Posts Tagged ‘peace’
Israel’s first disputes
19
Oct
So Abram, who was a Chaldean, from the city of
Ur in the south of Mesopotamia, under divine inspiration under the river Euphrates and goes to Haran, and then goes down to Canaan, passing through Sodom, where he separates from his nephew Lot, and leaving from there they should not look back, Lot’s wife looks and becomes a pillar of salt.
They arrive in Canaan and there were already inhabitants there (the Canaanites), there was a divine promise to give him a son, but with the consent of his wife Sarah (the original name Sarai was changed by God), Abram fathers the son Ishmael from the slave Hagar. , but later Sarah will also have her son Isaac.
God asks him for his son as a sacrifice, but when he is ready to do so, an angel appears to him and asks him to sacrifice a lamb instead, and then promises him infinite descendants and becomes called Abraham.
The site of this sacrifice is today a mosque, but there is an agreement between Muslims, Christians and Jews to be able to visit the place, today called Dome of the Rock (photo).
The family issue was important at the time, after all Abram was supposed to be the patriarch of the people chosen by God, so he wanted a woman from his lineage and not a Canaanite, he found Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel, sister of Laban, this one from a branch of the family who remained in Haran.
New drama, Rebeca has difficulty having children, but ends up having twins, Esau and Jacob, this one is born later and would lose his right to birthright, if it weren’t for a bad trick with his mother to prepare a supper to the liking of Isaac who was almost blind, and dressing his son in furs because his brother born minutes earlier, therefore older, was hairier, and Isaac blesses Jacob.
But Jacob knows that he needs God’s blessing, so going to meet his brother, one night he fights with an angel to obtain divine blessing, after that he will be called Israel, the suffix el in the bible means God, so he who fought with God, in fact, with a year Gabriel, “fortress of God” or Michael, which means “no one like God”, leader of the “armies”.
Jacob will have as his sons those who will give their name to the twelve tribes of Israel (see previous topic) and Joseph, sold as a slave to the Egyptians, having gifts of revelation, reveals to the Egyptian king what his dreams about “fat cows and lean cows” meant. ”, that a time of scarcity would come and receives a role from Pharaoh precisely to take care of the kingdom’s dispensations.
The brothers who sold him then leave Canaan and go to Egypt, where Joseph, after expressing his discontent (a scream was heard throughout the palace), welcomes the brothers, so Israel no longer has the lands and other peoples take their place. .
However, the next pharaoh, apparently Sethi, is not a friend of the Jews and wants all newborn babies to be killed, but Moses’ mother, Jochebed, throws him into a basket in the Nile River and he is welcomed by a princess and she takes him to reign in her care.
Moses is trained as a nobleman, but he wants to free his people who live as slaves, and in a certain mystical event, called the “burning bush”, God reveals his destiny and asks him to command his people back to Canaan, after several battles the kingdom of Israel is revived, but divided with Judah to the South, judges are appointed, rulers who were called by God.
This is the only true theocratic period of the Bible, the judges were appointed by divine inspiration, some were simple people, like Gideon (woodcutter) and Deborah, there were 14 judges, but the people later asked for kings “like other peoples” and they depended on the prophets
Religious and historical origins of Israel and Palestine
17
Oct
Although Noah is not a recorded figure in
history, his sons Ham and Shem are recorded as they are the origin of the Hamite and Semitic peoples, the latter stand out for being Hebrews and Arabs and thus share both cultural and religious origins.
Abraham, who was a Chaldean, a people who lived south of the Euphrates River, was the son of, in the lineage of Shem, comes from his son Arphaxad, who fathered Shelah, who fathered Heber, who fathered Peleg, who fathered Reu, who fathered Serug , who fathered Nahor, who fathered Terah, father of Abram (only later will he be called Abraham due to his descendants).
Abram’s father and brother die in Chaldea, and his nephew Lot, who will travel to Canaan, meanwhile going up the Euphrates River and then down through the north of the Middle East, before separating, dividing the lands, leaving Lot with the most fertile to the west and Abram with the southern lands.
