· Web view2021. 3. 17. · manifests itself most obviously in the distribution of resources. Two monkeys walking in the same direction simultaneously discover a desirable piece

Draft – Not for publication – Comments acknowledged ([email protected])

Religiosity and Morality

I.1. The Moral Lives of Animals – Dale Peterson

Animal scientists like to speak about the authority relationships among animals in terms of dominance and submission, which recognizes an unequal distribution of social power. This unequal distribution of power manifests itself most obviously in the distribution of resources. Two monkeys walking in the same direction simultaneously discover a desirable piece of fruit at an equal distance between them. Which monkey will predictably get the fruit, and which will predictably wait for the leftovers? They won't usually fight over the fruit. That would be a waste of time, energy, and wellness, since one or both might be injured by fighting over a mere piece of food. Thus nature, by which I mean evolution, has given them the ability to respond intelligently to an already established dominance- submission system. Both monkeys already know who is dominant and who is subordinate or submissive. They already know who has a right to take that fruit—but just to clarify the situation, they may also exchange dominant and submissive signals to each other.

I was curious: How does anyone persuade a wild elephant, who can weigh fifty to a hundred times more than a person, to obey and work for people?

You might imagine that elephants can be captured and made to work for people because they’re stupid or just inert. But one could just as easily conclude that elephants are smart enough to recognize quickly that they have no other choice, and so they intelligently adapt to the new life and new master. I think of the process as comparable to the Stockholm syndrome, which happens among people who are kidnapped and begin to identify with their kidnappers. And I believe that elephants learn obedience because they’re psychologically already prepared to. Obedience to authority is part of the inherited psychological nature of an elephant. (Peterson, 2011)

I.1.1. Did Affluence Spur the Rise of Modern Religions?

Reliable food and energy may have freed up time to think about the purpose of life

About 2,500 years ago something changed the way humans think. Within the span of two centuries, in three separate regions of Eurasia, spiritual movements emerged that would give rise to the world's major moral religions, those preaching some combination of compassion, humility and asceticism. Scholars often attribute the rise of these moral religions—Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Christianity included—to population growth, seeing morality as a necessary social stabilizer in increasingly large and volatile human communities. Yet findings from a recent study published in Current Biology point to a different factor: rising affluence.

The authors investigated variables relating to political complexity and living standards. Affluence emerged as a major force in the rise of moral religion, in particular, access to energy. Across cultures moral religions abruptly emerged when members of a population could reliably source 20,000 calories of energy a day, including food (for humans and livestock), fuel and raw materials.

“This number appears to correspond with a certain peace of mind,” says lead author Nicolas Baumard, a research scientist at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. “Having a roof over your head, not feeling like the world is full of predators and enemies, knowing that you'll have enough to eat tomorrow.” As Baumard points out, psychology research shows that affluence appears to influence our motivations and reward circuitry away from short-term gain to also considering the benefits of long- term strategy. In other words, with a steady energy supply, we had more time to cooperate, cultivate skills and consider consequences. Affluence also allowed more time for existential pondering: maybe we have some greater moral responsibility; perhaps life has a purpose.

Notes, Numbers, Emphasis & Italics mine 1


Baumard acknowledges that moral and ascetic qualities probably existed in humans before the major religions emphasizing them. Other experts believe that the paper may not consider these inherent qualities seriously enough. Barbara King, an anthropologist at the College of William & Mary, argues that the study exaggerates the sharp transition to the moral belief systems. She suggests that a more gradual transition may have taken place—one that was perhaps nudged over the line by a reliable calorie count. “Anthropologists and psychologists have found deep roots of morality and compassion in other primates,” King explains. “I don't see any reason to assume that cosmological morality and compassion were not important to earlier hunter-gatherer groups.”

Bernard J. Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, also cautions against Baumard's claim: “The main idea in the article is fascinating, but the causal link between increasing affluence and religion remains to be established. Our work actually suggests that the authors might have their causality reversed—that religion itself drives increases in affluence via its effects on increased cooperation.”

Still, Baumard's findings point to a strong association between affluence and the emergence of moral religion, specifically. Plenty of ancient societies cooperated and had religious beliefs—the Maya, Sumerians and Egyptians among them. For the most part, however, none of these societies' belief systems emphasized morality or material and visceral restraint. And according to Baumard, members of these societies never had access to more than 15,000 calories a day. Whether cause or effect, morality, it seems, takes energy.

The Beginnings of Moral Religion

These five major movements mark the beginning of humanity's turn toward religions that emphasize personal morality and asceticism, according to a new study. —Victoria Stern

(Bret Stetka, Scientific American, May/June 2015)

I.1.2. Latin

The Latin language barrier was the tool by which the elites (political, religious, scientific) held a monopoly on everything scientific, or even the Bible, so that the lower classes could not arrive to the intellectual world and knowledge nor communicate directly with god and read his words.

This was a barrier to the access of the lower classes to knowledge and was a very strong paralyzing factor for the advance of science, together with the difficulties that simple people had to dedicate their lives to study, because of very powerful financial constraints.

We found many examples of this problem, some of which are summarized in Chapters I.14, I.17 and I.30.



I.2. Saint Augustine

Whitehead wrote that the conflicts of thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were governed by the fact ‘that the world had got hold of a general idea which the world could neither live with nor live without.’ Scientific stringency, inflexibly resolved to denature the vital facts of our existence, continues to sustain this conflict, which may yet issue in a sweeping reaction against science as a perversion of truth. This happened before, with much less justification, in the fourth century, when St. Augustine denied the value of a natural science which contributed nothing to the pursuit of salvation. His ban destroyed interest in science all over Europe for a thousand years. (Polanyi, 1958)

I.2.1. Why I Am Not a Christian - Bertrand Russell

“I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.” (Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, p. 15)

I.2.2. Escohotado

As Escohotado writes:

The curse on riches and economic initiatives does not appear in written records as program and revealed truth until the Jewish civil wars of the Theocratic Period, in the first century B.C., when prophets announce a Messiah who will avenge the “poor in spirit” or possessions, assuring that “the last will be the first”. Simultaneously, the Essene sect rewrites the seventh Commandment as “thou shall not steal your brother practicing commerce”, and the great document in this line is the Sermon of the Mount (Matthew, 5-6), where private property is considered theft and commerce its instrument. The Messiah (Christos in Greek) preaches unconditional love, although his anti-commercial stand is demonstrated by whipping repeatedly the merchants, at the start and at the end of his public life.

His brother, the apostle James, states: “Weep and wail for your riches have rotted […] you have lived in wanton luxury, fattening yourselves like pigs, and the day for slaughter has come” (Ep., 5:1-7). The Book of Revelation is full of threats directed to different kinds of merchants, including ship-owners, businessmen, store keepers and even grocers, and the Gospels abound in similar expressions3.

The decadence and fall of the Roman Empire is directly linked with its contempt towards the fruits of work, and not in the least with adopting Christian faith–as Gibbon pretended-, because the Gospel revised by saint Paul is basically resignation with the share of the slave (better situated in the queue leading to Heaven), and anathema towards the profane institutions of commerce. In fact, Rome was plagued by gigantic revolts

An identical love for Mankind combined with the tenet that property is theft and commerce its instrument, informs the Communist Manifesto of 1848, that conceives the triumph of the last over the first as the “eternal law of social progress through class struggle” of slaves till the new faith entered through the backdoors of patrician houses, adopted initially by the servants, and the model of societies formed by a 90% of unpaid workers received the spiritual sanction of God’s will, concentrated in the vileness of Money and the business world.

A general theory of communist law is then developed by the Fathers of the Church, both Greek and Latin. Saint John Chrisostom proposes creating a “republic composed only of paupers”, Saint Augustine declares that “the social vice is buying cheap to sell expensive”; Saint Anselm and saint Hieronymus declare that the process of selling and buying is always a fraud, in which one or the other contractual partner is ripped off. Any interest rate of money betrays usury, and usury is as mortal sin that deserves capital punishment. The whole sphere of contracts violate God’s law by being “inflexible”, credit must be “offered without expecting any return” as Jesus said (Luke 6:35) and “giving away one’s own is a permanent duty”. Rich people will never obtain other after-life than Hell, and “anxious thoughts about tomorrow’s food, drink and clothes” (Matthew 6: 25) is veiled blasphemy, typical of the “gentiles”, because God is even more provident with Mankind than he is with “birds and lilies”.



In 552, after centuries of surpassing one million, the population of Rome has shrunk to 35.000, most of them slaves, and Europe enters the Dark Ages. Far from being the fruit of barbarian invasions –as conventional history books say- economic decay and demographical collapse stem from the clerical-military nature of the State, a monolith devoted to Auctoritas at the expense not only of freedom but of all type of voluntary obligations, as those embodied in contracts.

(Antonio Escohotado - Mont Pelerin Society - Regional Meeting - Lima 2015. Peru.)

Aristotle argued that since coins do not “bear fruit”, unlike cattle, which might bear calves while on loan to a neighbour, no interest should be paid at all when borrowing money.

(The Economist, Nov 30th 2013)

I.2.3. Jacob Fugger

Goldenballs

ALBRECHT DÜRER’S portrait of Jacob Fugger shows a man with thin lips and unforgiving eyes. He wears a fine fur tippet about his shoulders and a brown cap; for the time, his dress is strikingly plain.

He was born into a family of well-to-do textile traders and bankers in Augsburg in 1459. He grew rich and powerful by risking his capital and his reputation to finance the territorial ambitions of the Habsburgs. Jacob relished the relationship, which began when Frederick III, the Holy Roman Emperor, was given a loan by Fugger’s brother in spite of a dreadful credit rating. Jacob became principal banker to his son, Emperor Maximilian I, who established the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to Charles V of Spain, whose victory at the Battle of Pavia entrenched the Habsburgs’ hegemony. His huge loans were backed by collateral, and his Habsburg clients frequently paid them off in kind rather than cash.

Fugger was able to obtain control of commodities such as silver, from Austria, and copper, from Hungary.

The financier raised fresh capital for his bank by exploiting savings accounts, which were first introduced in Augsburg and paid 5% a year, thus contravening the Catholic church’s ban on usury. Fugger took his argument directly to Pope Leo X (a Medici, incidentally), who had personally benefited from his largesse. The pope was sympathetic and the ban on usury was conveniently rewritten in 1515, when the process was redefined as “a profit that is acquired without labour, cost or risk”. Taking risks with clients’ savings had become a legitimate business: “The modern economy”, Mr Steinmetz writes, “was under way.”

Fugger’s relationship with the Vatican was based on an extensive branch network through which he could transfer offertory collections from Germany to Rome (in return for a 3% commission). But his most astonishing and unexpected historical achievement, says Mr Steinmetz, was unwittingly lighting the fuse that started the Reformation. Fugger teamed up with another Habsburg client, for whom he had bought the archbishopric of Mainz, and the pair began to sell indulgences (a forgiveness of sins, which provided, for a fee, a short cut to heaven), splitting the proceeds with Pope Leo, who used the cash to build St Peter’s Basilica. In 1517 Martin Luther was sufficiently outraged by this scheme that he wrote the “95 Theses” that damned Rome, sparking the Protestant Reformation.

(The Economist, 1st 2015)

I.3. A few that could stay alive

I.3.1. Galileo

This is a clear example of a not entirely peaceful political and religious Resistance to Change1 hybrid.

1 In Encyclopædia Britannica: “Although the Venetian senate had granted Galileo a lifetime appointment as professor at Padua because of his findings with the telescope, he left in the summer of 1610 to become "first philosopher and mathematician" to the grand duke of Tuscany, an appointment that enabled him to devote more time to research.



Conflict With Rome. - In 1611 Galileo visited Rome and demonstrated his telescope to the most eminent personages at the pontifical court. Encouraged by the flattering reception accorded to him, he ventured, in three letters on the sunspots printed at Rome in 1613 under the title “Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti . . .” , to take up a more definite position on the Copernican theory. Movement of the spots across the face of the Sun, Galileo maintained, proved Copernicus was right and Ptolemy wrong.

His great expository gifts and his choice of Italian, in which he was an acknowledged master of style, made his thoughts popular beyond the confines of the universities and created a powerful movement of opinion. Perhaps the most far-reaching of his achievements was his reestablishment of mathematical rationalism against Aristotle's logico-verbal approach and his insistence that the "Book of Nature is . . . written in mathematical characters." From this base, he was able to found the modern experimental method. The Aristotelian professors, seeing their vested interests threatened, united against him. They strove to cast suspicion upon him in the eyes of ecclesiastical authorities because of contradictions between the Copernican theory and the Scriptures. They obtained the cooperation of the Dominican preachers, who fulminated from the pulpit against the new impiety of "mathematicians" and secretly denounced Galileo to the Inquisition for blasphemous utterances, which, they said, he had freely invented. Gravely alarmed, Galileo agreed with one of his pupils, B. Castelli, a Benedictine monk, that something should be done to forestall a crisis. He accordingly wrote letters meant for the Grand Duke and for the Roman authorities (letters to Castelli, to the Grand Duchess Dowager, to Monsignor Dini) in which he pointed out the danger, reminding the church of its standing practice of interpreting Scripture allegorically whenever it came into conflict with scientific truth, quoting patristic authorities and warning that it would be "a terrible detriment for the souls if people found themselves convinced by proof of something that it was made then a sin to believe." He even went to Rome in person to beg the authorities to leave the way open for a change. A number of ecclesiastical experts were on his side. Unfortunately, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the chief theologian of the church, was unable to appreciate the importance of the new theories and clung to the time-honoured belief that mathematical hypotheses have nothing to do with physical reality. He only saw the danger of a scandal, which might undermine Catholicity in its fight with Protestantism. He accordingly decided that the best thing would be to check the whole issue by having Copernicanism declared "false and erroneous" and the book of Copernicus suspended by the congregation of the Index. The decree came out on March 5, 1616. On the previous February 26, however, as an act of personal consideration, Cardinal Bellarmine had granted an audience to Galileo and informed him of the forthcoming decree, warning him that he must henceforth neither "hold nor defend" the doctrine, although it could still be discussed as a mere "mathematical supposition."

In 1624 Galileo again went to Rome, hoping to obtain a revocation of the decree of 1616. This he did not get, but he obtained permission from the Pope to write about "the systems of the world," both Ptolemaic and Copernican, as long as he discussed them noncommittally and came to the conclusion dictated to him in advance by the pontiff--that is, that man cannot presume to know how the world is really made because God could have brought about the same effects in ways unimagined by him, and he must not restrict God's omnipotence. These instructions were confirmed in writing by the head censor, Monsignor Niccol Riccardi.

Galileo returned to Florence and spent the next several years working on his great book Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, tolemaico e copernicano (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems--Ptolemaic and Copernican). As soon as it came out, in the year 1632, with the full and complete imprimatur of the censors, it was greeted with a tumult of applause and cries of praise from every part of the European continent as a literary and philosophical masterpiece.

On the crisis that followed there remain now only inferences. It was pointed out to the Pope that despite its noncommittal title, the work was a compelling and unabashed plea for the Copernican system. The strength of the argument made the prescribed conclusion at the end look anticlimactic and pointless. The Jesuits insisted that it could have worse consequences on the established system of teaching "than Luther and Calvin put together." The Pope, in anger, ordered a prosecution. The author being covered by license, the only legal measures would be to disavow the licensers and prohibit the book. But at that point a document was "discovered" in the file, to the effect that during his audience with Bellarmine on February



26, 1616, Galileo had been specifically enjoined from "teaching or discussing Copernicanism in any way," under the penalties of the Holy Office. His license, it was concluded, had therefore been "extorted" under false pretenses. (The consensus of historians, based on evidence made available when the file was published in 1877, has been that the document had been planted and that Galileo was never so enjoined.) The church authorities, on the strength of the "new" document, were able to prosecute him for "vehement suspicion of heresy." Notwithstanding his pleas of illness and old age, Galileo was compelled to journey to Rome in February 1633 and stand trial. He was treated with special indulgence and not jailed. In a rigorous interrogation on April 12, he steadfastly denied any memory of the 1616 injunction.

I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, arraigned personally before this tribunal, and kneeling before you, Most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors-General against heretical depravity throughout the entire Christian commonwealth, having before my eyes and touching with my hands, the Holy Gospels, swear that I have always believed, do believe, and by God's help will in the future believe, all that is held, preached, and taught by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. But whereas -- after an injunction had been judicially intimated to me by this Holy Office, to the effect that I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the world, and moves, and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to Holy Scripture -- I wrote and printed a book in which I discuss this new doctrine already condemned, and adduce arguments of great cogency in its favor, without presenting any solution of these, and for this reason I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves:

Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this vehement suspicion, justly conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error, heresy, and sect whatsoever contrary to the said Holy Church, and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me; but that should I know any heretic, or person suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of the place where I may be. Further, I swear and promise to fulfill and observe in their integrity all penances that have been, or that shall be, imposed upon me by this Holy Office. And, in the event of my contravening, (which God forbid) any of these my promises and oaths, I submit myself to all the pains and penalties imposed and promulgated in the sacred canons and other constitutions, general and particular, against such delinquents. So help me God, and these His Holy Gospels, which I touch with my hands.

I, the said Galileo Galilei, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above; and in witness of the truth thereof I have with my own hand subscribed the present document of my abjuration, and recited it word for word at Rome, in the Convent of Minerva, this twenty-second day of June, 1633.

I, Galileo Galilei, have abjured as above with my own hand.

I.3.2. Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623)

Paolo Sarpi, the first philosopher to develop systematic arguments for atheism, is now hardly known except by historians of ideas. Once he was famed throughout Europe. John Donne kept his portrait in his study. Boswell called him a genius. Both Gibbon and Macaulay praised him. He was well ahead of his time, since it was not until half a century after he died that Matthias Knutzen, the first widely mentioned atheist in modern history, distributed three handwritten atheist pamphlets at Jena in 1674.

Recent onslaughts on belief in God by Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens et al have made atheism quite acceptable. However, for many centuries, atheism would have been expressed with extreme caution. Sarpi was a monk of the Servite order, and at a time when heretics were burnt at the stake, a secret atheist.



He was born in 1552, the same year as his antagonist, Pope Paul V, and was the leading Italian intellectual of his age. Sir Henry Wotton, the English ambassador to the Venetian Republic, called him “the most deep and general scholar of the world” and “a sound Protestant as yet in the habit of a friar.” He was a life-long sceptic who lived in many worlds – the worlds of Catholic monks, Venetian patriots, and European radicals. He called himself “a chameleon [who] had to wear a mask like everyone else in Italy .” And in fact, what he really believed only became public long after he died in 1623.

Sarpi’s biography, written by his admiring friend and fellow monk Fulgenzio Micanzio, said that even as a child he was outstandingly serious and studious. He was a polymath with a photographic memory.

At eighteen, after a brilliant display of learning, he was made Theologian to the Court of Mantua, and then became professor of philosophy at the Servite convent at Venice. At twenty-six, he was the youngest Provincial in the three hundred year history of the Servite Order. At thirty-five, he was given the second highest post of the Order at Rome, but left three years later in disgust, saying, “only ruffians, charlatans and other devotees of pleasure and profit flourished there.”

Sarpi’s Opinions On Religion

Sarpi saw the State as necessary, since it made society possible but religion was only useful insofar as it supported the institutions of the State, and should therefore be under State control.

Campanella (1568-1639), who proposed that the study of the world should be based not on faith but on experience, was tortured on the rack and imprisoned for decades. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) who contradicted several doctrines of the Church, was burnt at the stake.

Francis Bacon’s Great Instauration, published in 1620, three years before the death of Sarpi, described a philosophy of scientific discovery that was consistent with the Pensieri, and it is significant that Sarpi and Bacon were in correspondence since 1616. Like Galileo, whom he often met in Venice, Sarpi believed that knowledge came about principally not by philosophical deduction but by induction, that is by observation and experiment. This approach may now seem self-evident, but in Sarpi’s day many learned people thought otherwise and could not accept findings if they went against their deductions. For example, since the moons of Jupiter as shown by Galileo’s telescope contradicted the Catholic church’s concept of the divine perfection of the universe, the astronomer Francesco Sizzi believed that they could not exist and refused to use the telescope to view them. Sizzi was not a fool, but he was imprisoned in his ‘mind-forged manacles’.

The Interdict Crisis

Until the Interdict crisis of 1605 between Venice and Rome, Sarpi was almost unknown outside Italy. His opposition to the Church then spread his fame throughout Europe.

