Blog Marcos L. Mucheroni Filosofia, Noosfera e cibercultura

Manuel Alegre is a contemporary Portuguese poet when he was a military man in the then colony of Angola, he participated in the first rebellion that tried to free Angola from the yoke of his country (he was arrested by the PIDE, Salazar police), he won several awards, including the Camões Prize in 2017, he wrote “Jornada da África” in 1989, “Alma” in 1995 and “The third Rose” in 1998, between others of course, but his book that we reference here is “Raphael” (in picture used in figure of its cover).

During his period of exile after his arrest, he lived in Algiers, which is why he will refer to Rafael in the novel as someone who lived under different pseudonyms, sometimes he feels Spanish, Portuguese or Algerian, but Manuel Alegre’s deepest feeling is of a citizen of the world, nameless and looking for references.

In the Book Rafael goes from house to house, from hotel to hotel, changes his name, lets his mustache grow, wears glasses without lenses, uses a passport in hotels where he hides his citizenship and another to travel, in each new document a name and a different profession, he is clandestine within himself, he has lost his references and his own personal identity, he already is and he is not, he does not use his first name, he has four or five pseudonyms that he prefers, whether he is French, Spanish or Algerian, he is alone, not in the proper sense, as a solitary literature might wish, but as a member of an international brigade, he feels solidarity with it.

Ser e não ser has already been written by William Shapespeare, but in Manuel Alegre it acquires a contemporary meaning, the citizen of the world in solidarity with all peoples, I make here a mystical incursion, which is not in your book and which I consider important, not to be is also part of Being when we are in solidarity with other peoples, customs and cultures, and in my case without losing our own, also the name of the archangel Raphael is significant for me, in Hebrew origin El is God and Rafa is healing, so Raphael has the meaning God heals, here in the sense of a socially and culturally sick world for not recognizing other values ​​and cultures.

I know 23 countries, 4 in Latin America, 19 in Europe, especially Spain and Italy because of my ancestry, and Portugal where I saw more clearly all the influence in Brazil, but I still feel Brazilian and today’s debut day of the national team in the World Cup around the world I will be with neighbors and friends cheering for the national team, without this meaning hatred or contempt for other peoples and cultures.

Christian values ​​that are universal are those that promote fraternity among men and for this they make use of their so-called theological virtues: faith, hope and charity, among them it is charity that has the greatest precedence.
Without charity, an essential aspect of those who profess religious faith in the advent of Jesus, a feast that begins next week, whose culmination is Christmas, without this charity neither the greatest altruism nor the greatest virtue can achieve the true Christian faith.
In times of crisis men not only lose fraternity, in fighting for their own survival and vision of the world, they also lose hope and with this grows not only hatred, but also intolerance, fear and division between peoples and nations.
So it is truly heroic to continue to promote charity and faith, and at different times in history it has even been necessary to go to the point of martyrdom to keep them as values, it is not just the misunderstanding of Christian values, but of all human values ​​that come into play. game when hatred and division thrive in many ways.
Dangerous times as we remembered in the previous post can be particularly difficult.
When Christians are also attacked, this is where their true faith and values ​​are tested, says a passage from the Gospel of Luke (Lk 12:13): “Before these things take place, you will be arrested and persecuted, you will be handed over to synagogues [false temples ] and put in prison, you will be brought before kings and governors for my name’s sake. This will be the occasion when you will testify to your faith”, but the gospel promises divine protection.
Thus we are not immune to human difficulties and divisions, but we seek unity.

It is a fact that great changes and perhaps even revolutions are underway at this time in human history, however the interpretation of false prophets is earthly and not divine, since they only look at earthly facts, is there something divine also going on?

For those who believe there is always, but what is speculated in false prophecies is the end of the world or the new coming of Jesus (Parousia), says the apocalypse through Jesus when he asks when this end time will be (Rev 2,8-9 ): Jesus answered: “Take heed that you are not deceived, because many will come in my name saying, ‘It is I!’ and again, ‘The time is at hand.’ Do not follow these people! When you hear of wars and revolutions, do not be terrified. These things must happen first, but it will not be the end right away.”