Lot’s descendants became people known as Ammonites, due to the god Amon, and who are children of Lot’s incest with his youngest daughter. Lot looks and turns into salt.
To the east to the Mediterranean lies Abraham, now called that by God, after having his Son Isaac (promised by God) with his wife Sarah, and Ishmael with Hagar, his slave.
While Isaac will be the “son of promise” and through him the twelve tribes of Israel will be born, the Quran can be read: “In the Quran; “God gave gifts to all Ishmael, Elisha, Jonah and Lot favor above the nations”, so Ishmael is not passed over.
From Isaac the twins Esau and Jacob were born, Esau is born first, but through a disguise, Jacob dresses in animal skins, helped by his mother Rebekah, as his brother was hairier and his father Isaac was almost blind, he notices the voice different, but blesses the son, in Hebrew tradition the eldest son, the firstborn, had priority in leading the family.
Jacob will fight with an angel to obtain divine blessing, before a confrontation with his brother, and in the biblical narrative it is there that he receives the name Israel, which means “he who fought with God” (every suffix el in Hebrew means God), Gabriel (God’s fortress) and Michael (no one like God) are two possible hypotheses of Jacob’s struggle, now Israel.
The children of Israel will form the 12 tribes: from Helena: from Joseph (who was sold to the Egyptians by his brothers) will be his grandchildren Benjamin and Manasseh, from Leah (first wife): Reuben, Simeon, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun and Levi (who were priests and had no lands), from the slave Bilhah: Dan and Naphtali, and from the slave Zilpah: Gad and Asser.
In fact, there would be thirteen tribes,
but the tribes of Benjamin and Manasseh, sons of Joseph, formed one tribe.
Tension in the Middle East
16
Oct
Despite beginning a critical phase (winter),
the war between Ukraine and Russia is out of focus, with increasing tension between Israel and Palestine, which claims its own territory.
After a daring and cruel incursion into Israeli territory, the military group took several hostages and Israel responded by attacking areas of the Gaza strip and cutting off water and energy in Israeli territory as a way of pressuring the handover of the hostages.
The humanitarian situation caused several international organizations to appeal to Israel to allow humanitarian aid, while Israel gives the option of moving to the south where the water and energy supply would be restored, giving a very short deadline and an ultimatum.
There is a point to the south where a passage to Egypt is possible, which is the Rafah refugee camp, negotiations between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi indicate that this passage would be open for humanitarian aid.
Israel is preparing for a fight on three fronts, as in southern Lebanon there were attacks by another anti-Semitic group, Hezbollah and there are already tensions and the capture of combat points with Syria, also through Hezbollah.
The greatest tension is the possible involvement of Iran, which finances these groups against Israel and Hamas leaders have already gone to Iran to talk to the country’s authorities, however the US warns that Iran’s entry into the war would cause strong tension with the West, since the US sent aircraft carriers.
The involvement of the Arab world could make the crisis even greater, as there are already unilateral talks.
Russia is a traditional ally of Syria, and with a military approach to Iran it could create an axis of allies with common enemies, which paints a dangerous geopolitical picture.
Peace seems distant, and the elements for a war with tragic consequences are emerging, but there are still localized forces for peace.
New war front and dangerous week
09
Oct
Since Israel had developed a strong anti-aircraft
battery scheme called the Iron Dome, missile attacks in the region had decreased, but at the end of the week a new attack by the Hamas group took place and more than 700 people were killed, showing that there are weaknesses in this system.
Israel’s military was caught by surprise on Saturday (10/07) and despite decades of the country becoming a technological powerhouse with the world’s most impressive military and a world-class intelligence agency, all of this simply hasn’t worked and This creates a new front of war in geopolitics already with delicate problems and Israel responded with missiles into Palestinian territory.
Hamas has Iran as a strong ally, which has supplied drones to Russia, and although it has denied that this continues to happen, Iran wants to be part of the BRICS and on the side of another invisible war, according to the words of Medvedev, the vice-president of the Russia’s Security Council and former president of the country, this war is taking place.
