From the sacred and profane text

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By FLÁVIO R. KOTHE*

O Old testment indoctrinated in schools and churches is a factory of sadists, who invent beautiful names for their violence

"The Old testment is a factory of sadists; New, of masochists”.

It is necessary to see how sacred texts shape the collective mind, transmit values ​​and thought structures. Those who use the texts do not want to decipher and reveal what they are transmitting. Those who believe in their sacredness do not want to either. What is most important is thus left aside, while the lesser is celebrated as central.

Different peoples at different times produced texts here and there that were sacred to them, as if they were protecting their immortal soul. Of the entire people, a body that decomposed, only these works, their spirit, remained. It is necessary for these texts to die as sacred, so that they can be resurrected as literary works, which they always were, but which belief prevented from being seen.

Believers in some of these books do not usually see them as literary art, just as they did not believe in the sacred character of other books. If everyone is right about the others, no one knows about himself. If there are no sacred texts, there are sacralized texts, just as there are consecrated texts, in some cases for good reasons, just as there are forgotten texts, for even better reasons.

The believer thinks that someone seeing literature in his sacred text is not recognizing its quality, it is a degradation, not recognizing its ascendancy to the divine plan. He himself does not have, however, freedom of reading: he reads hindered by the parameters of his belief. Strictly speaking, he does not even read, he only looks for confirmation in the text of what he assumes he already knew before. He does not decipher the text: he only sees in it the hidden figures of his belief.

Religious formation, when supported by belief, generates a structure that is not only concrete for reception, but also concrete, capable of withstanding loads of distrust, vetoes of arguments, historical denials: it itself remains untouched. There is no point in arguing. At most the answer will be: you think this way, I think that way.

The hermeneut who ventures into this is in a worse situation than the psychoanalyst who is faced with the walling up of a trauma that does not want to be dismantled, since it has already become a stone. He can even diagnose what is happening, he can establish hypotheses about what could have caused the trauma, but it is naive to assume that the genie comes out of the bottle when it is uncapped and asks what one wants as a reward for being freed. The believer does not want freedom of thought: he prefers to be tied to the dictates of his faith, because he believes that they lead him to salvation.

He does not want to lose the eternal life of the soul that he supposes he has. He thinks that it is so precious that it needs to be preserved for eternity. It is a deep narcissism, from which no one wants to move away, so as not to lose the precious image he has of himself (“if I don’t like myself, who else will?”).

Losing one's soul would be worse for a Christian than losing the land, cattle, and people with which Jehovah used to reward his followers. The Jew wants the world; the Christian, above all, heaven. Eternal glory is more important than the glories of the world. The priest who prostrates himself on the ground when he is ordained wants to show how humble he is: he does not accept as his boss anyone less than a god and his representative.

In the various faiths, each one wants to be right and, therefore, denies that the other can be. If they all want to be right, none of them ends up being right. In fact, faiths are not concerned with reason and logic: for them, the principles of faith are superior to all science and all art. The believer cannot understand thinking, because it is situated in a horizon that is not his own. He does not feel the drama of the tension between entity, being, language and the unknown in order to open himself to thinking. He does not want to think. Faith is enough for him.

The believer denies that he believes because it would be advantageous to him. He does not see himself as an opportunist. The fact that he denies does not prove that he is not an opportunist: quite the opposite. Nor does it make what he believes a factual reality. It remains a fact that he believes. Affirming the existence of deities and celestial acts does not establish their existence, it merely confirms and reaffirms that the believer believes in them. What are the advantages?

For the Jews of the Old testment, there was the Promised Land, that is, a territory inhabited by other peoples, which Moses, Joshua and their soldiers simply invaded and took, killing its inhabitants. This process is underway again, with Israel's racist, warmongering and genocidal policy. Those who participate in this believe they are acting in good faith, the faith they have in Jehovah and in the sacred text: they will not admit that there is an exchange of interests, the belief in the god in exchange for lands. The god comes before.