The causes of the crisis included serious losses of revenue to Venice as its numerous clerics were avoiding taxation, and pious citizens were leaving more and more of their property to the Church. Also, the important Venetian book trade was facing ruin, as the new Pope Paul V was trying to crush any signs of intellectual independence by banning any books that remotely questioned Catholic doctrine.

Prof. Gerald Curzon 2014

Gerald Curzon is a retired professor of neurochemistry (University College, London) with a life-long interest in history. He first heard of Paolo Sarpi while preparing Wotton and His Worlds: Spying, Science and

Venetian Intrigues (Xlibris, 2004).

(Philosophy Now, March/April 2014)

I.4. Pope Francisco and novelties



Francisco ended yesterday its first special synod on the challenges of the family with a strong call to not be afraid to novelty and respond "with courage" to the challenges of today.

"God is not afraid of new things! That's why continually surprises us, showing and taking us through unimagined ways," the pope said in his homily.

Indeed, quoted textually the words that Paul VI established the Synod of Bishops, 49 years ago: "After carefully survey the signs of the times, we strive to adapt the methods of apostolate to the multiple needs of our time and new conditions of society. "(La Nación, Lunes 20 de octubre de 2014)

Churches have been particularly adept at thwarting the curiosity of their members, keeping them uninformed or misinformed about the rest of the world while maintaining a fog of mystery around their internal operations, histories, finances and goals.

(Daniel C. Dennett2 and Deb Roy3, How Digital Transparency Became a Force of Nature, March 2015, Scientific American)

I.5. Tax MoraleCitizens’ attitude toward paying taxes or the intrinsic motivation to pay taxesSchneider’s findings in this area (citizens’ attitude toward paying taxes or the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes) may be a key determinant to explain why people are honest4. Societal variables such as trust or pride that have also been identified as key determinants that shape tax morale in Austria show that there is stronger compliance of religious people with taxes, (therefore plausible they should more strongly compliant also with regulations and respect to the state) than in less or non-religious people.

Religiosity (church attendance) “is a proxy for religiosity. The church as an institution induces behavioral norms and moral constraints among their community. Some papers in the criminology literature found a negative correlation between religious membership and crime5 (see, e.g., Hull, 2000; Hull and Bold, 1989; Lipford, McCormick and Tollison, 1993). Religiosity seems to affect the degree of rule breaking. Religiosity can thus be a restriction on engaging in tax evasion.”6

I.6. Most people believe that religion is good for society - Sergio Rubin

A survey conducted last year in 65 countries including Argentina-which covered 66,806 people and this weekend was known, coinciding with Easter, reveals that religion remains for most of the people in almost all world important and positive for society.

Worldwide’s answers of the work of WIN International show that for 59% of respondents religion is positive, while 22% consider it negative and 14% estimated that plays no role.

I.6.1. Spirituality is still valid

Marita Carballo (WIN)

2 Is University Professor and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. His most recent books are “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking” and (with Linda LaScola) Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind.3 Is an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, director of the Laboratory for Social Machines, based at the MIT Media Lab, and chief media scientist at Twitter. He also serves on the World's Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Social Media.4 In Schneider´s terminology, the term “honest” is used instead of “compliant” or submissive.5 Again, tax evasión seen as a crime, victimless or not, not as people accumulating capital, creating Jobs, protecting their property from political kleptocratic predators6 The China example of religious growth is very clear and, if what this reasoning suggests is correct, we may yet have dictatorships and kleptocrats for quite long.



The international study of WIN and Voices in Argentina reaffirms that religion does not lose validity globally, but instead plays an important and positive role in most societies. So point 6 of 10 respondents worldwide marking a change from the vision of thinkers like Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber, as well as much of contemporary intellectuals, who argued that the higher social progress would be less the influence of religion.

(Clarin.com - 19/04/14)

I.7. The neuroscience of faith for answersNora Bär,

Questions: According to anthropologists, Neanderthals7 had what can be considered a mystical feeling. Since then, myth and religion are found in all cultures.

The foundational questions of metaphysics expresses an existential anguish that precedes civilization and germ myths and religions since the dawn of humanity.

From then until now, myth and religion are found in all cultures.

There are about 10,000 different religions, each of which is convinced that theirs is the only Truth and that they, alone, possess it. [.] About 64% of the world population belongs to Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam or Hinduism. For many years, communism was the only belief allowed in China [.]. But in 2007, one third of Chinese over 16 years said they were religious. Since that figure comes from a state-controlled newspaper, China Daily, the real number of believers is probably higher. About 95% of Americans believe in God, 90% pray, 82% believe in miracles, more than 70%, in life after death.

Carballo’s study suggests that, on the contrary, it would increase: in 1984 62% of Argentines were considered religious people; in 1991, 70%; six years later, 79% and, in 1999, 81%. The same trend showed those who felt that religion was very important in their lives: they went from 40 to 55% between 1991 and 1999.

Religion may also be generated from social and moral needs, because of promoting cohesion, would have given human group evolutionary advantages.

Although no one has evidence about the stories that support their respective religions, about 85% of humans are described themselves as religious. In The Believing Brain, Shermer is even more categorical. He argues that "the brain is a machine to believe." And not only in the existence of God but also in aliens, conspiracies, in politics, in life after death, in visions. Shermer cites a 2009 US survey according to which 60% believe in demons, 42% in ghosts, UFOs 32%, 26% in astrology, 23% in witches and 20% in reincarnation. In another 2006, conducted by the Reader's Digest, 43% of respondents said that they could read the thoughts of others, more than half said they had a premonition of something that occurred after, more than two thirds said they could "feel "when someone was watching them and 62%, which could know who was calling before answering the phone.

(La Nación, 21 de noviembre de 2014)

I.8. The rapid spread of Christianity is forcing an official rethink on religion in China

Since the death of Mao in 1976, the party has slowly allowed more religious freedom8.

7 Hamer, ex former director of the Unit of Genetic Structure and Regulation of the Cancer Institute of US, thought he had identified one of those genes that predispose us to certain level of spirituality. In his book The God Gene (La Esfera de los Libros, 2006), says that it codes for a protein, VMAT2 (vesicular monoamine transporter 2), crucial for many brain functions.º8 Again a clever gatopardic flexibilization to stay in power. The informal guerrillas are in a difficult battle, but they continue growing and are holding the high ground.



Any shift in official thinking on religion could have big ramifications for the way China handles a host of domestic challenges, from separatist unrest among Tibetan Buddhists and Muslim Uighurs in the country’s west to the growth of NGOs and “civil society”—grassroots organisations, often with a religious colouring that are spreading fast.

Safety in numbers

The upsurge in religion in China, especially among the ethnic Han who make up more than 90% of the population, is a general one.

It is hard even to guess at the number of Christians in China. Official surveys seek to play down the figures, ignoring the large number who worship in house churches. By contrast, overseas Christian groups often inflate them. There were perhaps 3m Catholics and 1m Protestants when the party came to power in 1949. Officials now say there are between 23m and 40m, all told. In 2010 the Pew Research Centre, an American polling organisation, estimated there were 58m Protestants and 9m Catholics. Many experts, foreign and Chinese, now accept that there are probably more Christians than there are members of the 87m-strong Communist Party. Most are evangelical Protestants.

Predicting Christianity’s growth is even harder. Yang Fenggang of Purdue University, in Indiana, says the Christian church in China has grown by an average of 10% a year since 1980. He reckons that on current trends there will be 250m Christians by around 2030, making China’s Christian population the largest in the world. Mr Yang says this speed of growth is similar to that seen in fourth-century Rome just before the conversion of Constantine, which paved the way for Christianity to become the religion of his empire.

More than 2,000 Christian schools are also dotted around China, many of them small and all, as yet, illegal.

Pan Yue, a reformist official, wrote a newspaper article to that effect entitled, “The religious views of the

Communist Party must keep up with the times”.

One Chinese article in 2004 claimed that 3m-4m party members had become Christians. Despite that, the party still has doubts about officially admitting them. Recent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong are likely to reinforce those fears: some of the organizers were Christians.

(The Economist, Nov 1st 2014)

I.9. Harari

Humans have a marvellous capacity to believe in contradictions. Millions of Christians, Muslims and Jews can believe at the same time in an omnipotent God and an independent devil (Harari, 2014)

P. 196: Three centuries before the conquest of Mexico, the ancestors of Cortes and his army fought a bloody religious war against the Muslim kingdoms in Iberia and North Africa. The followers of Christ and the followers of Allah killed each other by the thousands, devastated fields and orchards, and transformed prosperous cities in smoldering ruins ... all for the greater glory of Christ or Allah.

P. 234: Today it is generally considered that religion is a source of discrimination, disagreement and disunity. But in reality, religion was the third great unifying humanity, along with money and empires. Since all orders and social hierarchies are imagined, all are fragile, and the larger the company, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has been to confer superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures. Religions claim that our laws are not the result of human whim, but are sorted by absolute and supreme authority. This helps to place at least some fundamental laws beyond response, thus ensuring social stability. Thus religion can be defined as a system of norms and human values based on belief in a superhuman order. This involves two different criteria:

The religions argue that there is a superhuman order, which is not the result of whim or human conventions. Professional football is not a religion, because despite its many laws, rites and often bizarre



rituals, everyone knows that they were human beings who invented football and FIFA can increase at any time the size of the goal or cancel the offside rule.

On the basis of this superhuman order, religion establishes norms and values that are considered mandatory. At present there are many Westerners who believe in spirits, fairies and reincarnation, but these beliefs are not a source of moral norms and behaviour, and as such, not a religion.

Despite its ability to legitimize social and political orders extended, not all religions have stimulated this potential. In order to unite under his wing a large expanse of territory inhabited by disparate groups of humans, a religion must possess two qualities: 1) It must adopt a universal superhuman order to be valid always and everywhere; 2) It must insist on extending this belief at all. In other words, it must be universal and missionary.

Religions better known in history, such as Islam and Buddhism, are universal and missionary. Consequently, people tend to believe that all religions are equal. In fact, most ancient religions were local and unique. Its followers believed in local deities and spirits, and they had no interest in converting the entire human race. To our knowledge, universal and missionary religions only began to appear in the first millennium B.C. Their appearance was one of the most important revolutions in history, and made a vital contribution to the unification of mankind, similar to the appearance of universal empires and money.

P. 240: The only god that the Romans refused to tolerate for a long time was the monotheistic God and evangelical Christians. The Roman Empire did not require Christians to renounce their beliefs and rituals, but expected them to respect the protective gods of the empire and the divinity of the emperor. This was considered a declaration of political loyalty. When Christians vehemently refused to do it and continued to reject all attempts to reach a compromise, the Romans reacted persecuting those who were considered a politically subversive faction. In the 300 years between the crucifixion of Christ and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, the polytheist Roman emperors began four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited anti-Christian violence on their own. Still, if we add all the victims of these persecutions, it appears that in those three centuries the Roman polytheists killed only a few thousand Christians. By contrast, over the next 1,500 years, Christians murdered millions of fellow to defend slightly different versions from their religion of love and compassion.

P. 241: This theological dispute became so violent that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants killed each other by hundreds of thousands. On August 23, 1572, French Catholics, who emphasized God's love for humanity, highlighting the importance of good works, attacked communities of French Protestants. In this attack, The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were murdered in less than twenty-four hours. When the news from France reached the Pope of Rome, he was so overcome with joy that organized festivities to celebrate the occasion, prayers, and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the rooms of the Vatican with a cool killing (currently access to the room is closed to visitors). During those twenty-four hours more Christians were killed by other Christians than those who died at the hands of the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its existence.

I.10. Hypatia

I.10.1. La terrible muerte de Hipatia de Alejandría

En 415, hace exactamente 1600 años, una turba desenfrenada de fanáticos atacó, vejó y desolló viva a Hipatia, célebre matemática, astrónoma y filósofa griega de la tardía Antigüedad; llevó luego sus despojos hasta el barrio del cementerio y allí los incineró. Hija y discípula de Teón de Alejandría, matemático y astrónomo no menos ilustre, esta científica y pensadora neoplatónica es autora de obras que no han llegado hasta nosotros, pero cuyos títulos al menos conocemos. Se le atribuye también la invención de aparatos vinculados con la mecánica pero, fundamentalmente, se la recuerda como expositora de ideas platónicas y aristotélicas. Descolló en el momento de la decadencia del paganismo y de la lucha de éste contra el cristianismo, que se esforzaba por abrirse camino. Para el imaginario de la época resultaba transgresora pues rompía con los cánones de una sociedad vertebrada en torno de la figura masculina, por



lo que molestaba, especialmente a los cristianos que, extendiéndose por Alejandría, pretendían su independencia política respecto del poder imperial.

Su martirio ocurrió en su patria, la esplendorosa ciudad fundada por Alejandro, famosa por su palacio –en él César conoció a Cleopatra–, su museo y su ya mítica biblioteca. Esta ciudad fue también célebre porque en ella setenta y dos sabios enviados por el sumo sacerdote de Jerusalén tradujeron al griego textos sagrados de los judíos –versión conocida como Septuaginta–, y hoy lo es también por ser cuna y sepulcro de uno de los más grandes poetas: Constantino Kavafis.

En tiempos de Hipatia, Alejandría, capital de la rica provincia romana de Egipto, se hallaba a las órdenes del prefecto Orestes, legado del emperador Teodosio I “el Grande” quien, al imponer el cristianismo como religión de Estado, ordenó cerrar templos paganos, prohibir sus ritos, incluso la celebración de los juegos olímpicos, e incinerar los famosos Libros Sibilinos. El clímax de ese vejamen fue la destrucción del Serapeo y el saqueo de su biblioteca, lo que generó hostilidad contra el nuevo credo por parte de los paganos. La Iglesia cristiana –con Teófilo al frente de la diócesis romana de Egipto– pretendía sentar basas en Alejandría, lo que dio origen a graves desavenencias político-religiosas materializadas en disturbios cotidianos y luchas callejeras. A su muerte, en 412, lo sucedió en el cargo su sobrino Cirilo, fanático como su tío a juzgar por sus hechos y en opinión de los historiadores. Con él se agravaron esas desavenencias, a tal punto que su vida llegó a correr peligro. Alejandría estaba convulsionada. Y fue bajo su patriarcado cuando ocurrió la flagelación de Hipatia, a quien culparon de la tensión entre el poder civil, encabezado por Orestes, y el religioso, por Cirilo. Una horda de salvajes, enajenada también por los ayunos de la Cuaresma, arrebató a Hipatia de su carruaje y la ultrajó hasta matarla. Tal salvajada nos recuerda los vejámenes a los que, en una Cuaresma porteña, una turba ávida de sangre sometió a un unitario hasta que “reventó de rabia”, según narra Echeverría en un magnífico relato alucinatorio: El matadero. Cuando ocurrió la mutilación de Hipatia, el prefecto Orestes, amigo y discípulo de la filósofa, la comunicó a Flavio Honorio, entonces emperador, pero la causa no prosperó por falta de testigos.

Si bien no hay pruebas concretas que culpen a Cirilo por ese crimen, los indicios y comentarios lo señalan como el instigador. Así, por ejemplo, lo afirma Sócrates Escolástico, el historiador cronológicamente más cercano a esos acontecimientos, quien recuerda a Hipatia como “modelo de virtud”. También la Suda, una enciclopedia bizantina del siglo XI, atribuyó a ese patriarca la responsabilidad de la muerte de Hipatia. Al margen de lo político, existen razones subjetivas que llevarían a incriminar a Cirilo. Los historiadores Blázquez y Sanz Serrano, por ejemplo, recuerdan que, desde muy joven, Cirilo vivió la vida monástica para la cual en esa época, falazmente, la mujer era vista como la encarnación del pecado, más aún Hipatia que, como científica y librepensadora, al no avenirse a credo religioso alguno, rehusó convertirse. Su proceder no condecía con lo que entonces se esperaba de una mujer, por lo que la habrían juzgado bruja, hechicera, ser abominable vinculado a fuerzas demoníacas. Su muerte, preludio de posteriores cazas de brujas, podría así ser explicada desde esa mirada tan engañosa como bárbara.

La opinión mayoritaria valora en Hipatia su vocación por el saber, su entrega a la ciencia, su inteligencia y es precisamente esto último lo que parece haber suscitado celos y envidia.

Su atroz mutilación debilitó el desarrollo del pensamiento científico a la par que, en Alejandría, trajo aparejado el abandono de los estudios griegos, los que sobrevivieron en Bizancio, la ciudad rival. En Bizancio, hoy Estambul, perduró el estudio de la lengua y la cultura griegas, de cara a la Europa occidental en que, durante el Medioevo, se ignoró el griego clásico; Dante y Petrarca, por ejemplo, no conocían esa lengua.

Hipatia, a lo largo de los siglos, viene transitando de la historia al mito para convertirse en símbolo con el que aludir a una mujer sabia, progresista, auténtica. En esa línea cuando Rafael pintó La Escuela de Atenas, la homenajeó retratándola junto al filósofo Zenón de Elea. Hoy, en su honor, un asteroide ha sido bautizado Hipatia; y también uno de los cráteres lunares; de igual modo un grupo de feministas la valoran al editar dos revistas con su nombre.



Esta mujer singular ha sido estudiada, biografiada y novelada por numerosos escritores y, en 2009, el director cinematográfico Alejandro Amenábar robusteció la leyenda en torno de su figura al dedicarle el film Ágora donde entremezcla realidad con fantasía.

De los tantos juicios vertidos sobre ella, aludo al del irlandés John Toland, que contribuyó a conformar el mito de Hipatia. Este filósofo, autor del célebre Cristianismo sin misterio, en un panfleto anticatólico sostiene que fue “despedazada por el clero alejandrino” cargando a Cirilo con la culpa.

También Voltaire, defensor a ultranza de la tolerancia, al exaltar la memoria de quienes propiciaron el progreso de la civilización, recuerda a Hipatia. Considera su muerte “un asesinato brutal perpetrado por los fanáticos tonsurados de Cirilo”. Para este pensador, Hipatia se presentaba como ícono de un pensamiento abierto y plural, opacado por el avance de una religión que, a sus ojos, esclavizaba la razón. Frente al fanatismo, a la demencia, a la desmesura, a lo que los griegos expresaron en la voz hýbris, flagelo ominoso que se ha dado en todos los tiempos y que es forzoso evitar, la figura de Hipatia crece día a día como símbolo de racionalidad, de búsqueda del saber y de inclaudicable amor por la ciencia.

(Hugo Bauzá, La Nación, Viernes 19 de junio 2015)

I.11. The Murder of Pythagoras

There had already been growing resentment among the masses because the secretive Brotherhood continued to withhold their discoveries, but nothing came of it until Cylon emerged as the voice of the people. Cylon preyed on the fear, paranoia and envy of the mob and led them on a mission to destroy the most brilliant school of mathematics the world had ever seen. Milo’s house and the adjoining school were surrounded, all the doors were locked and barred to prevent escape and then the burning began. Milo fought his way out of the inferno and fled, but Pythagoras, along with many of his disciples, was killed.

For the next four centuries the Library continued to accumulate books until in AD 389 it received the first of two fatal blows, both the result of religious bigotry. The Christian Emperor Theodosius ordered Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, to destroy all pagan monuments. Unfortunately when Cleopatra rebuilt and restocked the Library, she decided to house it in the Temple of Serapis, and so the Library became caught up in the destruction of icons and altars. The ‘pagan’ scholars attempted to save six centuries-worth of knowledge, but before they could do anything they were butchered by the Christian mob. The descent into the Dark Ages had begun.

A few precious copies of the most vital books survived the Christian onslaught and scholars continued to visit Alexandria in search of knowledge. Then in 642 a Moslem attack succeeded where the Christians had failed. When asked what should be done with the Library, the victorious Caliph Omar commanded that those books that were contrary to the Koran should be destroyed, and furthermore those books that conformed to the Koran were superfluous and they too must be destroyed. The manuscripts were used to stoke the furnaces which heated the public baths and Greek mathematics went up in smoke. It is not surprising that most of Diophantus’ work was destroyed; in fact, it is a miracle that six volumes of the Arithmetica managed to survive the tragedy of Alexandria.