He was referring to Russia’s good harvest of wheat grains, which it intends to become a bargaining chip with allied countries, even providing supplies to allied countries in Africa that do not have the resources to purchase grains.
The week is delicate in Ukraine and Russia, because on both sides a new surprise attack is expected, such as that of Hamas in Israel, on the Ukrainian side long-range missiles, and on the Russian side the destruction of energy sources in Ukraine which would make the coming winter cruel to the population and weaken the Ukrainian military army, which already has difficulties with ammunition for conflict regions.
Something new is expected in terms of peace, there is no shortage of nods from Russia, but without negotiating the territories already conquered, while the Ukrainian side wants possession back, including the controversial Crimea, one of the main targets in the counteroffensive.
All people of good will and who know the dangers of war want some relief.
True commitment to the common good
06
Oct
Bad managers and dictators also promise to
work for the excluded and the common good, what happens is that their true personal interests remain hidden.
No one openly says they are going to do evil, except declared psychopaths who are already at a level of mental illness that can no longer disguise their desires.
Political and social analyzes hide interests of violence, hatred and war against opponents, there is no shortage of justifications, but any initiative of exclusion is already an indication that no common good will be well managed by these managers.
They begin with small actions that initially confuse people with good faith and who actually want the common good for all, a peaceful and balanced life for everyone, but little by little the true personal desires for personal possession of goods are revealed.
Corruption also starts like this, small unrestrained thefts lead to large ones when there is no impunity, parents who correct and educate without children know this, it is necessary to always be attentive to actions and what each small gesture leads to, educators also know this.
As a biblical reading says, an owner of a vineyard rented it and traveled, after a certain time he ordered the employees to collect the rent (Mt 21:33) they beat him and sent him back, he sent others and they also caught him and returned with nothing and finally sent his son, so the tenants thought let’s kill him and keep the vineyard, and Jesus remembers himself at the end of the parable: the stone that the masons rejected became the cornerstone.
This is how good is established, with those that the evil people rejected, oppressed and after much suffering it is possible to establish peace and the common good.
Resilience and the development of good is greater than great evil, although avoiding them also means avoiding injustice, social imbalances and mainly innocent deaths.
Because evil grows
05
Oct
Common sense is to say that evil grows because
good is omitted, in part this is true, as evil is the absence of good, but this absence can be due to aporia (lack of knowledge), due to bad education that forms unenlightened minds and due to end out of pure pride and power.
Power is a way of legitimizing both good and evil, this is only possible through violence, and generalized violence is war, so this is the clearest and most unequivocal form of evil, in it intolerance, contempt for what is different, the imposition of ideas and injustices is facilitated.
Thus, at different times in our history, it was through violence that empires and dictators imposed their wills and ideologies, not without the consent of a large part of the population, which is why we remember bad education, whether through propaganda campaigns or through schooling itself. impoverished and malformed, the two issues are linked.
Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to management at all levels, from our homes, neighborhoods and condominiums to power structures, small illegitimate actions, education for empathy, coexistence, cleaning and even leisure must be observed and guided by managers and public bodies in order to preserve common space and public goods.
The zeal for honesty, transparency, respectful dialogue between opinions that are not necessarily opposite, but different even if in completely divergent directions should not be a reason for hatred and violence, dialogue is always possible.
Evil needs polarization, radicalization (in the bad sense, there is the good sense of going to the root of a problem), pure disagreement as a way to justify and propagate violence.
Just like the seeds of a good tree, weeds and poisonous plants also have roots, they grew in a healthy plantation and the fact that they must grow together can be a mistake because they can suffocate the good seeds, pests and diseases in plants.
Care must also be taken to cure these pests, in agriculture several pesticides have already been condemned, and even disease-resistant plants can be questioned, genetic mutation can cause greater harm than expected, there is a lot of ethical dialogue about this.