Impossible clearer, but there is also something divine in the air, civil disruption has taken ethical and moral values ​​together, even the strictest justice seems to slip through authoritarianism and tendentious arrogance, the religious also seem confused, the politicians even worse, pure radicalization blends in with authentic proposals and values ​​of social change and appreciation for the most socially disadvantaged.

Thus, there is a picture of a civilizing crisis: market imbalances, great powers in economic, social conflicts and at war or close to it, absence of a study leader and international organizations that have confidence and credibility, everything is biased and polarized to the extreme.

In the religious field, more spiritual trends are becoming clear and others are merely political and earthly, in the Islamic world there is a lot of tension and the struggle for civil rights, in Iran there is a strong struggle for women’s rights, there are also tensions in the eastern world, in addition to the crisis in China and from North Korea, the ancestral and cultural values ​​of the East are also in check, although the official discourse denies this, young people already question it.

In Brazil, the political polarization reaches the extreme, the elections are questioned and before taking office there are already problems in the new PT government that should start in January, new road blocks and a new wave of Covid 19 is a concern again, the perspective understanding the transition between radically opposed policies is difficult not only in the executive branch, but also in the legislative and legal branches.

To those who believe, God always acts in the extraordinary, that is, what men and earthly values ​​do not reach, so something can be expected in the divine plan, but it is always totally different from human rationality, it is unpredictable and completely disconcerting for men, Who would have thought that Jesus was raised in a village called Nazareth, today it has 72 thousand inhabitants, in the time of Jesus less than 10 thousand.

For those who believe there is always a ray of hope, there is always a divine light feeding and clarifying human reality.

The idea that it is necessary to disorganize to obtain a new order,is neither revolutionary nor democratic, it is a reflection of bad doctrine and bad theories, it is necessary to maintain a serene and peaceful path so that the fruits of a healthy and balanced society can be produced.

We are far from this, but the rupture can mean an even greater evil and we know that it is not just a matter of national values, but international ones, different names are given to this: the great reset, a new world order, crisis of capitalism or socialism (both have problems) and deep down it is a process of civilizing crisis.

What is this crisis, the one that several theorists and politicians pointed out in the past, the result of totalitarian and perverse theories of power, of the fragmentation of knowledge that does not see man as a whole, but in specific aspects and [and of course of unhealthy minds that lead society down tortuous paths.

Two wars, totalitarian regimes (not forgetting the dictatorships of Franco in Spain, De Gaule in France, Mussolini and Salazar), socialist revolutions, capital crises, sacrifices of the African colonies and Islamic radicalism in the Arab world.

The scenario can prepare the greatest of decoys if we do not pay attention to the fruits of those leaders who, even proposing peace, social harmony and the defense of the environment, prepare hidden and unconfessable interests behind the scenes.

The biblical parable of the servants who are left with values ​​to administer the goods of the owner who travels far away serves to identify the true good administrators through their fruits, says the passage after the owner praises the good administrators who have borne good fruits for the administration, says to the one who did nothing with what he was given to manage (Lk 19:22-23):

“ ‘You wicked servant, I judge you by your own mouth. You knew that I am a severe man, that I receive what I didn’t give and reap what I didn’t sow. So why didn’t you deposit my money in the bank? Upon arrival, I would withdraw it with interest”, it is not difficult to identify these bad administrators.

Of course, the biblical passage speaks of the spiritual life, but the lesson of material goods is still important, bad administrators lead to impoverishment and the loss of social gains.

Humanism in modernity was based on the separation between the subject and the objects, so all human subjectivity (it includes values ​​such as humility, compassion and tolerance, among others) is relegated to a sentimental plane and objectivity refers only to the which is material.

We post about humility, the humus from which life springs, tolerance for error from which forgiveness and change of course spring and from which the experience of each moment springs as if it were the last.