(…) when Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria, began to oppress philosophers, scientists and mathematicians, whom he called heretics. The historian Edward Gibbon provided a vivid account of what happened after Cyril had plotted against Hypatia and turned the masses against her:

On a fatal day, in the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanely butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics; her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells, and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames... (Simon Singh, Fermat´s Last Theorem, HarperCollins Publishers)



I.11.1. The Death of Pythagoras

Bruce Pennington9 tells us how Pythagoras became a has-bean, while another Bruce Pennington drew the portraits…

Shamanistic shyster or intellectual innovator, creative charlatan or exalted pioneer of philosophy – however one views him, Pythagoras remains the most famous name at the starting gate of Western philosophy. For half a millennium he was a superstar. He is professed to be the founding father of mathematics, music, astronomy and philosophy; he is even alleged to have coined the words ‘mathematics’ and ‘philosophy’.

The depiction of his death is no exception to the fantasising. In fact, there are as many as ten versions in the ancient literature relating how, when, and where Pythagoras died. For what it’s worth, the story that follows is based on the historical fragments. The pieces, though, are arranged by me to explore new possibilities. This is my story of the death of Pythagoras.

Pythagoras’ father was Mnesarchus, a Tyrrhen who earned his living as a merchant and shipowner. His livelihood took him throughout the islands of the Mediterranean, often with young Pythagoras aboard. Originally, Pythagoras’ mother was called Parthenis, the Virgin. Reminiscent of another story, the Delphic oracle informed Mnesarchus that his wife was about to give birth to a wonderful and important child. As it turns out, while Mnesarchus was off on one of his long voyages, Parthenis was secretly seduced by Apollo. Afterwards she was renamed Pythais, in honor of Apollo, who had destroyed the python guarding the oracle at Delphi, making the place his own.

Pythagoras the vegetarian did not only abstain from meat, he didn’t eat beans either. This was because he believed that humans and beans were spawned from the same source, and he conducted a scientific experiment to prove it. He buried a quantity of beans in mud, let them remain there for a few weeks, and then retrieved them. He noted their resemblance to human fetuses, thus convincing himself of the intimate relationship between beans and humans. To eat a bean would therefore be akin to eating human flesh. Equally, to crush, smash, or dirty a bean would be to harm a human. Thus the very strict rule to abstain from beans.

Genetics - Breaking the code

In the late 19th century a monk, Gregor Mendel, established, through experiments on pea plants, the basic rules of inherited traits. A Danish biologist, Wilhelm Johannsen, coined the term “gene” in 1909 to describe whatever it was that Mendel had found. (The Economist, Aug 8th 2015 )

It took a while for Pythagoras’ career to take hold, and he only found true success when he brought his ideas and his ardent followers to the east coast of Italy, taking residence in the welcoming Greek colony of Croton. There the Pythagorean Brotherhood was able to obtain a strong footing, and its influence soon became widespread. Before long, Pythagoras’ name became known throughout Greece and beyond.

Kylon was the son of a wealthy Crotonate nobleman. Born into nobility, he was used to getting anything he desired. When denied, he could become violent, tyrannical and demanding. Although Kylon had access to all levels of schooling, he proved to be something of a dullard. Nevertheless there came a time when he desired to become a part of the Brotherhood. Because he was a young man of privilege, he believed that he should be allowed to bypass the years of training, silence and deep contemplation which preceded entrance to the inner sanctum of the Brotherhood. Pythagoras bluntly turned him down: and not only was Kylon sent away, but Pythagoras refused a conference with him. Like Hera, Kylon grew angry and vengeful. He was soon giving mock discourses on Pythagorean ideas and beliefs – discourses that characterized the people of Croton as cattle being manipulated and controlled by the Pythagorean leaders. Kylon himself manipulated the emotions of his friends and townspeople, until, as a mob, they descended upon the cluster of houses in which the Brotherhood lived, studied and slept. The angry mob torched the buildings, forcing members of the Brotherhood to flee the terrifying flames. As the members exited the conflagration, many were stabbed to death. Those who escaped both fire and knife fled to the surrounding countryside. 9 Bruce Pennington, the author of this article, is a math teacher living in upstate New York..



Pythagoras was one of the lucky ones: his followers formed a human bridge to help him to clamber out of one of the blazing buildings. But his escape did not go undetected. Soon several of Kylon’s angry friends were in pursuit, yet as he had a significant lead, it looked as if the aging Pythagoras would make it to safety.

Suddenly Pythagoras came to a stop. A vast bean field stretched before him. He stood frozen, uncertain what to do. His eyes focused on a single bean dangling inches from his papyrus- covered feet. So true was he to his ideals that, even at the risk of losing his own life, he was unwilling to trample upon even a single bean. Staring down upon that vibrant bean, the sun low in the sky, he imagined it to be blossoming into a divine ripeness before him. And as he stood there, hesitating, contemplating his next move, his pursuers caught up with him. They lifted their weapons, and bringing the knifes down hard, spilled Pythagoras’ blood on the plants – ending his life for the sake of a bean, and for the deep wisdom immersed in that diminutive cosmic object.

(Philosophy Now, Aug/Sep 2015)

I.12. Huss, John

(born c. 1370, Husinec, Bohemia [now in Czech Republic]—died July 6, 1415, Konstanz [Germany]), the most important 15th-century Czech religious Reformer.

The clerical estate owned about one-half of all the land in Bohemia, and the great wealth and simoniacal practices of the higher clergy aroused jealousy and resentment among the poor priests. The Bohemian peasantry, too, resented the church as one of the heaviest land taxers.

In 1412 the case of Huss’s heresy, which had been tacitly dropped, was revived because of a new dispute over the sale of indulgences that had been issued by Alexander’s successor, the antipope John XXIII, to finance his campaign against Gregory XII. Their sale in Bohemia aroused general indignation but had been approved by King Wenceslas, who, as usual, shared in the proceeds.

The council urged Huss to recant in order to save his life, but to the majority of its members he was a dangerous heretic fit only for death. When he refused to recant, he was solemnly sentenced on July 6, 1415, and burned at the stake. (Encyclopædia Britannica)

I.13. Russian Orthodox Church

Meanwhile, the Russian Orthodox church has resumed its promotion of Caesaropapism (‘render unto Caesar not only what are Caesar’s but also God’s’). This deviant Christian doctrine had prompted Vladimir, the ruler of the Kievian state (the precursor of the Russian empire) to choose the Greek over the Latin Church. This doctrine has underwritten the autocratic Russian state ever since. Not only did the Moscow Patriarch urge his flock to vote for Putin, calling his rule a ‘miracle of God’, but he was caught in a photo-shopping scandal when he tried to doctor a published photograph showing him wearing a $30,000 Breuget watch, purportedly a gift from Putin.

(Deepak Lal, Regional MPS meeting Lima, Peru, 23 March, 2015)

I.14. Bible and Sword

“No other problem of our time is rooted so deeply in the past.” (Report of the Royal Palestine commission of Inquiry, 1937)

If it were not for the conventions of chronology this book would have been told backwards, like a detective story which starts with the denouement and traces clues back to the original motive.

Although these Old English versions must have acquainted the people of Saxon England, so far as they could be reached from the pulpit, with the Hebrew origins of Christianity and made a living drama of the history of ancient Palestine, yet the future English Bible owed nothing to these earlier fragments. For one



thing, the language in which they were written would have been quite unintelligible in Wyclif´s time, not to mention Tyndale’s. For another, the Conquest made a break with the past, the culture that preceded the conquerors was ignored and soon largely forgotten. The lack of Latin and the bare literacy that had so distressed King Alfred and Aelfric had been responsible for the early translations, which were simply designed to teach—to acquaint the people with their religious heritage, just as simplified Bible stories are today read to children. But post-Conquest England, with greater Latin and dominated by the dialectics and text-slinging of the Scholastics, was held in strict subservience to the Latin Bible and to the Fathers, at least until the age of Wyclif. Such free paraphrasing as Aelfric’s Maccabees or his epitome of the Old Testament, with all the difficult passages and Levitical laws left out, would have been as good as heresy, even supposing its language could have been understood.

The next attempt, by the Lollards, to make the Bible comprehensible to the people, was made, not by the authority of Crown and Church as in Saxon times, but against it, although Wyclif was himself a priest.

Fiercely suppressed through the fifteenth century, this attempt at last burst the dykes with the advent of the Reformation, and it changed the history of Europe. Tyndale’s proud boast to the “learned man" who upheld papal authority over that of the Bible, “I wyl cause a boye that dryveth ye plough shall know more of scripture than thou docst,” contains the essence of the change.

When Tyndale began his work in the 1520’s unauthorized translation of the Bible was still a punishable act, for Henry VIII had not yet broken with Rome. It was, then, in exile that the true begetter of the English Bible went to work in a little garret room in Cologne, with Hebrew and Greek grammars open on the candle-lit table. The Wyclifites, working from the Latin Vulgate, had produced a translation of a translation; but Tyndale, who knew Greek and some Hebrew, worked from the original languages.

(Tuchman, Barbara W. Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour. Random House Publishing Group, 2011)

I.15. Stirner

Before the sacred, people lose all sense of power and all confidence; they occupy a powerless and humble attitude toward it. And yet nothing is sacred of itself, but by my declaring it sacred, by my declaration, my judgment, my bending the knee; in short, by my - conscience.

For little children, just as for animals, nothing sacred exists, because, in order to make room for this conception, one must already have progressed so far in understanding that he can make distinctions like " good and bad," " warranted and unwarranted," etc.; only at such a level of reflection or intelligence " the proper standpoint of religion " can unnatural (i. e. brought into existence by thinking) reverence, " sacred dread," step into the place of natural fear. To this sacred dread belongs holding something outside oneself for mightier, greater, better warranted, better, etc. ; i. e. the attitude in which one acknowledges the might of something alien " not merely feels it, then, but expressly acknowledges it, i. e" admits it, yields, surrenders, lets himself be tied (devotion, humility, servility, submission, etc.) Here walks the whole ghostly troop of the " Christian virtues."

Max Stirmer explained in 1813 what later was taken as one of the pillars of statism: the aura of sanctity of the official rulers. That is what Schneider (2014) found of the greater tax-compliance (as he calls submissiveness) of the more religious sectors of the body social. (See section…p…)

(Stirner, Max. The Ego and His Own. Libertarian Book Club. New York. 1963)

I.16. Render unto Caesar (Jesus Christ)Party leaders persecute churches even as they try to co-opt them

The issue of religious freedom is complicated by the fact that Islam and Buddhism are closely linked to two ethnic minorities, the Uighurs and the Tibetans, with restive tendencies and resentment over Han rule.

The party’s problem is that it increasingly needs people like the law-abiding Christians in its fight against corruption. It also needs them to play a greater part in the social work it cannot do itself. Most Christians



are apolitical. One Wenzhou pastor says when he tells his flock to be more politically engaged, he is met with blank stares. “They don’t want to know,” he says.

Strangely, the assault on officially sanctioned churches comes as attitudes to house churches appear to be softening. On his first visit to China last month, Britain’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was surprised when Yu Zhengsheng, one of Mr Xi’s six comrades in the standing committee of the Politburo, the party’s highest body, admitted there were as many house-church Protestants as the 38m worshippers in official state Protestant churches. (China might have as many as 100m Christians in total.) To date many officials, not to mention Politburo members, have pretended that house churches do not exist. Senior house-church Christians in Beijing say that the authorities have recently approached them about the possibility of dialogue. They speak of renewed hope that their congregations could be formally recognised by the party.

(The Economist, July 25th 2015)

I.17. Explaining moral religions

Nicolas Baumard10 and Pascal Boyer11

Moralizing religions, unlike religions with morally indifferent gods or spirits, appeared only recently in some (but not all) large-scale human societies. A crucial feature of these new religions is their emphasis on proportionality (between deeds and supernatural rewards, between sins and penance, and in the formulation of the Golden Rule, according to which one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself). Cognitive science models that account for many properties of religion can be extended to these religions. Recent models of evolved dispositions for fairness in cooperation suggest that proportionality-based morality is highly intuitive to human beings. The cultural success of moralizing movements, secular or religious, could be explained based on proportionality.

Golden Rule

All moralizing religions defend some version of the rule that one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself [18]. In many traditions, this principle is regarded as the core of the doctrine. Table 1 provides illustrations.

Table 1. The ubiquity of reciprocation as an imperative in moralizing traditions

Buddhism'Just as I am so are they, just as they are so am I', Sutta Nipata 705

'Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful', Udanavarga 5:18

Confucianism 'Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself. Analects XV:24

'One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one's own self.Hinduism This, in brief, is the rule of dharma' Brihaspati, Mahabharata (Anusasana Parva, Section

CXIII, Verse 8)

Taoism'Regard your neighbor's gain as your own gain, and your neighbor's loss as your own loss',Tai Shang Ying Pian, Chapter 4

JudaismThat which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest isthe explanation', Talmud, m. Shabbat 31a

Jainism'Just as sorrow or pain is not desirable to you, so it is to all which breathe, exist, live orhave any essence of life', Jain sutra 155-156

Christianity

Therefore all things whatsoever would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them',Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31

10 Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, Oxford and University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA11 Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA



'As you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you,don't do to them',

Islam Kitab al-Kafi, Vol. 2, p. 146'None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself',An-Nawawi's Forty Hadith 13

Cooperation, distribution, and fairness

For a long time, the canonical situation envisaged in modeling cooperation was that of a prisoner’s dilemma, in which one cannot choose one’s partner and must select strategies that minimize the likelihood of defection [24]. However, this canonical model ignores a crucial factor in cooperation among early foragers, the fact that one 1) can choose among potential partners, 2)shun defectors, and 3)favor reciprocators

[25,26]. Therefore, a more appropriate model is that of a biological market [27J in which agents use signaling and reputation to convey that they are valuable cooperators [28].

Biological market models explain not just the emergence of cooperation but also the ways in which agents distribute the benefits of cooperation, a point that is crucial to human interaction but that is not explained by the classical models. Formal models show that when agents can select partners, evolutionary dynamics converge towards mutually advantageous distributions (Box 1) [29,30].

In line with this partner-choice approach, empirical evidence suggests that proportionality governs many moral intuitions.

Box 1. The evolution of Fairness by partner

Cooperative interactions create conflicts of interest, because each partner would be better off taking a larger share of the benefit and paying a lesser cost. How can this conflict be solved? In standard reciprocity models, in which individuals cannot choose their partners, any kind of strategic advantage leads to very asymmetric offers (Figure IA). The stronger partner indeed has a strategic advantage: the partner is forced to either accept his or her offer, or else refuse to cooperate, thereby losing all benefits.

However, human cooperative interactions occur in fluid groups (25,47) so that individuals can to some extent change partners. Those who are treated unfairly can abandon the interaction and seek a more generous partner. This creates a biological market (79) in which individuals compete to attract the best partners to be recruited in the best interactions. Agents must avoid the symmetrical pitfalls of excessive

selfishness (leading partners to abandon them) and excessive generosity (allowing partners to exploit them). Simulations and analytical results demonstrate that the best evolutionarily stable strategy is to share equally the costs and benefits of the interaction (Figure IB) (29,30). In such models the distribution of benefits in each interaction is constrained by the whole range of outside opportunities, determined by the market of potential partners. Even in interactions in which dominant players apparently could get a larger share of the benefits, symmetric bargaining involving each partner's outside opportunities occurs at a larger scale.

Proportionality is in most cases the best way to provide an equal share of the benefit for each cooperative partner. If, for instance, partner A has invested more than partner B, she should get a share of the benefits proportional to her investment. Otherwise partner B's rate of return would be higher than A's, and A would have been better off interacting with someone else. Partner choice thus explains why human interactions take on the specific form of proportionality (80).



Figure I. (A) Evolution of the average offer by the dominant partner when individuals cannot choose their partners. (B) Evolution of the average offer by the dominant partner when individuals can choose their partners. Adapted from [30].

How is religious morality connected to human evolution?

A cognitive description of religious morality suggests a scenario that is congruent with the experimental evidence and the historical record. In terms of cognitive processes, note that morality Is not just a matter of doctrines, but of intuitions and motivations that escape conscious access. These automatic intuitions precede conscious moral reasoning, as well as the explicit justification of moral choices, which often reduces to a posteriori rationalization [63]. That Is why moral intuitions are the same in religious and nonreligious people [62], and adherence to particular beliefs only marginally affects prosocial behaviors (64,65). These evolved moral intuitions, motivating individuals towards fair allocations, have supported extensive human cooperation without the need for an explanatory doctrine, religious or otherwise, in most human societies throughout evolutionary times and into the present (Box 2).

Box2.Did moral religions bolster large-scale societies?

Did moral religions support the transition from small-scale, kin-based groups to large-scale state societies? Ara Norenzayan and colleagues have put forward this hypothesis and investigated its empirical basis 181,821. The postulated development runs as follows, (i) In some groups, people imagined high gods, powerful agents that monitored people's behavior and punished those who did not obey their rules, (ii) These high gods prescribed prosocial behaviors towards ingroups and proscribed cheating, (iii) In general, people who think they are being monitored refrain from cheating or selfish behaviors, (iv) Therefore, members of groups that had beliefs in moral gods watching them would have engaged in more prosocial behaviors, which (v) allowed these particular groups to become larger because they could avoid the problem of widespread free-riding.



Box 3. Why did moral religions emerge at the same time?

Moralizing movements and religions appeared at roughly the same time (second half of the first millennium BCE) in a few places (84,851. Why there and then? Traditional explanations in terms of demographic change, polity size, or diffusion of agriculture are insufficient, because many large-scale societies (Egypt for instance) combined all these factors but did not give rise to moral religions.

Recent quantitative historical work may provide a better answer. Studies by Ian Morris and colleagues indicate a sharp increase in energy capture (how much energy people extract from the environment) that occurred at the same time in three distinct regions of Eurasia, the Yellow-Yangtze rivers, the Ganga valley, and the eastern part of the Mediterranean. At the end of the first millennium BCE these regions reached a production level (25 000 kcal per capita per day) that largely surpassed that of previous societies, which ranged from 4000 kcal for hunter-gatherer societies to 15 000 kcal for states such as Egypt and Uruk (Figure IA) (86,87).

These three regions are precisely the places where moral religions emerged: the Greek city states, the Gangetic Magadha and Kosala kingdoms, urban Jewish communities, and Chinese warring states (Figure IB). This suggests a tentative scenario in which the spread of moral religions followed a sharp increase in the standard of living in some Eurasian populations12.

What would be the connection between these two developments? Empirical studies on the impact of economic development on individual preferences, in a variety of different cultural contexts, suggest that material prosperity allows people to detach themselves from material needs (food, protection, affiliation) 188,891. Evolutionary reformulations of the pyramid of needs, combined with life-history theory, describe this process (90,91).

Despite their differences, religious and non-religious movements owe their cultural success to the fact that these explicit, coherent accounts of moral prescriptions are congruent with universal, and much older, evolved moral intuitions.

12 This theory is similar to my Wealthy Theory of Knowledge. (See point, section..) in which I notice the correlation between the growth of material prosperity and the advance of science and knowledge. I suspect some connection with causality and it seems to suggest that wealth and subsequent increase in the standard of living helps the appearance, growth and spread of mind and spirit (E.H.)



The Evolution, Evaluation and Reform of Social Morality: A Hayekean Analysis

Gerald Gaus

The fundamental philosophical question about the evolution of morality.

We have recently witnessed powerful analyses of the evolution of biological and psychological altruism, reciprocal cooperation, of our ability to follow rules and to socially enforce them, and of the development of conscience. Most, but not all, of this work has focused on biological evolution, employing both natural and social selection models, and increasingly employing some version of multi-level selection. This important work has made great progress in helping us understand the evolution of the building blocks of



cooperation and morality. And until we know how our basic moral sense could have evolved, the entire moral enterprise —and by extension, the nature of human social life—remains an evolutionary mystery.

The crux of such high dimensional landscapes is that the fitness (or, more generally, value) of any one rule is a function of all others, producing what Kaufmann called “a complexity catastrophe.”13

Correlation of the adaptive and evaluative landscapes thus requires social evolutionary and moral evaluative theories that possess multiple dimensions with a modest degree of interdependence.

I.18. Objects of his love

The theistic scenario seems to be that the supreme being, after an eternity of non-creation, decided suddenly to actualize a universe – a universe which, although designed for enormous expansion, was supposedly created merely for the sake of one tiny planet in a small solar system of a particular galaxy, as the specific habitation for a congenial Man Friday life form. It is the arrogantly anthropocentric belief shared by many millions of god-believers: that the whole complexity of the universe, of space and time, was specially devised by their god(s) with the sole motive of producing human beings on Earth as ‘objects of his love’. I relish Voltaire’s mockery of this idea, in which a house-fly, finding itself in the Palace of Versailles, looks around in amazement at the size and splendour of the structure and its decor, and thinks to itself: “Fancy, all this has been created just for me!”