Therefore, three precautions must be considered: the ethical education of valuing what is good, the zeal so that error and evil do not spread and finally the correction methods must be careful not to cause even greater harm.
Religions and evil
04
Oct
One of the biggest mistakes, already developed
in some of the posts, is the Manichaean duality of evil x good, without understanding that evil is precisely the absence of good, great Christian thinker, Augustine of Hippo converted precisely by abandoning Manichaeism.
Religious concepts that have long been forgotten, or that are submerged in mistaken preaching, impede what would be the “natural flow of humanity towards the enlightenment of the soul”, evil has deep-rooted sources in the form of old thoughts and emotional burdens from the past and, despite obsolete, still persist, hindering the progress of souls.
The remedy would be very simple, the closer the soul is to enlightenment, the less evil is present, and the more enlightened souls make the world more empathetic, harmonious and free from injustice.
The ethics and morals that derive from the need for civilizing progress do not find space if there are not souls and people in prominent positions with clear and convincing illumination, that is why evil has become a social, theological or ideological issue, and the both times.
It’s not just Christian thinkers who say this, Hannah Arendt talks about the Banality of Evil, Nietzsche about the “death of God” (or how we “kill” Him, of course impossible), Paul Ricoeur and Lévinas about the Other and Byung Chul Han about the “ Society of Fatigue” speaks of the vita contemplativa as a complement to the vita activa (which Hanna Arendt also spoke of), even remembering Christian thinkers.
The return of threats of war, the social crisis of moral values (everything is permitted!), before a true civilizational crisis occurs, a new enlightenment of souls is necessary (in Picture st. Francis expelling devils from Arezzo, by Benozzo Gozzoli).
The lack of understanding of subjectivity and human imagination, or its submission to unenlightened values, the absence of compassion towards others, the misunderstanding of progress as having fundamental positive aspects, even to save the civilizing process, leads society to exhaustion , disbelief or the fatality of wars and hatred.
It is not difficult to find positions in newspapers and social media in favor of the process of excluding people with a certain opinion, religion or even simple disagreement with dubious moral values (see the case of abortion in Brazil at the moment), the debates are sterile and instead of arguments the reactions are sarcasm and irony.
They are seeds of the broader process of civilizational crisis in progress and detected by great thinkers since the last century, crediting them to new media, to the resurgence of nationalism and authoritarian currents is to look only at the consequence, the root is the absence of enlightened souls who help humanity to contemplate its future with greater grandeur.
*When Francisco was in Arezzo, there was a great scandal and a war almost throughout the city, day and night, because of two factions that had long hated each other.
War attrition and peace in Nagorno-Karabakh
02
Oct
As the Russian/Ukrainian war enters a phase of
attrition, a border region has a sign of peace, even if it means a loss of territory.
The struggle for dominance over the Armenian-majority region of Nagorno-Karabakh goes back centuries, however the president of the self-declared republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, Samvel Shaharamanyan declared that it would cease to exist from the 1st. January 2023.
In the 18th century, when the region was under pressure from Persia, Russian Tsarina Catherine II issued letters of protection to them, but the conflict was never fully resolved.
The signed decree dissolved all state institutions that will be vacated by the beginning of 2024, and more than 100,000 Armenians have already left the country, which already has the presence of military personnel from Azerbaijan, with a Muslim majority and supported by Turkey, Armenia is Christian and supported by Russia.
The region has geopolitical importance because since Russia’s war against Ukraine, Azerbaijan has supplied millions of barrels of oil to the European Union through the Caspian Sea along the Mediterranean coast, and recently Russia announced that it will no longer supply it.
The Armenian genocide of 1915-1916 during the Otman Empire led many Armenians to flee to this region of Nagorno-Karabakh, since then they have been called Azeris, during the Russian revolution the region continued in conflict with Azerbaijan, although both were Soviet republics, the anti-Armenians in the city of Shusha killed 30 thousand Armenians.
With the end of the Soviet Union, the Armenians once again established themselves as a nation, but the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict remained, there were several periods of fighting in the region, now with the session of the territory this autonomous republic ceases to exist.
