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.