Barbara Smoker 2014

Barbara Smoker, one of Britain’s best-known atheist authors and speakers, was President of the National Secular Society from 1970-95.

(Philosophy Now, May/June 2014)

I.19. Esoterismo: un fenómeno que permanece latente

"Che, ¿me tirás cartas?", pide Gimena a su amiga mientras están mateando junto a otras cinco chicas en su casa de verano en La Lucila del Mar.

Ana, la que sabe tirar cartas, trata de eludir del pedido porque estudió la lectura de Tarot hace poco tiempo como un hobby.

"Dale, que te sale muy bien", insisten las amigas, todas estudiantes o profesionales de veintipico de años. "Bueno, mezclate las cartas y elegí tres", así arranca el ritual sagrado, y las chicas se quedan silenciosas, intrigadas y ansiosas por lo que dirá el Tarot, las cartas místicas.

La lista de consultas se repite y se enfoca en la vida personal, profesional y en algunas cuestiones puntuales. "No adivino el futuro ni doy consejos", advierte Ana, y trata de limitar las sesiones, solicitadas por amigas todo el tiempo, porque la idea que tuvo cuando empezó a estudiar el Tarot fue "conocerse a sí misma" y entender diferentes aspectos de su vida.

En cambio, para Dalia F. Walker, el interés por el esoterismo se convirtió en el proyecto de su vida. Productora de cine en el pasado, hace tres años inició FE, que define como un "espacio con espíritu joven para acercase a las ciencias ocultas".

"Empecé a estudiar gemoterapia (el arte de curar a través de las propiedades que manifiestan cristales y gemas) con una profesora y después estudié Tarot", cuenta a LA NACIÓN en su despacho del Patio Liceo, en Recoleta. Pensado como un hobby en principio, FE creció en una red de personas que vienen a los talleres y a la tienda, piden la lectura del Tarot y comparten conocimientos de otras ciencias relacionadas.

De algo oculto y secreto, que pasaba de boca a boca durante varios siglos, hoy, el esoterismo vive una especie de renacimiento, sobre todo en las ciudades grandes. Nicolás Viotti, antropólogo y sociólogo de

13 I only hope not to fall into what Kaufmann called “a complexity catastrophe”.



Flacso e investigador del Conicet, vincula el fenómeno con "la gente interesada en una psicología silvestre" - manejo de emociones, pensamientos positivos y autoayuda - y encuentra sus raíces en la Argentina con la inmigración francesa y española en el siglo XIX, sobre todo el movimiento teosófico.

Hoy, el fenómeno -aunque sin estadísticas oficiales- está presente en todos lados y de muchas formas: los avisos en la vía pública y online (sólo Mercadolibre tiene más de cuatro mil); escuelas de astrología y Tarot, como la popular Casa 11; el servicio adicional en restaurantes porteños, como la lectura de la borra de café, de las manos, de las cartas. Las cuentas de Facebook y Twitter de la venezolana Mía Austral tienen decenas de miles de seguidores en los países anglo e hispanohablantes.

Para el psicólogo Miguel Espeche, el esoterismo "no es un tema menor", ya que "llaman la atención los resultados" de estas prácticas, sobre todo la astrología, que utilizan a veces algunos psicólogos.

Viotti dice que hay un boom por la psicología junguiana, que reconoce el Tarot como el reflejo de la experiencia interna de cada persona. "Además, es una cuestión generacional: los que tienen entre 20 y 40 años viven un cambio cultural y tienen otra relación con la religión -explica Viotti-: estas prácticas también son religiosas. Más flexibles, más íntimas, menos dogmáticas y una forma de gestionar certeza."

También Espeche vincula el esoterismo con el manejo de certezas: "Existe una necesidad de dominar el destino porque no se acepta la incertidumbre. Las prácticas esotéricas les generan alivio, como los padres durante la infancia que aseguraban que todo iba a estar bien", dice.

La gestión de la certeza y "la solución hecha a la carta", como la define Espeche, es uno de los costados criticables del esoterismo. Además, se vincula a las ciencias ocultas con la mentira y la manipulación con fines lucrativos. El año pasado, Brasil, el país con un 3% de la población declarada como seguidora del espiritismo en el último censo, vivió un escándalo. La prefectura de Río de Janeiro tenía contratada a la Fundación Cacique Cobra Coral para resolver la crisis hídrica con sus "poderes místicos".

Los antropólogos explican la imagen negativa con una marginalización y manifestación elocuente del esoterismo en la cultura popular, sobre todo en telenovelas y en los medios. Otros ven las raíces en las épocas medievales, cuando la Iglesia Católica combatía a las brujas y los heréticos.

"Todo el mundo espera encontrar a una bruja pelirroja con ojos verdes y se sorprende viendo lo contrario", dice Silvia Bang, terapeuta psicocorporal con numerosos títulos en psicología social y ciencias ocultas. Tras una larga trayectoria, que empezó en los años ochenta en la discoteca Blades, en Palermo, donde se formó la mayoría de su clientela, hoy Bang recibe a la gente en su departamento de Belgrano. Durante dos horas, realiza la lectura del Tarot y las técnicas de curación y manejo energético para cada persona.

Ante las dudas de encontrar una solución fácil, Bang asegura: "Mi trabajo es sacar de la crisis, el Tarot solo no lleva a ningún lado". Walker coincide con Bang: "Nuestro trabajo es escuchar y ayudar a una persona, no salvarla".

Viotti advierte: "Hay un corte de clase; la psicologización es más común para la clase media. En cambio, la relación que existe con un santo popular es más práctica: te resuelve las cosas".

La historia de la curandera Isolina, fallecida hace más de siete años, es un ejemplo clásico. Su casa, ubicada en Puente de la Noria, era tan conocida que existían micros enteros para trasladar a la gente hasta su puerta. "No creo en la magia, pero fui a verla porque estaba buscando trabajo y durante mucho tiempo no conseguía", contó un taxista a LA NACION hace unas semanas.

"Isolina me aseguró que iba a encontrarlo pronto? y en una semana me llamaron desde un lugar que se convirtió en mi empleo", agregó contento.

Los peregrinajes, oraciones y ofrendas a los santos populares como el Gauchito Gil, la Difunta Correa o San Cayetano son otros ejemplos clásicos que confirman su fuerte influencia en todo el país. "Pero hay que diferenciarlos de las prácticas en las ciudades grandes, donde el objetivo es una búsqueda personal y el manejo del yo", subraya Viotti.



(Aigull Safiullina, La Nación, Lunes 20 de Marzo de 2015)

I.20. Las creencias religiosas, también bajo la lupa científica

Sergio Rubín - Clarín – Opinión - 13/12/14

La divulgación popular de las neurociencias está de moda a través de algunos libros de reciente aparición. Y la creencia en Dios acaba de ser puesta bajo la lupa científica en “Las neuronas de Dios: una neurociencia de la religión, la espiritualidad y la luz al final del túnel” del biólogo e investigador del CONICET Diego Golombek. El autor afirma que “científicamente, se puede afirmar que la idea de Dios es un fenómeno cerebral, como todas las ideas”.

Porque, dice, “con el avance de la neurociencia y la genética, se está tratando de mirar la religión como un fenómeno natural”. Y cuestiona a los científicos creyentes: “Si se ponen a investigar, será imposible que no entren en conflicto. No digo que tengan que dedicarse a otra cosa, pero no hay reconciliación posible entre religión y ciencia”.

Precisamente en estos días Clarín publicó unas cartas de grandes personalidades recopiladas por un publicista inglés, entre las que se cuenta una de Albert Einstein a una niña que le escribió para preguntarle si los científicos rezan, que viene muy a colación.

En su respuesta, el notable físico le dice que “los científicos creen que todo cuanto sucede, incluidos los asuntos de los seres humanos, se debe a las leyes de la naturaleza. Por consiguiente -añade-, un científico no tenderá a creer que el curso de los acontecimientos pueda verse influido por la oración, es decir, por manifestación sobrenatural de un deseo. No obstante, hemos de admitir que nuestro conocimiento real de esas fuerzas es imperfecto, de manera que, al final, creer en la existencia de un espíritu último y definitivo depende de una especie de fe. Es todavía una creencia generalizada incluso ante los logros actuales de la ciencia. Al mismo tiempo, todo aquel que se dedica seriamente a la ciencia termina convencido de que algún espíritu se manifiesta en las leyes del universo, un espíritu muy superior al del hombre. Así la dedicación a la ciencia conduce a un sentimiento religioso un tanto especial, sin duda diferente de la religiosidad de alguien más cándido”, concluye. Acaso una buena síntesis se encuentra en el comienzo de la encíclica Fe y Razón, de Juan Pablo II: “La fe y la razón son las dos alas con las cuáles el espíritu humano se eleva hacia la contemplación de la verdad”.

I.21. La Fe en Argentina: los santos preferidos "dan" trabajo y justicia

“La fe no se negocia”, dice Raúl Ardoso, vestido de gaucho en Azcuénaga y Bartolomé Mitre para explicar la multitud que lo rodea. A unos metros, una mujer de pechera verde pide: “Dejen pasar, ahí viene”. Son ocho cuadras de fila con gente que espera hasta ocho horas para poder entrar a la iglesia y otros cientos que - entre puestitos de ventas de recuerdos- escuchan misa y levantan las manos con las llaves de las casas mezcladas con las tarjetas de puntos de supermercado, fotos familiares, billeteras, espigas, estampitas y velas para ser bendecidas. ¿Quién viene?, pregunta otra mujer. “El santo”, es la respuesta.

El santo es San Expedito. Avanza, como puede, con su uniforme de guerrero romano sostenido por varios hombres y sobre una alfombra de claveles rojos frescos. Señalado como la figura religiosa que marca este tiempo argentino, es desde 2004 -cuando lo “rescataron” de un depósito detrás del altar de la parroquia de Balvanera-, el santo que más ha crecido dentro de las preferencias. Todos los 19 por lo menos van hasta esta esquina 30.000 personas, según la catequesis que reparten los voluntarios, y el 19 de abril, cuando es su fiesta oficial según el santoral católico, como mínimo 150.000 personas llegan hasta el altar a pedir por causas justas y urgentes y también para agradecer.

En 2001, y después de las devociones a la Virgen, San Cayetano -el santo del trabajo-, Santa Rita -la de los imposibles- y San Antonio -al que hay que pedirle un novio- eran los preferidos, según una encuesta de Gallup, el Episcopado y la UCA y publicada por Clarín. Los nuevos estudios detectan que salvo San Cayetano, el altar de figuras al que le rezan los argentinos ha cambiado. Responde al signo de los tiempos,



explican. En 2011, según una encuesta de ODSA/UCA, irrumpió con fuerza San Expedito, quien en la actualidad es el preferido junto a San Cayetano, después de ellos vienen los demás.

Juan Manuel Ribeiro es sociólogo especialista en religiones y durante un año y medio realizó un trabajo de campo entre los fieles de la Virgen Desatanudos, que tuvo un auge en al principio de la primera década del siglo XXI, y los de San Expedito. En total, realizó más de 600 entrevistas para su tesis para la UCA. “San Expedito también puede explicarse a través de la máxima de Durkheim, lo social explica a lo social”, dice. “Emerge en una cultura que privilegia la rapidez, pero es importante no confundirlo con el santo de lo rápido, contrariamente a lo que opinarían algunos sociólogos es un santo que refleja precisamente lo contrario, ante lo fugaz o superfluo, acentúa lo urgente, lo importante: los valores esenciales de la existencia. Ante la injusticia, vuelve a poner en el tapete el valor de justo. Sus devotos buscan respuestas a sus problemas, a sus dolores, a las injusticias y alegrías”. Ribeiro concluye tras su estudio que la Virgen Desatanudos surgió al final de la década de los ’90, “en un momento de recesión económica y depresión social. La gente estaba atada a muchas situaciones difíciles, créditos, hipotecas, jubilaciones que no salían. La Virgen Desatanudos vino a responder a esa necesidad social”.

Para Ribeiro, el sentimiento que prevalece en los peregrinos encuestados es que la paz es fruto de volver a recordar las certezas fundamentales.

Ambos santos “son figuras fuertes para enfrentar estas épocas”, agrega Alejandro Frigerio, sociólogo también especializado en religiones del CONICET y quien junto a otros quince investigadores crearon la Red de Estudios de la Diversidad Religiosa en Argentina. Su objetivo es repensar la religión a partir de la experiencia de las personas y de la diversidad de creencias y prácticas.

“Antes este tipo de fenómenos se pensaban bajo el término de religiosidad popular, pero esto va más allá - dice. Esta extra-institucionalidad de las prácticas y creencias religiosas abarca mucho más allá de los actores populares. Por la forma en que los estudiosos dividimos antes las cosas cuando era extra-institucional si era de clase media para arriba se lo denominaba ‘new age’ y cuando era de sectores bajos, religiosidad popular. Si uno se olvidara de estos nombres y hablara de religiosidad ve que hay elementos más mágico-milagrosos con apuestas o devociones por santos en sectores populares, medios y bajos y con una interpretación más de transformación espiritual en sectores medios y medios altos. Pero también hay una búsqueda de milagros, sanación en ellos. En síntesis, el fenómeno es parecido, pero cambia el lenguaje”.

Para Frigerio, el caso de San Expedito “es interesante porque es uno de esos casos –como lo fue San Cayetano o la Virgen de Luján o San Nicolás– en que hay una articulación entre lo extra y lo institucional. En ese sentido, San Expedito es una de las últimas apuestas de la Iglesia a captar gente en base a una oferta mágico-religiosa fuerte. Creo que lo que sucede es que los santos cuyas devociones más crecieron en los últimos años son santos que son simbólicamente fuertes, que responden a una característica de la sociedad actual, que necesita símbolos religiosos poderosos, para tiempos de incertidumbre, inseguridad. Es el de las causas justas y urgente, pero además es un soldado, te da una imagen de fortaleza”.

Además del santo que representa al soldado romano, el de las causas urgentes, en los sectores populares se registra un crecimiento del culto a San Jorge, otro santo que fue soldado romano y al que se lo representa a caballo y listo para dar batalla. Fuera del santoral católico oficial se marca el crecimiento y expansión de la devoción al Gauchito Gil, que es aceptado por la Iglesia (Ver “Cuando los milagros...”) y también la figura de San la Muerte. Incluso estas dos figuras que, en una mirada netamente porteña se las ubicaban orillando literalmente las rutas del interior, han llegado a las calles porteñas para sorprender al caminante distraído y provocar las quejas de muchos vecinos.

Si una vez un cronista dijo que el Once es “el mejor centro de informaciones de la ciudad para saber cómo marcha el rumbo de la economía” se podría agregar que el barrio y su extensión a Almagro y Balvaneda es también un buen lugar para entender que en cuestiones de fe no todo parece ser categorías estáticas. Como los mojones que en el Gran Buenos Aires marcan a los pibes muertos por las balas policiales y en la Ciudad a las víctimas de tránsito, la calle también tiene marcas de lo religioso y que son “habilitadores” para rezar, una práctica no tan extendida en lo urbano. En Agüero al 300, a cuadras de San Expedito y de



varios templos judíos, existe un Santuario a San La Muerte, que después de muchas quejas ahora tiene una puerta y un candado. En Lavalle al 3200 hay una ermita que del Gauchito Gil devino en una para San La muerte, y cuando sacaron a la figura del esqueleto apareció un enano de jardín. Ahora esta talla de cemento convive con San La muerte, el Sagrado Corazón y el Gauchito. El monumento, que de esta figura popular surgió tímidamente en Corrientes y Concepción Arenal, ha crecido en los últimos tiempos hasta transformarse en una casa de material sobre una de las esquinas del Parque Los Andes con sus colores rojos. Adentro tiene también una imagen de la Virgen.

La cita de cada domingo 19 de abril “es una demostración de fe más allá de las interpretaciones sociológicas”, explica el padre Ariel Rudy, de la Iglesia de Balvanera. “El de San Expedito es un fenómeno que va de boca en boca. Si usamos una expresión del marketing sería la de “fidelización”: cuando un peregrino experimentó ayuda, una gracia o un favor del santo entonces se vuelve muy fiel y seguidor y además lo contagia. Dicen: daré a conocer tu nombre a todos”.

Los Patricios tocan el Himno Nacional antes de que la talla de San Expedito salga el día de su fiesta de la iglesia. “Al ser un año de elecciones nacionales, el clima social lo pedía: entonces en las misas se rezó la ‘Oración por la Patria’, que fue elaborada por el Episcopado y pide por una nación cuya identidad sea la pasión por la verdad y el compromiso por el bien común. Que aborreciendo el odio construya paz”, explica Rudy.

En las urnas, forradas con papel afiche frente al santo, se acumulan papelitos con los pedidos. En las filas aseguran que ellos se cumplieron. Ribeiro agrega que en su investigación detectó que los peregrinos a San Expedito no son “cuentapropistas religiosos que buscan hacer una religión a la carta, como muchos describieron. En todo momento tiene una referencia a lo eclesial. En Argentina, el catolicismo tiene un grueso espesor. La Virgen Desatanudos, ahora San Expedito, son una muestra renovada de ese vigor”, insiste.

La edad de los devotos de San Expedito puede también explicar la formación católica. En promedio, según Ribeiro, rondan los 50. Raúl Ardoso anda en los 60 años y fue uno de los primeros peregrinos que le pidió al santo y volvió para agradecerle. Ya no lo hace montado en el “Colorado”, su caballo, como lo hizo hasta que la cantidad de gente hiciera peligrosa la cabalgata por el Once. Su primera vez fue exactamente hace 11 años, cuando su nieta nació con problemas de salud y él le pidió a San Expedito que si se curaba iría a agradecerle todos los 19 de abril vestido de gaucho. Y ahí estuvo el último 19, junto a Milagros, su nieta.

(Silvina Heguy, Clarin, Domingo 3 de Mayo 2015)

I.22. Cuando los milagros son una experiencia de todos los días

Un milagro puede ser cosa de todos los días y, cuando se pide que se los relate, son soluciones para temas de salud o trabajo, nada de contar una aparición divina. Al menos ese es el relato que surgió después de que académicos de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Católica Argentina realizaron la encuesta “Creer en las villas. Devociones y prácticas religiosas en los barrios precarios de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires”, que acaban de procesar y en la que el 84,6% dice creer en los milagros y un 61,8% haberlos vivido.

“Son siempre relatos desde lo positivo, incluso hasta estar vivos han dicho”, cuenta Ana Lourdes Suárez, directora de investigación del equipo formado por Juan Martín López Fidanza; Cecilia Galera; Isabel Gatti; Javier Barra; Luz Lecour y Agustín Grizzuti y cuyo trabajo será publicado en septiembre por Biblos. En base a una muestra representativa de 400 personas de distintas villas porteñas se trazó un perfil de la fe en los sectores populares. El catolicismo reina. El 76,4% de los encuestados se definió como tal. Después siguen los evangélicos (12,3%); Testigos de Jehová (2%); adventistas (1,3%); de la Iglesia de los Últimos Días (0,3%); umbandas y otros (0,3 %). Pero aunque las definiciones son estáticas, las prácticas no. “Se da interacción con otras prácticas religiosas. Se da entre los católicos que dicen tener intercambios con el llamado mundo no cristiano como el umbanda”, advierte Suárez.



Sólo el 7,5% dijo no tener pertenencia religiosa, un porcentaje menor al resto del país si se lo compara con el estudio “Atlas de creencias religiosas en la Argentina” publicado en 2013, en donde un 18% de los porteños se reconoció indiferente a las religiones ante los científicos del CONICET y un 69,1%, católico.

En las villas porteñas, el 82% es devoto de un santo, de la Virgen o Cristo. Entre estas devociones predomina la de la Virgen de Luján y la de Caacupé, de tradición paraguaya. Entre los santos, los preferidos son los varones: San Cayetano, primero; en el segundo puesto casi empatan San Expedito y El Gauchito Gil, aunque este no pertenezca al santoral oficial de la Iglesia Católica es aceptado en la práctica por ésta.