The Christian believer believes that he is in the grace of being a child of God, having been saved by his beloved son. Those who do not believe this are outside “the grace” and can begin to think for free, learning to laugh at misfortune. Thinking is different from belief, it arises from the feeling of loneliness and abandonment for those who were believers, but it requires the courage to think from oneself, for oneself.

There is Christian theology that claims to be a way of thinking, but the theologian needs to convince himself of the existence of God and his mythology through arguments: he does not have the grace to believe in a religion. Anyone who needs logical arguments to believe in God is not a believer. Theologians are atheists, who need proof to accept the existence of God. The believer himself does not need proof: faith is enough. He claims to have the grace to believe. This grace is the disgrace of his potential to think.

Theologians devote themselves to the study of God because they cannot free themselves from their shadow; they remain trapped in a shadow of the divine because they do not dare to think one step further. They stop thinking where thought would go beyond the limits sustained by the principles of belief. They pretend to think, but they do not think. The being-being relationship is not a problem for them, because there is an entity that contains, for them, all being.

There is a semi-thinking that inhabits the pages of newspapers, classrooms, commentators' screens, politicians' speeches, and the daily lives of all of us. It is a pretense of thinking, but within the limits of what has already been thought and consecrated. It is not an original way of thinking: it is an occupation of spaces by those who want to appear (and will be among the first to disappear). It does not have the patience of a way of thinking that needs three hundred years to be seen, if at all.

Just as there is a semi-thinking, a somewhat lame rationalization that does not go deeply into anything or radically question anything, there are also semi-sacred texts such as the official hymns and the literary canon indoctrinated in schools. They are forms of catechism applied to the secular world. They are revered by those who live off them.

The believer denies that he is an opportunist. He thinks he believes because what he believes in exists (because it exists in him). Pascal said that the believer makes a bet in which he expects an infinite reward (eternal life) for a finite amount wagered (masses, alms, religious acts). Pascal was the inventor of the roulette wheel, as well as the calculating machine. Those who play roulette expect to get more than they bet, but it is programmed in such a way that the machine will generally receive more than it pays out. Why does someone gamble, being predestined, above all, to lose? Because they believe they deserve divine grace: to receive more than they invest.

If someone believes that they belong to a superior people, they may even strive to be better than others, but that will make them seem inferior. They end up giving themselves the right to do whatever they want, as long as it serves their desire to be superior to others. If someone believes that their religion is the only true one, that is a personal belief, which does not make it any truer, no matter how much they try to believe it.

There is no freedom of belief; there is only freedom in unbelief. Old testment (or whatever you want to call it) decants the conquest of other peoples’ lands, annihilating them, with the supposed support of Jehovah. When the eleven thousand soldiers, one thousand from each of the Jewish peoples, return from the attack on a people they did not even know, Moses asks what they did with the men. The answer is: we killed them all. Then he asks what they did with the women and children. The answer is: we left them there. Then Moses orders them to return and kill all those who were left. This is genocide, celebrated not only by Jews, but by Catholics and Christians in general. And this is currently happening in Gaza and Lebanon. Literature is a very dangerous thing.

A few days ago, I heard a German with Jewish relatives, whom I met as part of the communist government of East Germany, assert that it was not right for Palestinians to use schools and hospitals to shelter terrorists. By doing so, he was defending the ongoing genocide. The aggressors were not to blame, but rather the victims. There is no evidence of the presence of any “terrorists”: it is only alleged that they were there, and then killed hundreds, thousands of women and children. This is how the Zionist press that dominates Otanistan talks. When it labels Hamas “terrorists”, it endorses genocide: it is incapable of seeing Israel as a racist, warmongering, genocidal state.

O Old testment indoctrinated in schools and churches is a factory of sadists, who invent beautiful names for their violence; New, of masochists, who believe that suffering is divine. Thus they complement and complete each other. For Christians. The compilation of texts made at the time of the Council of Nicaea left interesting versions aside.

