Posts Tagged ‘peace’
Resume the culture of life
31
Oct
All over the planet, there is an impasse between choosing a
culture that advances peace and prosperity for all humanity, including all diversity, and a culture of hatred, war and adversity.
War is this perspective, to enter into that polarized us-against-them current, and the war in Ukraine and the nuclear danger must awaken humanity to greater risks than diversity, which is ultimately beneficial and helps reflection on the future and the humans values.
Between Putin’s threats, the takeover of the city of Kherson in Ukraine with the population expelled, the power blackouts and a new embargo on Ukraine’s grains, Putin gives a weak nod to the West and says he is not an enemy and able to live together, there are even suggestions of peace brokerage by the pope and possibilities of agreements, they are urgent because winter is coming in the north.
Europe is already feeling the strong crisis that is approaching, not being able to control the economy, the British Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned, who stayed in office for a short time, being replaced by Rishi Sunak, an Englishman of Indian origin, which in itself is already very interesting, although it belongs to the Conservative Party, it is a breath of diversity for the United Kingdom, as India’s exit from the British empire was painful in the time of Gandhi, who made the first peaceful colonial war.
The political scenario is moving, now almost all Latin America is turning to the left, entering Brazil in this scenario can bring great changes, however, it is first necessary to internally pacify the forces literally divided and in an uncivilized confrontation.
It is necessary to defend life, also in the aspect of health and emotional balance, a lot of poison was distilled with apparently peaceful and loving words, and this is the worst type of war, the one that is carried out with refinements of cynicism and hypocrisy.
It is time to really pacify the mood, to look to the future so that it is less gloomy and at the end of the year that is approaching, we return to wishing for peace, prosperity and health, which is lacking in current times.
Diversity and adversity
27
Oct
A society that lives in balance and serenity is one that admits
diversity, see that adversity is precisely the denial of diversity, where differences can coexist.
It is not possible for the civilizing process and the public sphere to develop without diversity being accepted, harmonized in which all differences are respected, says Byung Chul Han: “Respect is the foundation of the public sphere. Where it disappears, it crumbles. The decadence of the public sphere and the growing lack of respect are conditioned.” Byung Chul Han No swarm” (Han, 2018, p. 12), which by the way is a reasoned and balanced critique of digital media.
Adversity is even worse when it comes from the powers that be, because having authority they should precisely oppose the hostile and hateful climate between differences, this does not mean that exactly they should curb exaggerations and abuses that powers have no legitimacy to have.
The public sphere has the right spaces and forums where those who feel that abuses may be committing, it is true, there are cases in which the desire to react is violence, one can enter a vicious circle in which it is often possible not to find the return, behold the wars.
So the ad-diversity school is the choice of conflict, hatred, dispute and death.
The greatest desire of sincere religion cannot be other than that space where there is peace, justice, harmony and respect for differences, difference is part of nature and in it human nature, one of the mistakes is not to be within the ecosystem , read Nature of Nature, we already made a post about this.
Jesus’ anguish when he saw the religious divided was greater than seeing his countrymen divided by the Roman Empire, greater than the theft and exploitation of the humble, we will come back to this tomorrow.
Diversity is a wealth for plurality, for dialogue, hatred and revenge are ad-diversity, the non-acceptance of what is not a mirror, the lack of respect and empathy.
The seeds of peace
25
Oct
The seeds of life, however small they may be, rise like trees
after germinating, those who wish to have desert areas need to throw strong vermifuges and pesticides on them that do not allow any form of life to start.
So it is by limiting the entry into the life of any seed and its collaborators the fertilizers that contain microorganisms that we limit the growth of life, the desert area can look clean and even in a way beautiful, and this is the modern misconception, not allowing life evolve.
It may seem contradictory, but the land is not impoverished by those who add pesticides to plant monocultures, yes the fruits seem “less perfect”, but imperfection can be part of the land, recent discoveries show that certain fungi save bananas that are doomed to no longer bear fruit.
Such is the purity of life, the desire to eliminate “enemies” from life that we end up eliminating life itself, every ideal of “purity” ends up killing the possibility of life, we have already posted here about the “communities of the elect” in the religious case and in the political case it is “ideological purity”.
Nazism also spoke of racial purity, in short, it is enough to allow the tiny seeds to develop, under water and protection from the sun, of course, that they themselves will give rise to life.
‘Social polarization is nothing but two clashing ideas of ‘purity’, both of which limit life where diversity must be allowed to grow and conflicts must be seen as a good opportunity for dialogue.
The biblical compares the origin of life to a mustard seed, a tiny seed that gives rise to a leafy tree.
A new piece in the war: Iran
24
Oct
The presence of the Iranian military in Russia has opened a new
alert to NATO countries, but also the deployment of anti-aircraft batteries from Germany and the training of Ukrainian soldiers in France open new war fronts in Ukraine.