Entre los devotos, cuatro de cada diez dijo haber hecho una promesa y más de la mitad tiene un altar en su casa (55%): la mayoría (74,7%) tiene una figura católica oficial o incluso la foto del Papa en él.

Los altares caseros son “espacios habilitadores de prácticas religiosas cotidianas como rezar”, explica Suárez. En la esfera de lo público o institucional, la práctica más realizada es la asistencia a la iglesia o al templo, lo hizo un 87,2% en el último año. Una proporción similar rezó.

Orar en una ermita callejera; concurrir a una procesión; realizar una ofrenda o confesarse son prácticas que alrededor del 30% dijo haber hecho en los últimos doce meses. Si se lo compara con anteriores estudios hechos en el país, se desprende que la vivencia de lo religioso es mayor en las villas que en el resto de la Argentina donde alrededor de uno de cada diez dijo haberlo hecho.

(Silvina Heguy, Clarin, Domingo 3 de Mayo 2015)

I.23. La barbarie de EI acabó con una joya milenaria de Palmira

Imágenes satelitales de la ONU confirmaron la destrucción del Templo de Bel, el mayor santuario de la ciudad antigua

DAMASCO.- Los especialistas lo consideraban "uno de los templos más hermosos de Medio Oriente", pero para Estado Islámico (EI) era un "testimonio del politeísmo" previo al nacimiento de Mahoma. Y las imágenes satelitales de la ONU confirmaron ahora la destrucción del Templo de Bel, el santuario más importante de la ciudad antigua siria de Palmira, Patrimonio de la Humanidad.

"Podemos confirmar la destrucción del principal edificio del Templo de Bel, además de una fila de columnas colindante", informó el Instituto de las Naciones Unidas para Formación Profesional e Investigaciones (Unitar), que comparó imágenes satelitales obtenidas antes y después de una potente explosión registrada anteayer.

En una imagen de satélite del 27 de agosto se ve con claridad el templo, una estructura rectangular rodeada de columnas, cuya construcción concluyó el siglo II. En otra foto, de anteayer, sólo son visibles unas columnas situadas en un extremo del emplazamiento.

Este es el segundo acto de destrucción cometido en una semana por los jihadistas contra un templo de Palmira, un conjunto arquitectónico declarado Patrimonio de la Humanidad por la Unesco, la agencia de la ONU para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura.

La directora general de la agencia, Irina Bokova, calificó de "crimen intolerable contra la civilización" la destrucción de "uno los monumentos religiosos más importantes del siglo I a.C. en Oriente".

"La destrucción de Palmira constituye un crimen intolerable contra la civilización, pero no borrará nunca 4500 años de historia", señaló Bokova en un comunicado.

El domingo pasado, el Observatorio Sirio para los Derechos Humanos (OSDH) había anunciado que EI hizo estallar una parte del Templo de Bel.

Mohamed Hasan al-Homsi, un militante antirrégimen de Palmira, también dijo que el templo había sido destruido parcialmente. "Utilizaron recipientes y barriles llenos de explosivos, preparados con antelación."



Según el director general de Museos de Siria, Maamun Abdelkarim, el Templo de Bel "combinaba de forma única el arte oriental y el arte grecorromano, y aún conservaba todos los atributos de los templos antiguos".

"Junto al templo de Baalbek, en el Líbano, era el más hermoso de Medio Oriente", agregó Abdelkarim.

Su construcción inició en el año 32 y llevó más de un siglo. Fue conquistado en mayo por EI, grupo que destruyó ya varias joyas arqueológicas en Irak. Antes de la guerra en Siria, 150.000 turistas al año visitaban este templo.

EI considera objetos de idolatría las obras religiosas preislámicas, principalmente las estatuas.

El 23 de agosto, EI destruyó totalmente con explosivos el templo de Baal Shamin, derribando la "cella" (parte cerrada del edificio) y las columnas contiguas se desplomaron. Unos días después, EI difundía imágenes del templo reducido a un montón de escombros.

Además de destruir el templo de Baal Shamin, acto denunciado por la Unesco como un "crimen de guerra", los jihadistas de EI decapitaron, mutilaron y colgaron de un poste el 18 de agosto al arqueólogo sirio Khaled al-Asaad, de 82 años, director durante 40 años del parque arqueológico de Palmira.

Avance sostenido

En tanto, en Damasco, se registraban anteayer luchas callejeras entre EI y rebeldes islamistas, que se acercaban poco a poco al centro de la capital siria.

Los choques se produjeron en Qadam, barrio del sur de la capital, donde el grupo jihadista tomó el control de dos calles este fin de semana, según el OSDH.

"Es el punto más cercano del corazón de la capital al que haya llegado EI", dijo el director de esta organización, Rami Abdel Rahman, que dio un balance de 15 muertos en los combates de anteayer.

Una fuente de la seguridad siria confirmó que hubo combates en esa zona. "Estamos contentos que luchen entre ellos, pero seguimos de cerca la situación para reaccionar en caso de que avancen hacia los sectores controlados por el gobierno", dijo la fuente.

(La Nación, Miércoles 02 de septiembre de 2015)

I.23.1. La destrucción de Palmira, mostrada por EI al mundo

Para la ONU, los ataques a las célebres ruinas son un crimen de guerra

DAMASCO.La triste saga de la ciudad antigua de Palmira parece no terminar, luego de que Estado Islámico (EI) publicara ayer fotografías que muestran la destrucción de las ruinas arqueológicas, un acto que la ONU considera un crimen de guerra.

Según el jefe de antigüedades de Siria, Maamoun Abdulkarim, las imágenes muestran una gran explosión en el templo Baal Shamin, la principal estructura en el sitio arqueológico. Esto se ajustaría a las descripciones de testigos que presenciaron la explosión el domingo pasado.

La Unesco, agencia cultural de la ONU, describió a la ciudad romana de Palmira, un oasis y centro de comercio del mundo antiguo, como un símbolo de la histórica diversidad siria.

En tanto, Abdulkarim dijo que la ciudad "se mantuvo por más de 1800 años. Era una hermosa atracción turística".

Palmira fue declarada Patrimonio Mundial de la Humanidad por la Unesco en 1980, y en 2013 se la incluyó en la lista de patrimonio en peligro. La directora general del organismo, Irina Bokova, consideró que la



destrucción del templo era "un nuevo crimen de guerra y una pérdida considerable para el pueblo sirio y la humanidad".

El secretario general de la ONU, Ban Ki-moon, pidió que los responsables sean llevados ante la justicia. "Estos ataques de terror bárbaros se suman a una larga lista de crímenes cometidos desde hace cuatro años en Siria contra sus habitantes y su patrimonio", agregó en un comunicado.

Entre las cinco imágenes difundidas por EI también se puede ver a jihadistas que trasladan e instalan explosivos en las paredes del templo.

El grupo extremista sunnita tomó las ruinas en mayo pasado y desde entonces amenazó con destruirla e incluso usó el anfiteatro romano para ejecutar a personas acusadas de simpatizar con el régimen de Bashar al-Assad.

La semana pasada, EI ejecutó a Khaled al-Asaad, un arqueólogo de 82 años que se encargó durante 50 años de la conservación de las ruinas, y colgó su cuerpo de una columna antigua. El experto sirio fue acusado de ser un "director de ídolos" y un "representante" de Al-Assad en los foros internacionales en los que participaba.

El domingo, finalmente, los jihadistas cumplieron con su amenaza al destruir con explosivos el templo de Baal, construido hace 2000 años.

Idolatría

EI lanzó una fuerte ofensiva en Siria e Irak en junio de 2014, que lo llevó a conquistar grandes porciones de territorio y a establecer una capital de facto en Raqqa.

Desde ese momento, el grupo se dedicó también a destruir ruinas y objetos arqueológicos anteriores al islam por considerarlos idolatría, especialmente aquellos provenientes de la herencia romana en Siria y asiria en Irak.

En marzo de este año, el gobierno iraquí anunció que las ruinas de las ciudades asirias de Nimrud y Khorsabad habían sido destruidas por EI, así como la ciudad romana de Hatra. También objetos arqueológicos y libros en Mosul corrieron la misma suerte.

En Siria, donde la guerra civil entre un gran número de facciones continúa desde 2011, mezquitas, templos y castillos construidos por cruzados fueron arrasados.

Según cálculos de la ONU, más de 300 sitios arqueológicos sirios fueron destruidos, dañados o saqueados desde el comienzo de la guerra.

En tanto, los combates en Siria entre el régimen, los rebeldes, los jihadistas y los kurdos siguen provocando muertes. Según el Observatorio Sirio de Derechos Humanos, por lo menos 31 civiles, incluidos ocho chicos, murieron en la última semana en bombardeos cruzados en Guta Oriental, una zona próxima la capital, Damasco.

(La Nación, Miércoles 26 de agosto de 2015)

I.23.2. La "masacre" de Palmira y la destrucción de un templo de 2000 años

La humanidad acaba de perder un tesoro invaluable, una joya arqueológica y un regalo de 2000 años de antigüedad. El templo de Baalshamin, en las ruinas fenicias de Palmira en Siria, uno de los mejor conservados, fue volado con explosivos por el Estado Islámico (ISIS).

Este es el último capítulo de la saga de destrucción en la "masacre" de Palmira que los bárbaros del ISIS han tomado en sus manos.

De hecho, la UNESCO declaró el brutal hecho como "un acto de guerra".



Hace menos de una semana, el grupo extremista decapitó a Al Asadde, de 82 años, hombre de fama mundial por sus conocimientos sobre este lugar único, declarado patrimonio de la Humanidad.

La última destrucción del EI anunciada el domingo fue la del templo de Baalshamin -el más importante después de Bel, según el Museo del Louvre de París-, que comenzó a construirse el año 17 y fue embellecido por el emperador romano Adriano el año 130.

El oasis de Palmira alberga las ruinas monumentales de una gran ciudad que fue uno de los más importantes focos culturales del mundo antiguo.

El Estado Islámico considera las obras religiosas preislámicas, en especial las estatuas, como idolatría. Por ello ha destruido varias joyas arqueológicas en Irak, suscitando reacciones de horror en la UNESCO y en la comunidad internacional.

Después de arrebatar a las fuerzas del régimen sirio el control de Palmira, el ISIS ejecutó a más de 200 personas en el interior y exterior de la ciudad, 20 de ellas en el teatro antiguo.

"Los habitantes de la ciudad me dijeron que el grupo ISIS había despedazado el cuerpo de mi padre después de tenerlo colgado de un poste durante un día", declaró a la AFP Mohamad, hijo de Jaled al Asaad, quien dedicó su vida entera a esta "novia" del desierto.

"Mi padre repetía a menudo 'Moriré de pie, como las palmeras de Palmira'", relató.

La UNESCO, Francia y Estados Unidos denunciaron un asesinato "brutal" perpetrado por "bárbaros". La UNESCO había protestado el 3 de julio contra la destrucción de obras de arte de Palmira.

"La destrucción de bustos funerarios procedentes de PALMIRA, en la plaza pública, delante de mucha gente y niños convocados al saqueo de su patrimonio es un espectáculo de un perversidad que deja helado", denunció la directora general de la UNESCO, Irina Bokova.

Los yihadistas, que controlan grandes porciones de territorios iraquí y sirio, destruyeron en abril en Irak con bulldozers, picos y explosivos el emplazamiento arqueológico de Nimrud, joya del imperio asirio fundada el siglo XIII.

También se ensañaron contra Hatra -una ciudad del periodo romano de 2.000 años- y con el museo de Mosul, en el norte de Irak.

Más de 300 emplazamientos históricos sirios han sido dañados, destruidos o saqueados durante el conflicto, que empezó hace más de cuatro años, según la ONU.

En otros lugares de Siria, país devastado por la guerra desde hace cuatro años, los combates y bombardeos entre régimen, rebeldes, yihadistas y kurdos siguen dejando decenas de muertos a diario.

(Clarin, 24/08/15)

Estado Islámico borró del mapa el monasterio cristiano más antiguo de Irak

El convento San Elías se suma a otros sitios históricos destruidos por el grupo

ERBIL, Irak.- Pese a los reveses militares de los últimos meses, Estado Islámico (EI) no detiene su ola de destrucción. Ahora redujo a escombros el monasterio cristiano más antiguo de Irak, la víctima más reciente de la implacable ofensiva sobre sitios culturales históricos perpetrada por la agrupación jihadista.

Lugar de rezo desde hace 1400 años, el monasterio de San Elías, ubicado en una colina sobre Mosul, en el norte de Irak, fue arrasado por EI. La destrucción del monasterio, que en la última década era visitado con frecuencia por las tropas estadounidenses en Irak, se suma a la ya larga lista de monumentos y sitios arqueológicos destruidos por el grupo, que los considera herejes o contrarios a su particular visión del islam.



Como consecuencia de esta ofensiva, más de 100 lugares o estructuras históricas y religiosas -entre ellos mezquitas, tumbas, santuarios e iglesias- han sido saqueados o destruidos por EI, que controla parte de los territorios de Irak y Siria.

Monumentos antiguos en las ciudades de Nínive, Palmira y Hatra fueron reducidos a escombros. Allí, los museos y bibliotecas fueron saqueados y sus libros y obras de arte, destruidos o vendidos por los militantes jihadistas.

La información sobre la destrucción de San Elías surgió luego de que la agencia The Associated Press (AP) solicitó a la empresa DigitalGlobe una serie de imágenes satelitales del lugar con una cámara de alta resolución.

El resultado confirmó los peores temores de las autoridades eclesiásticas y los conservacionistas: las fotografías obtenidas, luego de compararlas con imágenes tomadas previamente, reflejaban que el monasterio de San Elías ya no estaba en pie. La estructura, de unos 2500 metros cuadrados, se erguía en una colina al lado de Mosul. Aunque el techo estaba incompleto, contenía 26 salones que incluían un santuario y una capilla.

Un mes después de las primeras tomas, "las paredes de piedra han sido literalmente pulverizadas", dijo el analista Stephen Wood, director ejecutivo de Allsource Analysis, que opinó que la devastación ocurrió entre agosto y septiembre de 2014.

"Usaron bulldozers, equipos pesados, mazos, quizás hasta explosivos, para reducir toda la estructura a polvo. La destruyeron completamente'', agregó Wood desde su oficina en Colorado.

En Erbil, la principal ciudad del Kurdistán iraquí, el cura católico Paul Thabit Habib quedó atónito al ver las imágenes. "La historia de la cristiandad en Mosul está siendo destruida de manera bárbara'', alertó. "Consideramos que éste es un intento de expulsarnos de Irak, de eliminarnos, de exterminar nuestra existencia en esta tierra'', advirtió Habib.

El convento, también conocido como Dair Mar Elia, en homenaje al monje asirio Mar Elia, que lo fundó en 595, fue destruido en 1743 por orden del líder persa Nadir Shah Tahmaz y los monjes que habitaban allí fueron asesinados. Sin embargo, se reconstruyó a principios del siglo XX.

En siglos anteriores, generaciones de monjes encendieron velas en sus nichos y rezaron en su capilla. Durante 1400 años, el complejo sobrevivió a los ataques de la naturaleza y de la actividad humana. Pero no resistió la furia destructiva de EI.

(La Nación, Jueves 21 de enero de 2016)

I.23.3. Islamic State and antiquities

Nothing is sacred. Jihadists murder the man who tended Palmyra’s art for decades CAIRO KHALED ASAAD saw the continuity between Syrian Arab culture and that of the many peoples who had previously inhabited Palmyra, the 2,000-year-old archaeological site he had tended for almost half a century. A month before Islamic State (IS) rolled into the oasis town in May, the archaeologist described on a Facebook page the spring rituals that would have taken place in the colonnaded city during Greco-Roman times. Those rituals “fit perfectly” with pre-Islamic Arab ones, he wrote.

Others were less open -minded than the bespectacled 81-year-old. After the jihadists entered Palmyra they arrested Mr Asaad. On August 18th IS hung his decapitated body, his head and glasses at his feet, in front of the small museum where he had spent much of his life writing papers or working with teams from Germany and France. The reasons his killers gave, scrawled on a notice beside his body, were tending the site’s “idols”, attending “blasphemous” conferences, visiting Iran and communicating with generals in the Syrian regime.



Mr Asaad had worked for years for the government’s antiquities department. Some say he was a staunch supporter of Syria’s President Bashar Assad. But it seems as likely that he was killed because he refused to give up the locations of precious artefacts still buried underground in unexcavated tombs, despite being tortured. Palmyra, which flourished as a caravan stop on the Silk Road trading route, is home to temples used to worship deities before the arrival of Christianity and then Islam, as well as tombs and the ruins of a citadel.

Even though IS has destroyed large swathes of Hatra and Nimrud, ancient Assyrian cities in Iraq, so far it is only known to have smashed one statue in Palmyra: a lion representing the goddess Allat that stood at the museum’s entrance. Similarly when IS ransacked the Mosul Museum in February, it did not show itself destroying the most valuable pieces. Despite its aversion to antiquities—it argues that statues and images encourage idolatry—iconoclasm may not be its main aim in Palmyra. There are signs that it finds antiquities more valuable when they are sold rather than smashed on camera for publicity purposes. Sales to smugglers, who often take the valuables out over the Turkish border, are probably helping IS fill the hole in its coffers left by air strikes against oil facilities under its control. Attempts to stop this trade are proving as ineffective as the efforts to stop murder and maiming in Syria, whether by IS or the regime.

(The Economist, Aug 22nd 2015)

I.24. ¿Regreso de los partidos religiosos?

Roberto Bosca

El anuncio de Musulmanes al Frente, la nueva corriente constituida como un brazo político del kirchnerismo, evoca la Organización Israelita Argentina, que en los tardíos años ‘40 constituyó un fallido intento de peronización de la colectividad judía, previsiblemente refractaria a un movimiento que se había nutrido del nacionalismo antisemita. Por esos años se estrenaban los primeros balbuceos de la Democracia Cristiana, mientras irrumpía el entuerto con la Iglesia católica. Esos suspiros provocaron llantos en el corazón del peronismo, por cuanto, según su líder inmarcesible, el Partido Demócrata Cristiano ya existía y era el propio justicialismo.

Los partidos confesionales han recorrido con variopinta suerte la geografía política y casi no hay religión que pueda declararse exenta de una incursión temporalista. Una recurrente figura de la política consiste en la pretensión de instrumentar la herramienta religiosa para sus propios fines, pero también las religiones se ven tentadas a convertir el poder en una longa. manus de la fe.

El Zentrum fue un partido policlasista alemán del cual dio buena cuenta el ascenso del nazismo. En la Italia de comienzos del pasado siglo, el sacerdote Luigi Sturzo fundó un partido confesional, que el propio padre de la criatura prefería no identificar así. Sturzo no quiso procrear un partido católico sino para los católicos. El Partito Popolare corrió una suerte similar al Zentrum al ser disuelto por el fascismo. Uno de sus principales líderes, Alcide de Gasperi, hoy con proceso de beatificación, terminó de bibliotecario en el Vaticano.

Aunque las iglesias evangélicas han experimentado en las últimas décadas un notable crecimiento, en los años ‘90 asistimos a un lanzamiento de partidos de esa corriente (como el Partido Cristiano Independiente) que en el plano local concluyeron en un fracaso.

En cambio, en otras naciones de la región, los ejemplos abundan en sentido contrario, desde que el general Efraín Ríos Montt se convirtió a la Iglesia del Verbo y en el primer presidente evangélico de Guatemala, y Jorge Serrano Elías ocupó la presidencia del Consejo de Estado de ese país.

El partido Nuevo Komeito es una institucionalización política de la secta budista japonesa Soka Gakkai. Una sección bávara que es autónoma de la democracia cristiana alemana, la CSU, aún hoy mantiene un cómodo predominio político en la región. En Israel el Partido Nacional Religioso, si bien muy minoritario, no deja de ejercer su envidiable función de bisagra, junto a otras corrientes radicales como Kach o Gush Emunim.



Con el viento de cola del renacimiento político del islam, los Musulmanes al Frente han enriquecido la trasegada confesionalidad “francisquista” que contagió repentinamente el escenario político argentino a partir de la elección del nuevo pontífice. La sumatoria de votos no conoce límites.

