultural; overlaying religious faith or political demagoguery to reason, in essence extremism is the same everywhere. As can be seen in these times, judgment and the corresponding penalty affect everyone, consciously or unconsciously, believers or atheists, young or mature democracies, left or right. In Brazil you don’t even get to the fringes, it’s society itself that is split in half and power is disputed not by two rivals but two arch-enemies of the Marvel Comics genre.
If tomorrow it were reported that Pope Francis in his youth wore Nazi uniforms, I would be sad but not surprised. We are being inundated with news of sexual abuse in the Church, which Marcelo, in an unfortunate moment of full moon, considered to be a low number, and many Catholics feel the temptation to kill the messenger, the media that throw cases of abuses and do not show the persecution that the Church is subject to in various parts of the planet. Of course, there are those who take advantage of the weaknesses of others to strengthen themselves, it is the logic of power and organized religions do not escape it, while enemies of Christendom and reformers are stuck in the same bag, an attitude not unlike the era of crisis in the 16th century. that originated Protestantism: there is no discussion about shades of grey, only black or white is allowed. I would like to understand where Catholics will include the Pope who seems to be fighting for reform, and who, paradoxically, if he takes it as far as necessary, ends up becoming the Gorbachev of the Catholic Church, it undoes everything. From the outside and without faith in this church (or any other), the fall for sexual abuse has an obvious reason, the requirement of the vow of chastity. None of the apostles were chaste and there is no evidence that Christ was either. What is known is that he was against a professional clergy, the very Judaism reform movement that he started was based on this assumption, among others. But the Vatican has made priests different from the rest of men: specially chosen by God. In the first centuries of Christianity, the Eucharist, the fundamental liturgical rite of the Christian faith, could be presided over by any believer, including women. In the last millennium, the practice of Church professionals with “godchildren” has subsisted; today it is complicated, the world is full of judgments, spotlights and cameras, strictness is required in accordance with what is claimed, and since no human being is perfect, priests with more “appetites” do not resist, despite the existing scrutiny. Deep down, the Church finds itself in an identity crisis: if it wants to recover the true spirit of Christ, it finds itself in the contingency of denying some 15 centuries of deceit and corporate practices that have rotted the original fruit, so distorted the movement on which they were based that they became its worst enemy.
I speak of the Catholic Church because it is the one I am most familiar with, but all religions have practices that are different from the norms inscribed in the sacred texts that follow, and almost all practices overlap in authority with the scriptures, which I am not even critical of, after all. Was it not men who first hand wrote and chose the texts that make up the sacred books? On the other hand, the radical movements of various religions (such as some evangelicals in Christianity) tend to take what is inscribed in the scriptures to the letter, with the perverse consequence of alienating the spirit even more, producing crowds with a high state of unconsciousness, the state where they can have some peace and find meaning in life, since its reality is so bad that it is incomprehensible. I don’t know what’s worse, invoking the complexity (dangerousness?) of the text, having to be adapted to our little brain by specialists, or taking it literally; is that in the latter case, taking the Judeo-Christian tradition, I still haven’t understood many things, such as the rules that God instituted for slaves. There are believers aware of the untruths of their religion who choose to believe, they are within their rights, I am not making value judgments; I am saying that for non-believers the evidence points to us finding ourselves in an age of awareness, in which we are continually confronted with past mistakes.
As for the believers, the Hindus who believe in cycles whose end is marked by the moral decay of humanity that will destroy itself and rise again, the Jews who do not believe in the Apocalypse but in redemption, the Muslims who believe in the “Day of Resurrection”, the final assessment of humanity by Allah which will take place in an age of “corruption and chaos”, and Christians awaiting the Apocalypse (which means “revelation”), all point to a state of consciousness, whether it is essential to reach a new Age of life. on Earth or to be judged by God; unconscious beings cannot be judged, so for better or worse everyone will gain consciousness, it’s not worth pretending or running away. The advantage of acquiring it is being able to attack cancer as soon as possible and with that have a better chance of defeating it. Realistically, humanity’s hope lies in this so I will always be on the side of those who promote awareness, and on the alert for those who do the opposite.