The attacks in Ukraine were not only carried out by missiles, but also the Iranian drones of the Shahed-136 type, which are triangular and measure 3.5 m, capable of carrying up to 36 kg of explosive charge and also dribble or confuse anti-aircraft radars due to their large number.
Iran denies sending drones, but the presence of the military in Crimea has been confirmed by NATO intelligence, and European Union countries are already threatening sanctions, but the dependence on oil in the current Russian gas crisis is immense, and a closure of the Persian Gulf would have a bombastic repercussion on the European economy and, as a domino effect, on the world economy.
In a context of American conflict in the region, the fact becomes even more serious, it is not necessary to destroy an aircraft carrier to put it out of combat, just hit a part that causes some inclination and it will already be out of combat, and Iran has nuclear weapons.
It is also necessary to remember that we are less than a month away from the World Cup, which will be in a country in the Persian Gulf, the last one in Russia took more than 700 thousand people, it is believed that in Qatar it is likely to reach one million tourists from all over the world.
It also marks the beginning of the European winter, and the war on European soil has no sign of a truce in sight, on the contrary, it undergoes a dangerous escalation.
Peacekeeping forces are lacking, countries and political forces capable of leading a peace crusade are lacking, the situation is quite dangerous and few realize the gravity.
There can be a fair division
20
Oct
The union of society and peoples has always been desirable in peaceful ways, which happens when it becomes unfeasible in a polarized society, something that some social forces
not only encouraged but spread in the social fabric.
What happens on a broader horizon is war, in an environment closer to the citizen is the growth of hatred, intolerance and little empathy and dialogue.
Presenting values that are not practiced is, in addition to hypocrisy, a great social decoy, one bets on what will never be accomplished, and both peace and war are achievable.
A fair division is thus one that, within a broad process of social division, of imposing ideas and political, religious, gender intolerance (heteros are also a gender) promotes concord and the possibility of dialogue, it is heroic, but it is true .
True because it promotes a fair division between the intolerant and the true and sincere democrats, who are peaceful and who want a coexistence between the different and the diverse, it is a type of division also because it separates the hypocrites from the realists and sincere.
These positions also require firmness, resilience and tenacity, it is not for the weak but for those who are truly strong, but without the use of brute force, they only use the coherence of ideas, arguments and are in fact open to dialogue.
It is the division with authoritarians, imposters, liars and demagogues, they never do what they actually claim to promote, they want to see only “their side” of history, only their version of the facts, their imposition of “community” ideas, but of few and not of the social set.
There is a simple reading of this type, they are characterized by arrogance, by the rejection of dialogue, the “other side” is always wrong, but the arguments are just irony and contempt.
Those who despise the different, the diverse, have no democratic basis or logic of dialogue, with these there is indeed a social division, because they are against peaceful coexistence between opposites.
Between faults and crimes
19
Oct
In the face of a situation of danger or pressure, we can all
commit faults and mistakes, but the most socially punished crimes are those that are committed intentionally or worse still premeditated, carefully planned and with the refinements of evil.
There are also crimes that are tolerated and should not be, such as cases of prejudice or systematic theft, even of things of little value, society can and must defend itself in these cases to prevent what is evil from spreading, and if the justice is conniving it is also an accomplice in these crimes.
However, modern society does not know how to deal with human faults and mistakes and that the person has the right to correct himself or repair possible damages, given the religious message these people are liable to repair, but they must recognize the faults.
It can also happen that serious faults are committed by people who have a certain social respect, administrators, public figures and religious authorities and they do not recognize that their faults are equally grave and this type of hypocrisy or self-righteousness occurs with some frequency.
They are particularly serious because they are being practiced by those who should play the exact opposite role to what they do, and the power to culturally propagate evil is greater.
This needs to be socially exposed so that society can also defend these crimes, they are potentially greater because they go beyond the crime itself and spread false values.
The society that does not fight them becomes morally perverse and can reach the point of a civilizational rupture, wars in general are on these limits and for that reason alone they are dangerous.
A culture of peace must include in everyday values messages referring to values of peace.
The real nuclear danger
17
Oct
While Russia threatens Ukraine’s entry into NATO would lead
to a third war, the rhetoric of Western countries is that Russia’s use of “tactical” nuclear weapons would be war, so the war between these two countries indicates the possibility of a war. world confrontation that would be catastrophic.
It is difficult to find breaches in this scenario for any peace agreement, the escalation of the war is ascending and even public opinion is divided, as in the scenario before the 2nd. War.
North Korea has already tested its cruise missiles, China, in the view of Japan, would reach its territory, China censored its internet (there is a control of the nationalized electronic network) and India presented its submarine capable of launching nuclear missiles, Russia already has in time.
The idea of a shield in the form of a mosaic (several countries would help Ukraine to defend its airspace), is an attempt to respond to Russia’s demonstration of its ability to reach not only strategic points in enemy territory, but also tested a response to NATO.
