[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are it behooves you. This Reader excepts from a (not so) sarcastic account of the role of religion in history. Angulo uses irony and a biting wit to show the Venezuelan poet’s contempt]. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
[Let me begin by saying that respecting believers is very important to me. But we must also be mindful of the role that religion has played –and continues to play–in our civilization. I add to this the deification of money and link it with religion. Take this old example: When a country enters an economic crisis, it is worth examining the evolution of the church within it. I recall here the distant days of July 1789 in France, and I recapitulate how faith was abandoned for the sake of vested interests. (Louis Casado)].
Have we worked too hard for the gods? (Chino Valera Mora)
1. For centuries, the wrath of the people and the supernatural began to be mediated. The elites adopted a repeated politicization of faith through a demagoguery of hope and promises of a paradise. With the gods’ approval, the people paid their tribute many times with their lives, subjected to legalized religious repression ‘to please the king’. (In some cases, if the king died, his subjects had to die with him to continue serving even after death).
2. Paintings, music, and poems still survive today to tell the story. Likewise, intellectuals made their contribution to please the patron of the moment. They sang the lie with honor, praised human sacrifices and genocides, all in the name of the God that best suited them. (And let us not even mention here the subjugation of nature’s tormented forces). These intellectuals did not hesitate to promote fear to uphold the established order. I am not exaggerating: History still sells the horrors of the past in flashy paintings, texts and documentaries. The truth is that, in history books, the only findings recounted are the dead among the serfs and the outcasts of poverty. What did not change was the origin of those who died.
3. Ah, and the pagan gods were, of course, replaced. From the multiplicity of gods, we moved to monotheism. This was because the dispersion of power among countless gods and kings made it necessary to channel ambition into a single God and a single empire.
4. So, religions globalized God, but unified misery. They created the ministries and ministers of God. They often regarded the state as an appendage of religion. From politics –a flexible arm of the church– we moved to the notion of power separate from religion, according to the principle of “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”. For some, what is redistributed is the creed; for others, it is wealth.
5. Then, the Lord’s works were heavily financed –temples and cathedrals in every corner. Religions created the curia, they administered God. Saints emerge, along with work for painters and sculptors. The saints, too, are globalized. Guilt ceases to be supernatural and becomes that of the poor human beings as personal sin is decreed. God is made into a man with his counterpart, the devil. The codes are published, transcribed from heaven. The Catholic confession sets the stage for the preamble of psychology and psychiatry.
6. Colonization through missionaries took place, foreign cultures were supplanted, and the new order was created with its collateral extensions. Pity, mercy, and compassion bowed people’s heads and brought them to their knees. People prayed for better times, but after two thousand years, such prayers have yet to be heard; a fact that likely contributed to the discrediting of their leaders.
7. The church dictated what constituted science and replaced it with its religious ideology thus revealing its demagoguery. The truth of science and its apparent neutrality often became subject to the criteria of multilateral investor associations.
8. The church had to relax its constraints to extend its dominion though. Merchandise today replaces the communion wafer. Mass is televised, universities become convents and seminaries.
9. The International Monetary Fund, the Vatican of the economy, tells us between the lines, “I am the way, the truth, and the gate to life”, and publishes its creeds, its homily, and prescribes its prescriptions. St. Peter’s Square is surpassed in importance by the New York Stock Exchange. Shopping malls and supermarkets are transformed into new churches, with their windows filled with fashion icons. The Pope also founded his own ‘Hambrosian’ (from the Spanish) bank. Devotion meets money; every parishioner has a price and economic gain is the greatest desire asked of God. The churches emptied; the banks filled.
10. National gods and saints lost power and made way for the new international corporations. With the same code, the corporations that govern countries from behind the scenes –through political conclaves specialized in servitude and in kissing their peoples on the cheek– have championed a new inquisition: a judicial system subject to supply and demand and at the service of corporations, regardless of truth and justice.
From autarky emerges the colonial regime, the supranational and biotech–police state
11. The system homogenizes and mass-produces clothing, music, art, language, and ignorance. The path to success is paved by the American dream. A neoliberal theology and faith in globalization have merged. A single world police force emerges, a single currency, a single language, a single God, a single faith, a single world, a single culture, a neoliberal global order. Patenting life and its resources, preaching control over food systems in every corner of hunger. Transforming culture into a showcase, usurping biodiversity to strengthen the new God and his empire. They have unreasonably driven up the already high cost of living, and now they are adding the cost of death to the mix by privatizing cemeteries. Freedom and human rights are in short supply, and ideals are no longer en vogue.
12. Capital roams freely without a passport. It enters and leaves any sovereign country without asking anyone’s permission, rendering humans illegal when they fail to meet requirements as old as the Bible –even in their own country. The duality continues; the opposition between good and evil has its enforcer.
13. Most of the planet’s intellectuals, just like Pindar yesterday (ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes, 518 BC- 438 BC) realized this financial goldmine and joined the party of fame, the narcissism of the media –selling their souls to the new devil, putting a price tag on their dignity in the hypermarket of emotions. There, the (autonomous?) universities stand as small branches of the imperial deification of money.
14. But absolute power carries within itself its own decay. Therefore, it will always urgently need to conjure up an enemy to postpone what remains of its ruins. The empire’s insomnia defines its desire and is destined to force and hasten the twilight of the gods and their respective religions. Christ, the immortal, said it best: “Whoever believes in me will live.” (excerpted from Carlos Angulo, Venezuelan poet).
15. No bottom line today…
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
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