Arquivo para December 17th, 2024
Christmas and Civilization
17
Dec
Turbulent times, a night of culture, thought and spirituality.
Asia and Oceania have always been resistant
to the process of Western colonization, Africa and Latin America have suffered from the process of colonization and their development has always been built with difficulties.
A biblical figure of Christmas is John the Baptist, the last and greatest prophet, because he announced the coming of Jesus, he had to “make smooth the paths of the Lord”.
He lived in the desert and ate insects and honey. He was an ascetic and was viewed with some suspicion by the religious of the time, but he was the announcement of what was to come, so he was an important part of the “advent”.
Where we can find today’s advent is certainly not in today’s “Roman empires”, their wars and injustices, nor is it in the false prophets and those who want an aura of divinity for themselves that they don’t have, filling their pockets and exploiting the people with easy words.
Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher who is not religious, calls the asceticism of today’s world an unspiritualized asceticism, a society of exercises, although it has a series of practices, now physics is also one of them, there is no content of ascension, and so it is not a true asceticism.
John the Baptist’s word was hard, his followers had a true but difficult asceticism, but they did prepare the proclamation of the good news, and there the roads were prepared, the hills lowered and the paths straightened.
So neither the wars nor the revolutions that are currently being proclaimed are paths to a new process of civilization; they are much more the denunciation of a time that must be overcome for a new civilization.