Despite the fears of separatist Armenians, this new situation is a great sign of peace.
Russia and Ukraine can be inspired by this model or something similar, the world wants peace.
The good and wars of Darius
26
Sep
The separation between secular and religious
human historie´s is not always possible without an adulteration of both by those who do it in a particular way.
This process also includes the question of good and evil, it is common thought that those who are in this or that religious confession will be “saved”, or even, who have somehow accepted God in their lives, this is just a part of the truth .
The biblical reading says: “not everyone who says ‘Lord Lord!!’ will enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 7:21) and so the understanding of what it actually means to do good pleasing to the heavens is not even remotely the simple formal or nominal religious commitment requires the will.
The will is also not like a belief that spreads today, the daily reaffirmation of the desire for a certain thing, called the law of attraction or “the mystery”, nor is it also the will to power as Nietzsche thought, for the philosopher everything in the world it is Will to Power because all forces seek their own expansion.
Will is, in a spiritual sense, that which is in line with the power that we are and that we must develop, one would say a vocation, but in everyday acts that require the ability to discern between one’s own will, often impetuous, and that which is a good thing.
We can better distinguish between evil, the absence of good, and good, which we developed last week as the inadequacy of good: illicit enrichment, being superior to others, judging by our own non-universal criteria, in short, an infinite number of issues can be an evil. not apparent.
A universal story cited in the Bible is that of Darius in the Persian Empire, not being religious, he appointed the prophet Daniel to one of his provinces (called satrapies), determined that the Hebrew people be repatriated and authorized the reconstruction of the temple, as per narrates the book of Ezra.
Without being religious, he recognizes the Hebrew people, so Darius has a privileged place in biblical and religious history. Another curious event is the war of the Medes and Lydians, after an indecisive battle, on May 25, 585 BC, both armies end the fight by a sign in the sky, which was actually a lunar eclipse (a similar one will occur on October 14).
This date was confirmed by scientific calculations, being one of the first recorded annular eclipses.
Thus, one can understand historical and divine designs even without belief, as King Darius did, and do what is fair and good for people and humanity.
In times of threat of war, finding this asset can prevent major disasters.
A cold and dangerous European winter
25
Sep
We are entering spring in the southern
hemisphere and autumn in the northern hemisphere, in Europe the concern about fuel stocks for the winter due to the Russian embargo is growing, there is a danger of rationing and a rush to use coal, in Poland for example there is already queues to buy stocks.
But this is not the only aspect, the reduction in the supply of diesel by Russia will affect the entire world market and the price of fossil fuels could skyrocket, according to Abicom (Brazilian Fuel Association) the defense in Brazil is 7% in relation to the international market and 12% in the case of diesel, and may increase.
Another crisis is that of food, because Ukraine has maintained a large part of its production, which helps the international market, but there is a conflict over the flow through Poland where the country’s producers have protection and the port of Gdansk is famous, since in Black Sea military clash in Crimea grows.
The geopolitical crisis is the most serious problem, if Ukraine loses part of its territory, Baltic countries such as Estonia and Latvia which border Russia and Belarus, and Lithuania which borders Belarus feel threatened (map), and the question is who will be the next target.
The news talks about NATO’s help, but these small countries, due to their fragility, have supported Ukraine militarily and materially, there are even several reports of military enlistment in the war in Ukraine.
The United States announced long-range missiles (ATACMS type) and winter is always a strategy during war due to difficulties in logistics and troop mobility, now also due to supplies and heating energy.
Ukraine proposed a peace plan that was rejected by Russia, Zelensky went to the assembly that was taking place and had bilateral talks, including with Brazil, which certainly irritated Russia, but beyond the principles of peace and mutual aid there is no indication of a Brazilian position in the confrontation.
What can be expected for winter, if there is no peace, it is dangerous not only for the countries in conflict, but for all of Europe due to its proximity and everyone due to economic issues, fuels are just one aspect.