Turkey wants to mediate a deal and Iran continues to send its drones to Russia which has improved its attack capability, also the powerful Himars missiles are now being reached by the Russian anti-aircraft battery.
It is little remembered in the literature, but we have more than 400 nuclear plants, each bombed one is a bomb, and the largest plant in Europe, Zaporizhia (photo before the war) is in the middle of the conflict, the presence of troops there is a possible scenario of a catastrophe that would hit the whole of Europe.
It is difficult to talk about peace, but it must be thought of within a civilizing process that is capable of reversing the tendency to hate, intolerance and peaceful coexistence between different opinions, the social and world scenario is increasingly polarized and the idea of submitting the other by force grows.
Crisis, hypocrisy and clearing
14
Oct
Today, what you really are is worth very little, what matters more
is personal marketing, the makeup that hides the defects of what the man really is, this is a consequence of the hiddenness of the Being.
So the concealment of the truth is the result of this concealment of the Being, not its cause, the thought goes in this direction because within each Being there is room for falsification, lying and hypocrisy.
So it is not the case of those who lie the most, it is the absence of a clearing where the conscience of each Being presents itself, and the leaven of the liars grew, as the biblical passage of Lk 12,1=2 “take care with the leaven of the liars”. Pharisees which is hypocrisy, there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and there is nothing hidden that will not be known.”
It is true that Heidegger’s category of “clearing” has a more general meaning, it involves the whole that is hidden within a Being, but for those who believe this whole is hidden in God, what we are in the divine heart, and even not believing this seems proper to modernity that does not see the whole.
The fragmentation of knowledge, the social division, the absence of transdisciplinary thinking led to a new type of occultism, one that specialized only sees the part and does not see the whole, even though quantum physics, the search for the infinite or finite universe ( looking for its edge) seen by James Webb, it is nature and within the Being that this whole inhabits and where the truth is hidden.
How it was hidden was the social fragmentation, the absence of communion, where the Whole is complete, the absence of transcendent Love (not that of idealistic subjectivity), where we are able to see the other.
We thus form a generation (in the sense of several since the last century) that became evil, selfish and individualistic, autophagic and exclusionary and unable to see the whole clearly.
It is true that divine justice is superior to human justice, but it does not ignore it, Jesus told a parable of a widow who goes to an unjust judge who then bothers him so much, he decides to stop having her bothering him anymore and “ don’t come and attack me”.
And Jesus explains the parable to the disciples (Lk 18:6-7): “And the Lord added: “Listen to what this unjust judge says. And will God not do justice to his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will it make them wait?” so we can also hope for earthly justice.
The Civilization Crisis and Thought
13
Oct
It is not a propitious time for thought, said Peter Sloterdijk, 
in other words Edgar Morin asked for a revolution in thought through education, what is observed are increasingly dogmatic currents (different from orthodox) in duel, without a understand or argue in terms of the universe of the other.
The outline of this crisis has its origins in the inability to move forward, the proposed models show signs of exhaustion, the media and common sense appeal to superficial arguments, without a clear reference and sometimes appealing, this has reached the social body and politics.
They blame the new media, they are just vehicles of thought, their cognitive basis is in education and in what is digested in people’s daily lives, and since the beginning of the last century it was already showing signs of exhaustion, not a few serious thinkers comment on this, from Nietzsche to Freud, through conservative writers on the right and left, because both returned to their origins.
There is a social crisis, no doubt, but it exists due to the absence of consistent responses that mobilize everyone, thinking is segmented, the great models and theories have failed and the sign of this is its radicalization to irrational levels, and the horizon of war emerges.
In A well-made head, a book by Edgar Morin, he states that the reform of thought would allow the full use of intelligence to respond to these challenges and a link between cultures that are dissociated, it is not a programmatic reform, but a paradigmatic one, that is, with regard to our ability to organize knowledge.
Putting everything together, exercising a transdisciplinary approach, as described in the opening remarks of Arrábida’s letter (Morin, Barsarab Nicolescu and Lima de Freitas subscribed to it): “Considering that the contemporary rupture between an increasingly cumulative knowledge and an increasingly impoverished leads to the rise of a new obscurantism, whose consequences, at the individual and social level, are incalculable.” (Feitas, Nicolescu, Morin, 1994).
This letter establishes a new ethics: “Transdisciplinary ethics rejects any attitude that rejects dialogue and discussion, whatever their origin – ideological, scientific, religious, economic, political, philosophical” (Freitass, Nicolescu, Morin, 1994).
Freitas, Lima; Morin, Edgar; Nicolescu, Basarab . (1994) Carta da Transdisciplinaridade de Arrábida, Portugal Convento de Arrábida.
Post-God or the Theocide attempt
11
Oct
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.