Roberto Bosca Historiador

(Clarín, 10/09/15)

Jesus of Nazareth executed by Pontius Pilate government for dissent, unorthodox views, and refusal to be loyal to local religious and political doctrines. (33)

William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson hanged in Boston for being Quakers. Several Quakers hanged over next 5 years. (1659)

I.25. False Decretals

A 9th-century collection of ecclesiastical legislation containing some forged documents. The principal aim of the forgers was to free the Roman Catholic church from interference by the state and to maintain the independence of the bishops against the encroachments of the archbishops, who were attempting to extend their power.

A party had been formed in the Carolingian Empire to combat the subjection of the church to the state. Within this party was a group that became convinced that the use of legitimate means would never accomplish this purpose and determined to try to achieve it by illegitimate means. They conceived that positive legislation of their demands could be projected into the past by attributing it to popes and kings long dead. Thus, they produced a number of falsifications of church law, of which the best known was the False Decretals.

The False Decretals—also called the Decretals of Pseudo-Isidore because their compilers passed as Saint Isidore of Sevilla, a Spanish encyclopaedist and historian, and sometimes the Collection of Isidore Mercator because they usually begin with the words Isidorus Mercator, servus Christi lectori salutem (“Isidore the merchant, a servant of Christ, salutes the reader”)—purports to be a collection of decrees of councils and decretals of popes (written replies on questions of ecclesiastical discipline) from the first seven centuries. The collection contains (1) the letters of the popes preceding the Council of Nicaea (325) from Clement I to Miltiades, all of which are forgeries; (2) a collection of the decrees of councils, most of which are genuine, though the forged Donation of Constantine is included; (3) a large collection of letters of the popes from Sylvester I (died 335) to Gregory II (died 731), among which there are more than 40 falsifications.

As a collection, the False Decretals seems to have been used first at the Council of Soissons in 853. They were known at the end of the 9th century in Italy but had little influence there until the end of the 10th century. For the next few centuries, they were generally accepted by canonists, theologians, and councils as authentic. Beginning in the 12th century, their authenticity was doubted by some critics, but it was not until the 17th century that David Blondel, a Reformed theologian, clearly refuted their defenders. Since that time, research has concentrated on the origin, extent, and purpose of the falsification.

Modern scholars do not believe that they were produced in Rome. Their place of origin was somewhere in France (Reims, Le Mans, Tours) and the time was about 850. The object of the forgers was not to extend papal authority; rather, in seeking to effect the purpose mentioned above, they attributed laws and customs to earlier times and earlier popes than the facts permit. To this end they insist on the canonical election of bishops, on the exemption of clerics from trial in civil courts and condemn the alienation of ecclesiastical property. In order to stop the abuses of archiepiscopal power they maintained that the provincial council when summoned by the pope was the superior of the bishops. In so doing they put the centralization of the church in this matter further back in time than is acceptable.

It is untrue to say that the False Decretals revolutionized canon law, but the forgers did have a considerable influence. They seem to have helped eliminate chorepiscopi (bishops in full orders, who, at this time, were



auxiliaries of diocesan bishops or of administrators of dioceses), limit the power of archbishops, revive dormant privileges of the clergy, and revive the right of appeal of local bishops to the pope. The False Decretals were also extensively during the Gregorian reform in the 11th century. (Encyclopædia Britannica)

I.26. Donation Of Constantine

(Constitutum or Donatio Constantim) is the supposed grant by the emperor Constantine the Great to Pope Silvester I (314—335) and his successors spiritual supremacy over the other great patriarchates and over all matters of faith and worship, and of temporal dominion over Rome, Italy and the entire western world. The gift was claimed to have been motivated by Constantine’s supposed gratitude to Silvester for miraculously healing his leprosy and converting him to Christianity. Compounded of various elements (notably the apocryphal Vita S. Silvestri) and now universally admitted to be a forgery, the Donation was fabricated perhaps at Rome, more probably in the Frankish empire, between the middle and end of the 8th century. In the 9th century it was included in the collection known as the False Decretals (see Decretals, False), and two centuries, later was incorporated in Gratian’s Decnetum by one of his pupils. The evidence of its Roman origin is mainly internal; that of its origin in the Frankish dominions is based on the facts that the earliest manuscript (in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris) containing it appears to have been written there and that the earliest quotations from it are by Ado of Vienne, Hincmar of Reims and Aeneas of Paris, all Frankish; authors. It was regarded as genuine, by both friends and enemies of the papal pretensions throughout the middle ages, though at the close of the 10th century Leo of Vercelli, Otto Ill’s chancellor, proclaimed its true character.

Although the document was in existence before 800, the earliest certain appeal to it by a pope was made only as late as 1054 by Leo IX in a letter to Michael Cerularius, the patriarch of Constantinople. From that time forward it was increasingly employed by popes and canonists in support of the papal claims, and from the 12th century onward it became a weapon of the spiritual against the temporal powers.

(Encyclopædia Britannica)

I.27. San Oliver Plunkett, mártir de Irlanda

Nació en 1 de Noviembre de 1629. Oliver fue educado, desde su juventud, en la devota religiosidad viril, propia de la "isla de los santos". Imposibilitado de poder realizar los estudios teológicos en su patria, se fue a Roma a los dieciséis años; recibió allí las sagradas órdenes y trabajó benéficamente como profesor de teología moral en el Colegio de la Propaganda. El 9 de julio de 1669, fue consagrado arzobispo de Armagh y llegó a su sede en marzo de 1670.

Los siguientes diez años no nos muestran ningún hecho sorprendente, ninguna aparición estrepitosa en público. Sólo el trabajo callado y arduo del arzobispo Oliver. Superando la fatiga, visitaba las parroquias dispersas, sin tener en cuenta los caminos largos y peligrosos. Consolaba a los abatidos, administraba los sacramentos y, cuando una parroquia se encontraba abandonada, enviaba un sacerdote que no temiera la pobreza o la persecución.

Entre sus paisanos, Oliver Plunkett se convirtió de nuevo en un completo irlandés. Se sacrificaba por ellos y ellos le agradecían incluyéndolo cada mañana en su oración, antes de comenzar la tarea diaria. Eran agricultores o ganaderos sedentarios, pero ninguno era rebelde. Cualquier idea sobre una conspiración era ajena a su manera de ser; a pesar de eso, el 23 de julio de 1680, se encontró el arzobispo ante el tribunal de Dundalk, debido a la absurda acusación de haber contratado a setenta mil irlandeses católicos para asesinar a todos los protestantes. Uno de los llamados cazadores de sacerdotes, había seguido el rastro del primado cuando asistía al anciano obispo de Meath, durante su agonía. Aquellos cazadores recibían de parte de las autoridades como otros Judas, 10 libras esterlinas por el arresto de un obispo o de un jesuita.

Después de una larga detención en su "querida y cara celda" Dublin, Oliver Plunkett fue trasladado a la torre de Londres; se formuló la acusación de "alta traición" la sentencia del jurado fue "culpable".



Se le había negado el término necesario para poder llamar de Irlanda a sus testigos de exoneración de tal manera que él mismo que defender con fuego y pasión y no entregó su nombre honrado sin luchar. Indignado, rechazó la suposición de haber comprado vida libertad por medio de un testimonio falso: "Muy señor mío, morir diez mil veces a robarle a un ser humano injustamente un centavo de sus bienes, o un día de su libertad, o un minuto de su vida".

Cuando, el 11 de julio de 1681, Oliver Plunkett fue llevado al cadalso, se detuvo, una vez más, ante la multitud que rodeaba el patíbulo, para pronunciar un discurso maravilloso de defensa; perdonó a sus acusadores y asesinos y rezó, en voz alta, por los miembros de la familia real inglesa. Después dijo el solemne "Miserere" hasta que la soga apagó sus últimas palabras. Su cuerpo fue partido en cuatro partes.

Después de la muerte del arzobispo cesó la gran persecución.

(ACI Prensa)

I.28. Para Dawkins, vigoroso defensor de Charles Darwin, creer en Dios es un delirio.

Por André Petry

Dawkins afirma que la creencia en un gran creador del todo se puede calificar como un “delirio”; y un delirio sería, en términos dawkinianos, la persistencia en una falsa creencia mantenida frente a fuertes evidencias contradictorias.

Periodista: A medida que el conocimiento científico sobre el mundo se va ampliando, es cada vez más difícil creer en ciertos dogmas religiosos, como por ejemplo la idea de que la humanidad tiene apenas seis mil años de existencia. Pero eso no es lo mismo que decir que religión y ciencia son completamente incompatibles, ¿no le parece?

Dawkins: En un sentido trivial, religión y ciencia son compatibles, en tanto que existen los científicos religiosos. Pero, por otro lado, algunos de los científicos que se presentan como religiosos no tienen fe en el sentido de los que creen en un Dios personal, sino que son creyentes en un sentido similar al que tenía Albert Einstein, que decía: “Yo creo en el Dios de Spinoza, que se revela en armonía con todo lo que existe, y no en un Dios preocupado por el destino y las acciones de la humanidad”. De manera que, del modo que yo lo veo, religión y ciencia son totalmente incompatibles. Aún los científicos que sí creen en un Dios personal solo logran esa proeza levantando barreras mentales entre áreas imposibles de ser compatibilizadas.

Periodista: Usted dice que la religión es un obstáculo para el avance de la ciencia. Pero, en el mundo religioso, la ciencia tuvo avances fenomenales en los últimos siglos. ¿Es tan así que la religión sea una traba, entonces?

Dawkins: La ciencia podría haber progresado mucho más rápidamente en un mundo no religioso. Actualmente, la mayoría de los científicos son no religiosos. Entre los científicos que forman parte de la élite de nuestra actividad, integrando instituciones renombradas como la Academia Nacional de Ciencias de los Estados Unidos o la Royal Society británica, la gran mayoría es atea. En siglos anteriores, particularmente antes de Charles Darwin, era muy difícil para cualquiera que no fuese religioso. Por eso, no es ninguna sorpresa que Newton y Galileo, por ejemplo, fuesen religiosos.

(Noticias, 31 de agosto de 2015)

I.29. Praying for health - Religious diversity may be caused by disease

SOME people, notably Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, regard religion as a disease. It spreads, they suggest, like a virus, except that the “viruses” are similar to those infecting computers—bits of cultural software that take over the hardware of the brain and make it do irrational things.



Corey Fincher, of the University of New Mexico, has a different hypothesis for the origin of religious diversity. He thinks not that religions are like disease but that they are responses to disease—or, rather, to the threat of disease. If he is right, then people who believe that their religion protects them from harm may be correct, although the protection is of a different sort from the supernatural one they perceive.

Mr Fincher is not arguing that disease-protection is religion's main function. Biologists have different hypotheses for that. Not all follow Dr Dawkins in thinking it pathological. Some see it either as a way of promoting group solidarity in a hostile world, or as an accidental consequence of the predisposition to such solidarity. This solidarity-promotion is one of Mr Fincher's starting points. The other is that bacteria, viruses and other parasites are powerful drivers of evolution. Many biologists think that sex, for example, is a response to parasitism. The continual mixing of genes that it promotes means that at least some offspring of any pair of parents are likely to be immune to a given disease.

Mr Fincher and his colleague Randy Thornhill wondered if disease might be driving important aspects of human social behaviour, too. Their hypothesis is that in places where disease is rampant, it behoves groups not to mix with one another more than is strictly necessary, in order to reduce the risk of contagion. They therefore predict that patterns of behaviour which promote group exclusivity will be stronger in disease-ridden areas. Since religious differences are certainly in that category, they specifically predict that the number of different religions in a place will vary with the disease load. Which is, as they report in the

Proceedings of the Royal Society, the case.

(The Economist, Jul 31st 2008)



I.30. Diversas Religiones (cuadro comparativo)



I.31. MenckenThe Christmas Story pulled Mencken even more strongly.The success of Christianity in this world, I believe, is due largely, if not chiefly to the unmatchable beauty as; poetry, of its sacred books. It is hard to think of any oriental religion that is not more plausible and persuasive, but not one of them has a sacred literature even remotely to be compared for simple loveliness, to that decadent Judaism which, alone among them, has conquered the west. There are single psalms that have ten times more beauty in them than the whole of Brahminism, ancient and modern; in the story of the Christ Child there is more poetry than was ever heard in Greece or Rome. It is precisely this profound and disarming poetry, this irresistibly beautiful evocation of the unattainable and ever to be desired, that gives Christianity its continued strength in the modern world, despite the gradual destruction of two-thirds of its objective evidences.Few Americans of the present day, I take it — that is few of the enlightened sort — accept the story of the Christ Child in all literalness. It violates their notions of the probable; in part, at least, it seems to them to be plainly fanciful. But that man must be a dull clod indeed who is not moved by it and never catches himself wishing a bit wistfully that such things could really be. It is of all the stories devised by man enormously the most beautiful. Whoever reduced it to words, conquered, by that stroke, the whole civilized world.(Wingate, P.J. H.L. Mencken's Un-Neglected Anniversary. Hockessin: The Holly Press, 1980)

I.32. The Meaning of Life in a Formula

Can science help us overcome the terror of existence?

Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who died in 2002, was a tough-minded skeptic who did not suffer fools gladly when it came to pseudoscience and superstition. Gould was a secular Jew who did not believe in God, but he had a soft spot for religion, expressed most famously in his principle of



NOMA— nonoverlapping magisteria. The magisterium (domain of authority) of science “covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory),” he wrote in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. “The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value.”

In part, Gould’s motivations were personal (he told me on many occasions how much respect he had for religion and for his many religious friends and colleagues). But in his book, he claimed that “NOMA represents a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds, not a merely diplomatic solution.” For NOMA to work, however, Gould insisted that just as “religion can no longer dictate the nature of factual conclusions residing properly within the magisterium of science, then scientists cannot claim higher insight into moral truth from any superior knowledge of the world’s empirical constitution.”

Initially I embraced NOMA because a peaceful concordat is usually more desirable than a bitter conflict (plus, Gould was a friend), but as I engaged in debates with theists over the years, I saw that they were continually trespassing onto our turf with truth claims on everything from the ages of rocks and miraculous healings to the reality of the afterlife and the revivification of a certain Jewish carpenter. Most believers hold the tenets of their religion to be literally (not metaphorically) true, and they reject NOMA in practice if not in theory—for the same reason many scientists do. In his 2015 penetrating analysis of Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne eviscerates NOMA as “simply an unsatisfying quarrel about labels that, unless you profess a watery deism, cannot reconcile science and religion.”

Curiously, however, Coyne then argues that NOMA holds for scientists when it comes to meaning and morals and that “by and large, scientists now avoid the ‘naturalistic fallacy’—the error of drawing moral lessons from observations of nature.” But if we are not going to use science to determine meaning and morals, then what should we use? If NOMA fails, then it must fail in both directions, thereby opening the door for us to experiment in finding scientific solutions for both morals and meaning.

In The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom, I give examples of how morality can be a branch of science, and in his 2014 book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion, neuroscientist Sam Harris makes a compelling case that meaning can be found through the scientific study of how the mind works (particularly during meditation and other mindful tasks), noting that “nothing in this book needs to be accepted on faith.” And Martin Seligman’s pioneering efforts to develop a science of positive psychology have had as their aim a fuller understanding of the conditions and actions that make people happy and their lives meaningful.

Terror Management Theory, another explanation of Religion

Yet what if science shows that there is no meaning to our lives beyond the purposes we create, however lofty and noble? What if death is the end and there is no soul to continue after life? According to psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, in their 2015 book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, the knowledge that we are going to die has been a major driver of human affairs and social institutions. Religion, for example, is at least partially explained by what the authors call terror management theory, which posits that the conflict between our desire to live and our knowledge of our inevitable death creates terror, quelled by the promise of an afterlife. If science takes away humanity’s primary source of terror management, will existential anguish bring civilization to a halt? I think not. We do live on—through our genes, our loves, our friends and our contributions (however modest) to making the world a little bit better today than it was yesterday. Progress is real and meaningful, and we can all participate.

(Michael Shermer, Scientific American, August 2015)



I.33. Jesus Is an AnarchistA Free-Market, Libertarian Anarchist, That Is — Otherwise What Is Called an Anarcho-Capitalist14

James Redford' - December 4, 2011

It is the purpose of this document to demonstrate the above claim, and if you are a Christian then I submit that it should be your task to honestly consider what is presented here, for if the above claim comes as a surprise then I will show that what you thought you knew about Jesus was not the whole story — Jesus is far more radical than many would have you believe, and for good reason: it threatens the status quo.

For the consequence of this truth becoming understood and accepted by even one- tenth of the population would be quite dramatic indeed: governments would topple like so many dominoes. As the 16th century Frenchman Etienne de La Boetie observed in his Discourse of Voluntary Servitude q all governments ultimately rest on the consent of the governed, even totalitarian dictatorships. Now this "consent" does not have to be in the form of active promotion and support of the State, it could simply be in the form of hopeless resignation, such as accepting the canard "nothing's as sure as death and taxes." All governments can only exist because the majority — in one form or other — accept them as at least being inevitable. They believe in the deception that even though government may be evil that it is nevertheless a necessary evil, and therefore cannot conceive of a better alternative. But if such were true then Jesus Christ's whole message is a fallacy. But such is not the truth, there is an alternative: liberty. And I will show that Jesus has called us to liberty, and that liberty and Christ's message are incompatible with government.

5 Tax Collection Is a Sin!

A further demonstration that Jesus considers the institution of taxation to be unjust is given in the below story:

As Jesus passed on from there, He saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax office. And He said to him, "Follow Me." So he arose and followed Him. Now it happened, as Jesus sat at the table in the house, that behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with Him and His disciples. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to His disciples, "Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" When Jesus heard that, He said to them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice.' For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance .

It's important to point out here that Jesus actually made a stronger case against the unrighteousness of tax collectors than the Pharisees originally had in questioning Jesus's disciples about it: the Pharisees actually separated the tax collectors from the sinners when they asked "Why does your Teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" Yet when Jesus heard this He answered the Pharisees by lumping the two groups together under the category of sinners — thus: "For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance."

V. On Paul, Romans 13 and Titus 3:1

It is often claimed that Christians are required to submit to government, as this is supposedly what Paul commanded that we are supposed to do in Romans 13. Thus, Paul writes:

Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to

14 First published at <http://anti-state.com> on December 19, 2001. Herein revised and expanded on December 4, 2011. Permission to copy, reprint and/or translate this article without the need for request is hereby granted.



evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. For he is God's minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God's minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. Therefore you must be subject, not only because of wrath but also for conscience' sake. For because of this you also pay taxes, for they are God's ministers attending continually to this very thing. Render therefore to all their due: taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor

But in actual fact Paul never does tell us in the above excerpt from Romans 13 to submit to government! — at least certainly not as they have existed on Earth and are operated by men. In fact, Paul would be an outright, barefaced hypocrite were he to command anyone to do such a thing: for Paul himself did not submit to government, and if he had then he would not even have been alive to be able to write Romans 13. It is quite a good thing that Paul did disobey government, as we would not even know of a Paul in the Bible had he not disobeyed government. As when Paul was still known as Saul of Tarsus he escaped from the city of Damascus as he knew that the governor of that city, acting under the authority of Aretas the king, was coming with a garrison to arrest him in order that he be executed. This was right after Saul's conversion to Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus. The Jews in Damascus, hearing of Saul's conversion, plotted to kill him as a traitor to their cause in persecuting the Christians. Saul was let out of a window in the wall of Damascus under cover of night by some fellow disciples in Christ]^] In none of Paul's later writings does he dispraise, or disassociate himself from, these actions that he took in knowingly and purposely disobeying government: in fact, this very event is one of the things that he later cites in demonstration of his unwavering commitment to Christ! Indeed, ever since Paul's conversion to Jesus Christ, he spent the rest of his entire life in rebellion against mortal governments, and would at last — just as with Jesus before him — be executed by government, in this case by having his head chopped off. Paul was continuously in and out of prisons throughout his entire ministry for preaching the gospel of Christ; he was on five separate occasions lashed with stripes 39 times each by the "authorities" for preaching Christ; he was beaten with rods by the "authorities" for preaching Christ; and none of these rebellions of his did he ever reprehend: indeed he cited them all as evidence of his commitment to Jesus!"

As was explained above, all mortal governments throughout history steal and extort wealth from their subjects which they call "taxes," yet at the same time governments make it illegal for their subjects to steal from each other or from the government. Thus in taxes we see that historically all governments do to their subjects what they outlaw their subjects to do to them. Thus, all Earthly, mortal governments, by levying taxes, break the Golden Rule which Jesus commanded everyone as the supreme law.