Happiness does not depend only on material things and not only psychologists who say this, doctors and some sociologists also defend the joy of living, in them there is real wisdom of life, apparently contradictory things such as happiness of the humble, of those who suffer, of those who hungers and thirsts for justice and for those who are persecuted for their beliefs and values.

In the biblical text, explaining that religion is a practice of values ​​that “reconnects” heaven and earth, so it is not from earth to heaven (a sublimation of values) nor from heaven to earth (as the spiritualists want), but of those who know and live the religious teachings, the greatest of them, Love.

This is what the biblical passage of the so-called “beatitudes” says (Mt 5:4-6): happy are the “afflicted, for they will be comforted, … the meek, for they will possess the earth.d those who hunger and thirst for justice, because will be satisfied” among other values ​​such as: happy those who are persecuted those who desire peace because they will be called children of God.

There is no contradiction between heaven and earth, it exists between those who are attached only to heaven (everything is on the subjective plane) or only to the earth (everything is on the plane of materiality), and the complement of the two depends on love, but also on hope and faith.

The Proclamation of the last happiness is indeed a beatitude, because few really have faith, says the passage (Mt 5,11-12) “Blessed are you, when they revile you and persecute you, and lyingly say all kinds of things. evil against you for my sake, rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.”

More than the reading of Nietzsche on the “death of God”, understanding religious radicalism, in addition to the evangelical, there is the Semitic, the Islamic and neo-Pentecostal currents, the reading of Post-God is actually a re-reading of the issue of evil or more correctly “God is dead, and we killed him”, what I call the attempt at Theocide, impossible, whether it exists or not.

If God exists, he cannot be killed, just erased from the human mind, in the logic of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Hegelianism he exists only in the human mind and in this case he would not exist in fact and if he exists, we cannot kill him since he is immortal and precedes everyone and to everything.

Peter Sloterdijk in part of the proposition and of course of the hypothesis that it only exists in the human mind, a delusional fantasy of men, say many convinced atheists, since the Gnostics do not consider the hypothesis, the most important living German philosopher (I consider the pope emeritus also important), will analyze, in addition to Nietzsche and Cioran, Luther’s intermezzo.

Luther is particularly important because he is the undeclared root of Nietzsche’s thought, son of Lutheran parents and relatives, some pastors, the Protestant Reformation is fundamental to understand the religious phenomenon or the so-called “revenge of the sacred”, it entered the political scene .

The book, with this name will attract few Christians, has an interesting dialogue path that goes through Hans Jonas (The Gnostic Religion), Harold Bloom (Omens of the millennium), Franco Volpi (Nihilism), Sergio Givone (Storia della nulla), Ioan Culianu (The Tree of Gnosis) and Sylvie Jaudeau (Cioran or le deernier homme), all authors and exegetes of Cioran, who had a “disfigured” mystical experience of an atheistic, disenchanting and nihilistic nature.

Who was Emil Cioran (1911-1995), author who wrote from Nag Hammadi, a series of manuscripts found after World War II that killed more than 40 million lives in Africa 50 km from Luxor, in a large container of clay, numerous papyrus codices written in Coptic language and in great condition.

The great “Gnostic” library quickly spread among intellectuals, dating from about seventeen hundred years ago, therefore during the western emergence of Christianity, the author projects a mystical message for our current state.

This aura of “discovery” of Nag Hammadi remains until today, in fact it gave wings to what I call Theocide, taking it not only from minds but building a nihilistic “mystic” without God, but it does not escape what it is, a exotic nihilism.

Sloterdijk talks about despiralized asceticism, Cioran is also, the search for an asceticism without all this false diffuse radicalism, does not resist the slightest idea of ​​practiced principles, confuses everyone, and politics is also contaminated by it, the only possible way to everyone seems to be hate.

Hatred is the most vehement and efficient Theocide, where it entered, any possible asceticism left.

SLOTERDIJK, Peter. (2015) Post-God. trans. portuguese by Markus A. Hediger, Brazil, Petropolis: ed. Vozes.