This is not the relationship between the Iliad, which sings of the wrath of Achilles in the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, which tells of Odysseus' love for Penelope and his quest for his kingdom, with all the adventures that come with it. These were sacred texts for the Greeks. It is necessary to study the structures and semantic gestures of these narratives to understand how they helped shape the mentality of the people.

Homer does not simply praise the Achaians for being victorious, having the support of more gods, nor does he disdain the defeated Trojans. The war is decided in the fight between Achilles and Hector, a model followed by narratives to this day. The most human and interesting figures are among the vanquished: it is as if they obtained a literary victory, in a narrative that tells of their defeat. People with more defects are among the victors, starting with the commander Menelaus. The reasons for the war are also laid bare: apparently, to force Helen to go back on her romantic choice for Paris, but in reality due to conflicts of economic interests and domination of the seas.

Achilles reappears in Odyssey to say that the choice he had made when he was young – to die young and famous, instead of old and unknown – had been a big mistake, because life is the greatest gift we have. He feels sorry for himself, when he is already famous, but he does not regret the death of so many people he had killed: it seems he wants both, to be famous and old (eternal?). When Odysseus kills all the suitors with Telemachus, this is passed on as something fair, not regretted. That he, for having killed the young Astyanax, heir to the throne, was condemned to spend ten years on an island with the goddess Calypso, even having children with her, is not regretted: it is as if it were a consolation prize. Except that the woman was expected to be completely faithful.

Homer's texts were sacred to the Greeks, taught in schools and sung by rhapsodes. They therefore served to shape the people's mentality. The gods that appeared were not mere literary figures: they were entities whose real existence was believed. The mental structure resulting from this formation was more nuanced than the biblical one. Since the difference between gods and humans was the death of the latter, the central theme of the religion was human finitude; secondarily, it served to legitimize slavery, showing that the white lordly class was more similar to the gods. There was no place for a Christ or a slave on Olympus.

It is common among us to present monotheism as progress. We do not realize that polytheism allowed each person to choose the “saint” of their preference, the one with whom they could make a pact of fidelity by affinity. This is shown in the Gilgamesh, when a minor goddess learns that a great flood is coming and warns a family (who owed something) to take precautions. They then build a large, square vessel to house the family, the animals and those who help to build (they receive wine while they work). This story was copied by the Jews and adapted to the monotheism imposed by the Egyptian priests of Aton.

With some basic differences: wine was discovered after the flood; Noah, who had gotten drunk, invented slavery against his son (who had found it funny that he was braiding his feet) and extended it to his descendants (who had nothing to do with the story); there is no mention of sheltering the workers.

Virgil was commissioned by Caesar to write a Roman “sacred text,” Aenida, which served three basic purposes: (i) to erase the current myth that Rome had been founded by Romulus and Remus, to affirm that Aeneas, father of Iulus and founder of the Julia dynasty, had done so, after saving his father from the flames of Troy; (ii) to place the Romans as avengers of the Trojans, invading Greece in the year 100 BC; (iii) to propose that the Carthaginians wanted revenge for the fact that Aeneas had abandoned Dido after seducing her in a cave (in fact the two could never have met, since there was a gap of about 300 years between them).

A Aenida is an inferior work to Homer's epics. Virgil imitated them, but is even lesser The Lusiads, made as an imitation of the imitation, a work also commissioned by the royal family, to exalt the formation and expansion of Portugal, until proposing to the king of Melinde a war and commercial agreement, with Portuguese advantages in receiving spices in exchange for military support. The reactionism in literature is so strong that it fails to see the most obvious and is happy with the organic servility prevailing there. The more sacred, the more dangerous the literature.

* Flavio R. Kothe is a retired full professor of aesthetics at the University of Brasília (UnB). Author, among other books, of Allegory, aura and fetish (Cajuína Publisher). [https://amzn.to/4bw2sGc]


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