In the earlier discussion on Jesus and taxes we learned that when Jesus said "Give on to Caesar that which is Caesar's and give unto the Lord that which is the Lord's" he was, in effect, actually saying that one need not give anything to Caesar: as nothing is rightly his, considering that everything that Caesar has has been taken by theft and extortion.

"Si pretendiéramos vivir según los dictados de la Biblia, esclavizaríamos a la gente, cometeríamos genocidio o limpieza étnica"

-Fiona debe decidir sobre la separación de unos hermanos siameses para que uno sobreviva, contra el deseo de unos padres católicos; después, sobre una transfusión de sangre para salvar a un testigo de Jehová. ¿Hasta qué punto es el libro una defensa del ateísmo?

-Las religiones, los textos sagrados, no son buenas guías para el comportamiento moral. Si pretendieras vivir según los dictados de la Biblia, por ejemplo, esclavizarías a la gente, cometerías genocidio o limpieza étnica. Muchos cristianos leen la Biblia selectivamente. Toman lo que parece prudente y rechazan eso otro. Y hacerlo implica operar en otro sistema moral diferente al de la Biblia; uno superior, de hecho. Las religiones han tratado de persuadirnos de que Dios es la fuente de la moralidad. Pero ese no puede ser el caso si para corregirla debemos recurrir a otra fuente. Entonces, ¿cuál es la base de nuestras decisiones morales? La ley secular es una fuerza moral superior a cualquier religión. Pero me fascina cuando se produce ese choque entre la fe, sincera y devota, y la ley.



(La Nación , Martes 6 de Diciembre de 2016)

I.34. Religión y violencia

Parece paradójico, pero, en pleno siglo XXI, pocos temas son más importantes para la agenda global que la vinculación entre religión y violencia.

Si se piensa en esa vinculación, es imposible olvidar que el año 2015 quedó enmarcado por dos atentados en París, tal vez la ciudad más simbólica de Occidente. El 7 de enero doce personas murieron en el ataque contra Charlie Hebdo. Más recientemente, el 13 de noviembre, 137 personas murieron en múltiples ataques. Sin embargo, poner el foco en los atentados que se producen en Occidente es adoptar una visión sesgada y parcial de un fenómeno que, en realidad, es absolutamente global.

Según el Índice de Terrorismo Global 2015, el 78% de los ataques terroristas del año pasado con alguna raíz religiosa tuvo lugar en apenas cinco países: Irak, Afganistán, Nigeria, Pakistán y Siria. Y en esos mismos países ocurrió el 80% de los atentados de 2013. La tendencia es clara: la amplia mayoría de las víctimas de los ataques terroristas no son ni cristianos ni judíos; son musulmanes. El terrorismo es un fenómeno altamente concentrado en lo geográfico y en lo religioso(…)

Ivan Petrella (La Nación, Domingo 20 de diciembre de 2015)

I.35. Internalization of beliefs during childhood

Which can form and shape our beliefs in different domains. Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said that "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." Political beliefs depend most strongly on the political beliefs most common in the community where we live. Most individuals believe the religion they were taught in childhood.

Wikipedia

I.36. Dawkins

No, no es exactamente lo mismo. En un sentido trivial, religión y ciencia son compatibles, en tanto que existen los científicos religiosos. Pero, por otro lado, algunos de los científicos que se presentan como religiosos no tienen fe en el sentido de los que creen en un Dios personal, sino que son creyentes en un sentido similar al que tenía Albert Einstein, que decía: “Yo creo en el Dios de Spinoza, que se revela en armonía con todo lo que existe, y no en un Dios preocupado por el destino y las acciones de la humanidad”. De manera que, del modo que yo lo veo, religión y ciencia son totalmente incompatibles. Aún los científicos que sí creen en un Dios personal solo logran esa proeza levantando barreras mentales entre áreas imposibles de ser compatibilizadas. (Noticias, 31 de agosto de 2015)

I.37. Nice Guys Finish First

The hot new theory that says generous people do better at work than selfish ones.By Seth Stevenson

Grant, at 32 years old, is already a major star in the world of organizational psychology.

Grant divides the typical workplace into three types of people: takers, matchers, and givers. Takers are those selfish folks who always have a sharky angle and forever put their personal interests ahead of everybody else’s. Matchers (the bulk of us) view the world in terms of fairness and balanced ledgers—I scratch your back, with the unstated but firm understanding that at some point you will scratch mine. Givers, by contrast, perform all sorts of selfless acts with no expectation of reciprocity. They tirelessly pitch in for their colleagues, eagerly mentor their underlings, and regularly prioritize other people’s needs above their own.



Meanwhile, givers construct valuable networks out of all the grateful colleagues who correctly perceive them as selfless and agenda-less. Givers share credit without demanding any in return, which spurs co-workers to flock to their projects. Their generosity earns them deep and lasting respect, which translates into potency. When a taker suggests an idea, others are naturally skeptical—what’s in it for her? But when a known giver has a notion, people are willing to get on board out of a sense that it must come from a place of genuine good will.

The negative impact of a taker is double or triple the positive impact of a giver. With one taker on a team, you begin to notice that paranoia spreads and people hold back out of fear that they'll be exploited.”

(Slate. Sunday, June 1, 2014)

(Therefore surely reciprocity, and very probably altruism, are successful survival strategies and lay the ground for the appearance of religions and morality. E.H.)

I.38. Wittgenstein & Postmodern Biblical Scholarship

Dear Editor: Van Harvey’s article on ‘Wittgenstein & Postmodern Biblical Scholarship’ in Issue 107 was a gem of clarity, and extremely welcome given the often slapdash application of philosophical ideas and trends to Biblical criticism. There is a paragraph in Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value that is very pertinent to issues Harvey raises concerning critical historical scholarship:

“Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative; rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it. – There is nothing paradoxical about that!”

As usual, Wittgenstein has distilled an entire thesis into one

paragraph. David Clarke, Hobart, Tasmania

(Philosophy Now, Oct/Nov 2015)

• Inquisition ends in Spain (1834), after 600 years of state-sanctioned torture and death for any individual accused of heresy.

• William Tyndale, New Testament publisher, executed for heresy, in England. (1536)

I.39. “What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us l"

Finally, in the court of Naples arose that most formidable of all critical engines, the critique of established ecclesiastical traditions and spurious historical documents. Valla by one vigorous effort destroyed the False Decretals and exposed the Donation of Constantine to ridicule, paving the way for the polemic carried on against the dubious pretensions of the papal throne by scholars of the Reformation. A similar criticism, conducted less on lines of erudition than of persiflage and irony, ransacked the moral abuses of the church and played around the very foundations of Christianity. This was tolerated with approval by men who repeated Leo X.'s witty epigram: “What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us l" The same critical and philosophic spirit working on the materials of history produced a new science, the honours of which belong to Machiavelli. He showed, on the one side, how the history of a people can be written with a recognition of fixed principles, and at the same time with an artistic feeling for personal and dramatic episodes. On the other side, he addressed himself to the analysis of man considered as a political being, to the anatomy of constitutions and the classification of governments, to the study of motives underlying public action, the secrets of success and the causes of failure in the conduct of affairs. The unscrupulous rigour with which he



applied his scientific method, and the sinister deductions he thought himself justified in drawing from the results it yielded, excited terror and repulsion. Nevertheless, a department had been added to the intellectual empire of mankind, in which fellow-workers, like Guicciardini at Florence, and subsequently Sarpi at Venice, were not slow to follow the path traced by Machiavelli. (Encyclopædia Britannica)

I.40. Theory of mimetic desire´ concerning the role of imitation in human behavior (Girard15)

Atheism, Religion & Morality

A new study strongly indicates a negative correlation between religious belief and altruistic behaviour. “Overall, our findings … contradict the common sense and popular assumption that children from religious households are more altruistic and kind towards others,” concluded the authors of ‘The Negative Association Between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism Across the World’, published in Current Biology at the beginning of November. Academics from seven universities across the world conducted the study of 1,200 children aged between 5 and 12, in the US, Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey and South Africa from different belief backgrounds. Almost 24% were Christian, 43% Muslim, and 27.6% non-religious. The numbers of Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and other children were too small to be statistically cogent.

The children were asked to choose stickers and then told there weren’t enough for all children in their school, to see if they would share. Also their responses to film clips of children pushing and knocking one another were noted. The authors claim the results “robustly demonstrate that children from households identifying as either of the two major world religions (Christianity and Islam) were less altruistic than children from non-religious households.” Older children, i.e. those with a longer exposure to religion, “exhibit[ed] the greatest negative relations.”

Non-intuitive institutions will drift towards greater intuitiveness.

Popular images and understandings of the rules of non- intuitive institutions will drift towards greater intuitiveness; that is, over time (if countervailing actions are not taken) subjects will be more likely to recall intuition-confirming parts of institutions and mould initially intuition-disconfirming rules into a format that matches intuitions.One example of this comes from religious institutions and, in particular, Max Weber’s classical account of the rise of capitalism (Weber, 2002). Before the reformation, Christians could secure salvation by submitting themselves to the authority of the Catholic Church16. After the reformation, this possibility was closed and, instead, the dominant theological paradigm described how certain people were predestined to become saved. With predestination, the normal response to a problem as psychologically significant as the prospect of eternal damnation, i.e. action, was effectively removed. As a result, at the popular level, the theological institution of predestination quickly drifted into the more intuitive informal institution of looking for signs for salvation in the form of success in the current life. Through success and, hence, hard work, one could then ‘reveal’ oneself as chosen for salvation.

I.41. The Humanities and Science Share the Virtues of Empiricism and Skepticism

Reason, empiricism and skepticism are not virtues of science alone

In the late 20th century the humanities took a turn toward postmodern deconstruction and the belief that there is no objective reality to be discovered. To believe in such quaint notions as scientific progress was to be guilty of “scientism,” properly said with a snarl. In 1996 New York University physicist Alan Sokal punctured these pretensions with his now famous article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” chockablock full of postmodern phrases and

15 René Girard, French philosopher and cultural anthropologist, was Emeritus Professor of French Language, Literature & Civilization at Stanford.16 And securing salvation by buying Indulgencies from which the market for xxx with a network of retailers evolved.



deconstructionist tropes interspersed with scientific jargon, which he subsequently admitted were nonsensical gibberish.

Indeed, I had forgotten the story he recounted of Italian philologist Lorenzo Valla, who in 1440 exposed the Latin document Donatio Constantini—the Donation of Constantine, which was used by the Catholic Church to legitimize its land grab of the Western Roman Empire—as a fake. “Valla used historical, linguistic and philological evidence, including counterfactual reasoning, to rebut the document,” Bod explained. “One of the strongest pieces of evidence he came up with was lexical and grammatical: Valla found words and constructions in the document that could not possibly have been used by anyone from the time of Emperor Constantine I, at the beginning of the fourth century A.D. The late Latin word Feudum, for example, referred to the feudal system. But this was a medieval invention, which did not exist before the seventh century a.d.” Valla's methods were those of science, Bod emphasized: “He was skeptical, he was empirical, he drew a hypothesis, he was rational, he used very abstract reasoning (even counterfactual reasoning), he used textual phenomena as evidence, and he laid the foundations for one of the most successful theories: stemmatic philology, which can derive the original archetype text from extant copies (in fact, the much later DNA analysis was based on stemmatic philology).”

Inspired by Valla's philological analysis of the Bible, Dutch humanist Erasmus employed these same empirical techniques to demonstrate that, for example, the concept of the Trinity did not appear in bibles before the 11th century. In 1606 Leiden University professor Joseph Justus Scaliger published a philological reconstruction of the ancient Egyptian dynasties, finding that the earliest one, dating to 5285 b.c., predated the Bible's chronology for the creation of the world by nearly 1,300 years. This led later scholars such as Baruch Spinoza to reject the Bible as a reliable historical document.

Regardless of which university building scholars inhabit, we are all working toward the same goal of improving our understanding of the true nature of things, and that is the way of both the sciences and the humanities, a scientia humanitatis.

(Michael Shermer, Scientific American June 1, 2015)

I.42. In search of the ungodly

Two books offer fresh views on humanism

ALONGSIDE angst vampires and “mummy porn”, godlessness has offered a reliable leg-up onto the bestseller list. These days, however, the market for antireligious tracts is sufficiently crowded that any new entrant needs a unique selling point. Two new books, from a philosopher and a primatologist, hope to inject something fresh into the argument. “The God Argument”, by A.C. Grayling, a British philosopher, is concerned with tone. Other writers about religion, such as Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris, pour out heated criticism. Mr Grayling promises to turn down the temperature. He claims (somewhat dubiously) to have written the first book “thoroughly and calmly to examine all the arguments offered in support of religious beliefs”, without the ill-temper that so often characterises many of these debates.

The first half of his book attacks both the human institution of religion and the intellectual idea of a God, or of supernatural beings in general. Mr Grayling is precise and incisive. He rattles through the standard arguments against the existence of God, and does a capable job of demolishing those put forward in the hope of proving a deity’s existence.

Yet his dispassionate approach has its drawbacks. Mr Grayling’s attack on religion is a competent piece of popular philosophy. But as a piece of proselytising, it is somewhat wide of the mark. Mr Grayling may be correct, for instance, that the “ontological argument” (which aims to prove the necessity of God’s existence through some creative arguments about the meaning of the word “greater”) is logically dubious. But few



religious people base their beliefs on such rarefied reflection, a point that Mr Grayling himself concedes. The fact that his language is often austere and abstract, and peppered with the jargon of academic philosophy, merely compounds the problem.

The second half of the book, in which Mr Grayling sets out his take on the ethical system known as humanism, is more likely to win converts. Religious apologists frequently argue that morality would collapse in the absence of a God to enforce it. Mr Grayling has no time for such worries. He defines humanism as an approach to life that relies on two premises—that there are no supernatural beings and that ethics must therefore be drawn from human experience. He traces its history from early classical thinkers such as Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius to its revival during the European Renaissance, and shows how its principles can be applied to thorny questions of love, death and how to live a good life. Mr Grayling is a talented apologist. His brand of humanism comes across as sensible, reasonable and characterised by a generosity of spirit that is often absent from religious strictures, many of which involve compiling lists of what is forbidden and dreaming up creatively horrendous punishments for those who fall short.

If Mr Grayling’s book is overly donnish, Frans de Waal’s is the opposite. A primatologist who has spent his career studying chimpanzees and bonobos, two of humanity’s closest living relatives, Mr de Waal draws on a lifetime of empirical research. His data provides plenty of evidence that religion is not necessary in order for animals to display something that looks strikingly like human morality.

Readers are told of chimps that, in lab tests, help other chimps obtain food even though there is no benefit in doing so, or even refusing rewards themselves until their troop-mates get some too. Powerful examples also come from the wild: young chimps fetch water for oldsters who cannot manage themselves, for instance, or adopt orphaned youngsters from other families. One troop of wild rhesus monkeys is even recorded as tolerating the serious social faux pas of a trisomic member—in other words, one with three copies of one chromosome, a condition that in humans is called Down’s syndrome.

Mr de Waal’s central concern is to attack the idea that what humans call morality stands apart from, and above, anything found in the “lower” animals. Most people, he notes, accept that their bodies evolved from those of man’s predecessors, but the conceits of religion and philosophy make it much harder to accept that the same is true of human minds and behaviour, no matter how good the evidence.

Human ethical codes, on this reading, arise from ancient social behaviours. Different versions of this can be found in a variety of animals, from chimps and bonobos to dogs. For Mr de Waal, religion is a natural consequence of combining the built-in behaviours of an intelligent, sociable ape with strong dominance hierarchies (God, on this reading, being the ultimate alpha male) and an unusually big brain, finely tuned to find patterns and assume cause and effect even when they are not actually there.

He has little patience for the sort of confident, assertive atheism championed by Mr Grayling, seeing it as tilting hopelessly against human nature. It is here that Mr de Waal’s book is at its weakest. His sophisticated interpretation of religion seems to make it hard for him to imagine that other people can take it literally. He compares the “neo-atheists” to people standing outside a cinema, earnestly pointing out that Leonardo DiCaprio did not really go down with the Titanic—in other words, a crowd of crashing bores spoiling the fun by stating the obvious to people who know better than to take a film as gospel truth. Mr de Waal has the more convincing argument, but Mr Grayling is the better rhetorician.

(The Economist, Apr 6th 2013)

I.43. El horror de lanzar religión y política a la batalla final

Debates: ¿Recrudece el choque de civilizaciones?.Horacio Esteban Correa



El Papa Francisco declaró ante los atentados terroristas en París que usar el nombre de Dios para matar es una blasfemia. Está reafirmando lo que señaló su antecesor en Ratisbona, Benedicto XVI, cuando destacó el encuentro entre el emperador bizantino y un ilustrado musulmán. El bizantino, teniendo en cuenta que Constantinopla estaba rodeada por los ejércitos musulmanes, señaló: “religión que mata en nombre de Dios no es verdadera religión”.

Y aquí, el problema de cómo comprender valores y tradiciones vigentes que están más ligadas a una suerte de caballeros jedi o secta sith, que a ejércitos modernos regulares. Que posee conceptos donde la yihad (palabra derivada del verbo yahada que quiere decir esfuerzo, en principio esfuerzo espiritual para ser mejor) puede convertirse por un límite tenue en la justificación para el combate militar, pero más aún, en tácticas de terror que muestran signos de barbarie, que en ciertas acepciones de la lengua árabe, tawwasuf, significa virtud rústica y original.

Que morir tiene una connotación de cumplir una deuda, derivada del verbo wafay, que quiere decir “completarse”, “pagar deuda con la vida que Dios nos dio”. En pasado tawafay significa cumplió, pagó, saldó la deuda. El ISIS ha recortado y sesgado infinidad de conceptos teológicos del islam, que es una gran tradición cultural y filosófica de la humanidad, ya que al decir del arabista Maíllo Salgado, el islam tuvo una vocación de religión de síntesis desde las palabras e inferencias de Mahoma, y luego con su fulminante expansión en sus primeros años.

Esos conceptos han sido resignificados, para configurar una estrategia que nutra las operaciones de táctica terrorista. En términos junguianos, el ISIS ha recortado el arquetipo en un estereotipo funcional a su estrategia.

Los ataques en Francia, país que posee una gran población musulmana, tienen como objeto polarizar el mundo entre cristianos y musulmanes, aumentar la islamofobia y definir la batalla final.

La polarización llevará a definir los contendientes y lograr terminar con la fitna (la división primigenia de los musulmanes entre sunnitas y chiítas, provocada por shaitan, satanás) y así bajo un solo liderazgo, recobrar la fitrah (esencia de las cosas y su unidad) primigenia.

Existe una profecía islámica, que es utilizada por el ISIS; la batalla final de Dabiq, donde los musulmanes enfrentarán a una horda de infieles con sus ochenta banderas. Dabiq queda en Siria, el ejército islámico es el ISIS y la posible coalición internacional, la horda de infieles. Sobrevendrá una derrota para el ejército islámico, pero luego la victoria emergerá por obra de Dios.

Quizá haciendo cumplir las palabras de Gadafi, sobre que la demografía musulmana supere rápidamente a la europea y que en pocas décadas Europa será musulmana sin necesidad de armas, secuestros o ataques terroristas.

El presidente de Francia ha dicho que el país está en guerra. Aquí, Jung señalaba que en la guerra la “sombra inconsciente” emerge y todo nuestro odio, bajezas y defectos se proyectan en el otro ya convertido en enemigo objetivo. Todas nuestras miserias encuentran un campo fértil en la guerra para hacer lo que nunca hemos hecho, lo inconfesable de nuestras miserias. Parafraseando a la saga de Star Wars, entramos en el lado oscuro y de él es muy difícil salir.

El componente de alta estrategia del ISIS, además, incorpora valores extraídos de una gran tradición religiosa. Esto agrega otro tópico, una convicción moral, ligada con la idea tribal arquetípica, que da una cohesión de la que pocos ejércitos pueden ufanarse.

De esta manera, el ISIS aprovecha los múltiples estereotipos que existen sobre el islam y los usa a su favor. Así, la polarización y la guerra aparecen irrefrenables. “Cuando política y religión van de la mano una tormenta asoma en el mundo” señaló Frank Herbert, autor del libro “Dunas”.



(Clarin.com, 29/11/15)

I.44. Religion and altruism

Far from bolstering generosity, a religious upbringing diminishes it AN ARGUMENT often advanced for the encouragement of religion is that, to paraphrase St Matthew’s report of Jesus’s words, it leads people to love their neighbours as themselves. That would be a powerful point were it true. But is it? This was the question Jean Decety, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, asked in a study just published in Current Biology.

Dr Decety is not the first to wonder, in a scientific way, about the connection between religion and altruism. He is, though, one of the first to do it without recourse to that standard but peculiar laboratory animal beloved of psychologists, the undergraduate student. Instead, he collaborated with researchers in Canada, China, Jordan, South Africa and Turkey, as well as with fellow Americans, to look at children aged between five and 12 and their families.

Altogether, Dr Decety and his colleagues recruited 1,170 families for their project, and focused on one child per family. Five hundred and ten of their volunteer families described themselves as Muslim, 280 as Christian, 29 as Jewish, 18 as Buddhist and 5 as Hindu. A further 323 said they were non-religious, 3 were agnostic and 2 ticked the box marked “other”.

Follow-up questions to the faithful among the sample then asked how often they engaged in religious activities, and also about spirituality in the home. That let Dr Decety calculate how religious each family was. He found that about half the children in religious households came from highly observant homes; the spiritual lives of the other half were more relaxed. He then arranged for the children to play a version of what is known to psychologists as the dictator game—an activity they use to measure altruism.

In truth, the dictator game is not much of a game, since only one of the participants actually plays it. In Dr Decety’s version, each child was presented with a collection of 30 attractive stickers and told that he or she could keep ten of them. Once a child had made his selection, the experimenter told him that there was not time to play the game with all the children at the school, but that he could, if he wished, give away some of his ten stickers to a random schoolmate who would not otherwise be able to take part. The child was then given a few minutes to decide whether he wanted to give up some of his stickers—and, if so, how many. The researchers used the number of stickers surrendered as a measure of altruism.

The upshot was that the children of non-believers were significantly more generous than those of believers. They gave away an average of 4.1 stickers. Children from a religious background gave away 3.3. And a further analysis of the two largest religious groups (Jews, Buddhists and Hindus were excluded because of their small numbers in the sample), showed no statistical difference between them. Muslim children gave away 3.2 stickers on average, while Christian children gave away 3.3. Moreover, a regression analysis on these groups of children showed that their generosity was inversely correlated with their households’ religiosity. This effect remained regardless of a family’s wealth and status (rich children were more generous than poor ones), a child’s age (older children were more generous than younger ones) or the nationality of the participant. These findings are, however, in marked contrast to parents’ assessments of their own children’s sensitivity to injustice. When asked, religious parents reported their children to be more sensitive than non-believing parents did.

This is only one result, of course. It would need to be replicated before strong conclusions could be drawn. But it is suggestive. And what it suggests is not only that what is preached by religion is not always what is practised, which would not be a surprise, but that in some unknown way the preaching makes things worse.

(The Economist, Nov 7th 2015)



I.45. La generosidad es un hábito innato

La creencia de que los niños son más egoístas y poco interesados en los demás es desmentida en un estudio. Pero si la solidaridad no se estimula, se puede perder.

Dar y compartir sin esperar necesariamente nada a cambio no solo es un eslogan apropiado para tarjetas de regalo o repetido en fechas especiales como Navidad, siempre asociada al espíritu solidario. En realidad, la generosidad estaría presente siempre en cada persona y desde muy pequeños. Sin embargo, también es increíblemente fácil que se diluya con el tiempo. Para que este rasgo se fortalezca y permanezca, debe ser estimulado.

"Los niños tienen la reputación de ser egoístas y no muy generosos. Pero estudios recientes han demostrado que incluso los bebés son sensibles a las inequidades y que los preescolares ya tienen la habilidad de actuar en beneficio de otros. Mientras el niño va creciendo muestra también un incremento de generosidad", explica al diario chileno El Mercurio el neurocientífico francés Jean Decety.

Como profesor de psicología y psiquiatría en la Universidad de Chicago, Estados Unidos, Decety lleva años estudiando el tema, y recientemente publicó un nuevo estudio —en diciembre pasado en la revista especializada Current Biology—, en el que sugiere que en la edad preescolar las conductas generosas requieren de un proceso de pensamiento controlado.

"A los niños les toma más realizar una evaluación moral automática y, por ende, actuar con generosidad y compartir", pero no les es imposible, precisa.

Para descubrir de dónde viene la generosidad, Decety y sus colegas analizaron la actividad cerebral de un grupo de 57 niños de 3 a 5 años mientras observaban dibujos animados que promovían actitudes positivas y otras negativas.

Luego les dieron 10 imágenes autoadhesivas como regalo. El truco vino después: se les preguntó si deseaban regalar alguno de sus stickers a otro niño que no tenía ninguno. En promedio, los chicos del experimento compartieron un máximo de dos de sus autoadhesivos (en esas edades la generosidad no está aún muy desarrollada), sobre todo después de ver los cortos animados con acciones positivas. Sus ondas neuronales indicaban que los juicios morales que habían hecho dependían de una combinación de un procesamiento automático previo mientras observaban los videos donde aparecían escenas de ayuda o en las que se perjudicaba a alguien (ejemplo), más una reevaluación posterior y más reflexiva de esas escenas.

Los resultados son esperanzadores para los padres que tratan de razonar con los más pequeños para hacerles más generosos. A la larga esta paciente labor tiene sus frutos, como acaba de demostrar la neurociencia.

De hecho, la conclusión del estudio proporciona una evidencia de que animar a los niños a reflexionar sobre el comportamiento moral de otros fomenta la generosidad.

El tema del desarrollo moral, de la generosidad y la cooperación ha tenido un auge en los últimos diez a quince años, como explica el psicólogo Felipe Lecannelier, director académico del Centro de Apego y Regulación Emocional (CARE), de la chilena Universidad del Desarrollo. "Las teorías tradicionales del desarrollo infantil planteaban que el niño inicia su vida en una etapa de egocentrismo, y posteriormente, debido a las influencias de la familia y la cultura, aprendía la generosidad, la empatía y la cooperación", agrega.

Pero la evidencia actual muestra que ocurre lo opuesto: la cooperación y la generosidad son aspectos implícitos, naturales y automáticos en el ser humano. "La aproximación actual es que más bien se desaprende la generosidad, por ciertas condiciones ambientales y familiares", dice Lecannelier.



La tarea es, entonces, fomentar esta conducta innata. Y nada mejor que con el ejemplo. "Ciertas épocas, como la navideña, pueden ser una buena instancia para inculcar en los hijos el hábito de dar —sugiere Decety—. Al alentar en ellos una reflexión sobre el comportamiento moral con otros, podemos ser capaces de fomentar la generosidad".

Lecannelier recuerda que en los temas de la crianza importa más la coherencia de lo que uno hace con lo que uno dice. "Un padre puede decirle a su hijo muchas veces que tiene que ser generoso, pero si el niño no observa eso en la cotidianidad de la conducta paterna, no tendrá el efecto deseado".

Asimismo, hay que evitar conductas que jueguen en contra. "Si el padre se propone enseñar al niño a que sea generoso (o si está constantemente reforzando positivamente con regalos, por ejemplo), podría provocar el efecto contrario", puntualiza el psicólogo.

I.46. Superstition

Superstition is the belief in supernatural causality—that one event causes another without any natural process linking the two events—such as astrology, religion, omens, witchcraft, prophecies, etc., that contradicts natural science.

I.46.1. Superstition and religion

See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion, Evolutionary origin of religions, affluence spurs the rise of Modern Religions (Baumard, 2015), Roots of Morality and compasion in animals and primates (Peterson, 2011)

In his Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther (who called the papacy "that fountain and source of all superstitions") accuses the popes of superstition:"For there was scarce another of the celebrated bishoprics that had so few learned pontiffs; only in violence, intrigue, and superstition has it hitherto surpassed the rest. For the men who occupied the Roman See a thousand years ago differ so vastly from those who have since come into power, that one is compelled to refuse the name of Roman pontiff either to the former or to the latter.” (What would Luther say today? E.H.)

As discussed above, there is a thin line of distinction between the concept of superstition and religion. What is fully accepted as genuine religious statement may be seen as poor superstition by those who do not share the same faith. Since there are no generally agreed proper or accepted religious standards among people of different cultural backgrounds, the very notion of what is a superstitious behavior is relative to local culture. In this sense, Christian theology will interpret African cults as pure superstition while an evangelical Christian will see as meaningless the Catholic ritual of crossing oneself (the Sign of the cross) when going by a church. With the development of folklore studies in the late 18th century, use of the derogatory term superstition was sometimes replaced by the neutral term "folk belief", an attempt to go over local cultural biases. Both terms remain in use; thus, describing a practice such as the crossing fingers to nullify a promise as "folk belief" implies a neutral description from the perspective of ethnology or folklore studies, while calling the same thing a "superstition" implies its rejection as irrational. Magical thinking, Placebo and Effective theory.

I.46.2. Reinforcement schedule and partial reinforcement effectsSkinner´s conception of the reinforcement schedule has been used to explain superstitious behaviour in humans.

Compared to the other reinforcement schedules (e.g., fixed ratio, fixed interval), these behaviours were also the most resistant to extinction. This is called the partial reinforcement effect, and this has been used to explain superstitious behaviour in humans. To be more precise, this effect means that, whenever an individual performs an action expecting a reinforcement, and none seems forthcoming, it actually creates a



sense of persistence within the individual. This strongly parallels superstitious behaviour in humans because the individual feels that, by continuing this action, reinforcement will happen; or that reinforcement has come at certain times in the past as a result of this action, although not all the time, but this may be one of those times. (you can never lose, but, perhaps it is possible that, sometimes, you can win. It is a no-lose situation. Therefore, not bad as a survival strategy. E.H.)

From a simpler perspective, natural selection will tend to reinforce a tendency to generate weak associations. If there is a strong survival advantage to making correct associations, then this will outweigh the negatives of making many incorrect, "superstitious" associations. (Wikipedia)17

I.47. Church of the poor judgment

Who will rid me of these troublesome auditors?

THE Vatican is an oddity: a state within a city that is the capital of another state. Seldom have the anomalous relationships between the Vatican, Rome and Italy been more in evidence than this week. On November 5th, two books came out in Italy that included the latest in a long series of eyebrow-raising revelations about the Vatican’s finances. Both draw on leaks from confidential reports prepared for Pope Francis and his predecessor, Benedict XVI, as part of a drive to clean up the Vatican’s act (not least in order to comply with international regulations on money-laundering and the funding of terrorism).

Three days before publication, the papal spokesman revealed that detectives of the Vatican Gendarmerie had traced the origin of the leaks and locked up two former members of a committee established by Francis to advise him on restructuring his financial bureaucracy. Francesca Chaouqui, a public-relations executive who denies any wrongdoing, was let go after being detained overnight in a convent. But a senior Vatican prelate, Lucio Ángel Vallejo Balda, was still being held as The Economist went to press. (He has been detained in the same lock-up in which the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, was confined in 2012, after he was fingered as the source of the last big leak of embarrassing Vatican secrets.) Neither Ms Chaouqui, an Italian, nor Monsignor Vallejo, a Spaniard, has Vatican citizenship. But the pope’s prosecutor claims jurisdiction over their alleged offences. If indicted, they risk up to eight years in jail.

The books’ allegations may trouble the consciences of the Catholic church’s leaders. They hardly square with the church of (and for) the poor that Francis says he seeks. One of the authors claims the Holy See’s real-estate holdings, not including church properties such as cathedrals, are worth at least €4 billion ($4.4 billion). He also says a fund for the care of sick children paid €200,000 towards the conversion of a cardinal’s penthouse apartment and €23,800 to charter a helicopter for him.

Other disclosures bear on the Vatican’s relationship with Italy. According to a leaked auditors’ report, the Vatican earns €60m a year selling petrol, cigarettes and other products at below-market prices in Italy. They should be available only to the city-state’s citizens, yet more than 40,000 Italians are said to have cards giving them access to the shops beyond the Vatican’s walls. One of the books reports a request from Italian prosecutors for information on a named individual suspected of hiding taxable assets in the Vatican bank. (Vatican officials insist all accounts opened without good reason by lay Italians are now blocked.)

While the city-state can be a thorn in the side of Italy and its capital, it can also be a blessing, both spiritually and fiscally. Every 25 years, by tradition, the Vatican declares a holy year, or “jubilee”, which attracts millions of pilgrims and pours money into Roman coffers. Popes can also declare jubilees in intervening years, as Francis has done. This extraordinary jubilee is due to start on December 8th.

Yet even this windfall can become a burden. Francis’s announcement of the jubilee took Rome’s government by surprise. The city administration is already plagued by corruption and deficient public services; with just a month to go, it is woefully unprepared for a deluge of new tourists. On October 30th, more than half the city’s councillors resigned to oust the mayor, Ignazio Marino, who was accused of (and

17 B.F. Skinner published an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology



denies) fiddling his expenses. He has been replaced by a government-appointed commissioner. The central theme of all jubilees is pardon. Quite a lot may be needed in the Vatican, as in Italy, in the months ahead.(The Economist, November 7th 2015)

I.48. Consider the idea of God.

We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent ‘mutation ’. In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by the great music and great art. Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that ‘survival value’ here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: what is it about the idea of a god which gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in his world may be rectified in the next. The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is nonetheless effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or ineffective power, in the environment provided by human culture.’

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

Blind faith can justify anything. If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshipping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die— on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader's sword, shot in a Beirut Street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith.'4

I.49. InterrogantesSegún los antropólogos, ya los Neandertales tenían lo que puede considerarse un sentimiento místico. Desde entonces, el mito y la religión se encuentran en todas las culturas. Tal universalidad atrajo el interés de los científicos y en los últimos años se multiplicaron los libros que intentan explicar las creencias y experiencias afines a partir del funcionamiento del cerebro.

La pregunta fundacional de la metafísica expresa una angustia existencial que precede a la civilización y es germen de mitos y religiones desde los albores de la humanidad.

Los antropólogos registran evidencias de que ya hace 160.000 años los Neandertales enterraban intencionalmente a sus muertos, lo que sugeriría que ya existía un pensamiento (¿o sentimiento?) religioso o mitológico de un “más allá”.

Desde entonces hasta hoy, el mito y la religión se encuentran en todas las culturas a partir de una noción de lo sobrenatural y lo ritual, un pensamiento moral y una serie de verdades sagradas. Semejante universalidad no podía dejar de atraer el interés de los científicos.

Entre muchos otros, Michael Shermer en The Believing Brain (“El cerebro que cree”, Robinson, 2011), Andrew Newberg y Eugene D’Aquili en Why God Won’t Go Away. Brain science and the biology of belief. (“Por qué Dios no se irá. La ciencia del cerebro y la biología de las creencias”, Random House, 2001) o el científico Holandés D.F Swaab, en Somos nuestro cerebro: como pensamos, sufrimos y amamos (Plataforma, 2014) plantean hipótesis provocativas a partir de experimentos que alumbran los engranajes internos de la mente.



Para Swaab, la pregunta más interesante acerca de la religión no es si Dios existe, sino por qué tantas personas son religiosas:

Hay alrededor de 10.000 diferentes religiones, cada una de las cuales está convencida de que la suya es la única Verdad y que solo ellos la poseen. […] Alrededor del 64% de la población mundial pertenece al catolicismo, protestantismo, islamismo o hinduismo. Durante muchos años, el comunismo era la única creencia permitida en China […] Pero en 2007, un tercio de los chinos de mas de 16 años dijeron que eran religiosos. Dado que esa cifra viene de un diario controlado por el Estado, el China Daily, el número verdadero de creyentes es probablemente más alto. Alrededor del 95% de los norteamericanos creen en Dios, el 90% reza, el 82% cree en los milagros, mas del 70%, en la vida después de la muerte.

Cuando el Censo Nacional de Población preguntó sobre esta temática. Hace medio siglo, más del 90% se identificaban con el catolicismo. Hoy, este culto sigue siendo mayoría: es la religión que profesa el 76% de la población; un 11% dice ser agnóstico o ateo, y el 11,3%, evangélico. En el estudio de Mallimacci, el 61% dijo que se relacionaba con Dios por su propia cuenta, sin mediación institucional. A este grupo, el científico lo cataloga como “cuentapropistas religiosos”

Según un estudio de Maria Carballo de 2005, hoy son casi 3000 los grupos religiosos inscriptos en la Secretaría de Culto de la Nación. Y a pesar de que hay quienes suponen que el avance de la ciencia y la tecnología destierran la religiosidad, las estadísticas sobre este punto son controvertidas. El estudio de Carballo sugiere que, por el contrario, ésta iría en aumento: en 1984 el 62% de los argentinos se consideraban personas religiosas; en 1991, el 70%; seis años después, el 79% y, en 1999, el 81%. La misma tendencia mostraban quienes opinaban que la religión era muy importante en su vida: pasaron del 40 al 55% entre 1991 y 1999.

Sin embargo, un estudio del Centro de Investigaciones Pew dado a conocer la semana última por el Buenos Aires Herald describe un panorama algo diferente: el número de argentinos que se reconocen como católicos, según este trabajo realizado en toda América Latina entre 2013 y 2014, habría caído un 20% desde 1970, mientras aumentaba el protestantismo evangélico y la población no afiliada a ninguna religión organizada. Los argentinos se encontrarían en el extremo inferior de las estadísticas en términos de cuan importante es la religión en sus vidas, con solo un 43% que la consideran “muy importante”.

La religión también podría generarse a partir de necesidades sociales y morales que, al favorecer la cohesión, habrían otorgado ventajas evolutivas a los grupos humanos.

Aunque nadie tiene evidencia acerca de las historias que sustentan sus respectivas religiones, cerca del 85% de los seres humanos se describen a si mismos como religiosos.Hamer, ex director de la Unidad de Estructura y Regulación Genéticas del Instituto del Cáncer de Estados Unidos, creyó haber identificado uno de esos genes que nos predisponen a cierto nivel de espiritualidad. En su libro El gen de Dios (La Esfera de los Libros,2006), que Golombek comenta en la obra de reciente aparición, afirma que éste codifica para una proteína, la VMAT2 (vesicular monoamine transportes), crucial para muchas funciones cerebrales.

Basándose en estudios de genética del comportamiento, neurobiológicos y psicológicos, Hamer argumenta que la espiritualidad puede ser cuantificada, que la tendencia a ser más o menos religioso es parcialmente heredable, que parte de esa heredabilidad puede ser atribuida a dicho gen y que la selección natural favorece a los individuos más espirituales porque les otorga un sentido del optimismo que los afecta positivamente, tanto en el nivel físico como psicológico. Mas allá de las exageraciones de Hamer, estudios en gemelos parecen indicar que la espiritualidad que predispone a los sentimientos religiosos está genéticamente determinada en un 50%.

Swaab, por su parte, afirma:



La religión es la forma local que se da a nuestros sentimientos espirituales. El ambiente en el que crecemos hace que la religión de nuestros padres se imprima en nuestros circuitos cerebrales durante el desarrollo temprano, de forma similar como lo hace el lenguaje. Mensajeros químicos, como la serotonina, afectan hasta que grado somos espirituales: el número de receptores a este neurotransmisor en el cerebro se correlaciona con grados de espiritualidad. Y sustancias que afectan a esta hormona, como el LSD, la mescalina (obtenida del peyote) y la psicolicibina (de los hongos mágicos) pueden generar experiencias místicas y espirituales.

En The Believing Brain, Shermer es incluso más categórico. Argumenta que “el cerebro es una máquina de creer”. Y no sólo en la existencia de un Dios, sino también en alienígenas, en conspiraciones, en ideas políticas, en la vida después de la muerte, en visiones. Shermer menciona una encuesta norteamericana de 2009 según la cual el 60% cree en demonios, el 42% en fantasmas, el 32% en ovnis, el 26% en la astrología, el 23% en las brujas, y el 20% en la reencarnación. En otra de 2006, realizada por el Reader’s Digest, el 43% de los encuestados afirmaron que podían leer los pensamientos de otras personas, más de la mitad dijeron haber tenido una premonición de algo que después ocurrió, más de dos tercios aseguraron que podían “sentir” cuando alguien los estaba mirando y el 62%, que podía saber quien llamaba antes de atender el teléfono. Shermer escribe:

A partir de datos de los sentidos, el cerebro naturalmente comienza a buscar y encontrar patrones, y luego los llena de contenido. Al primer proceso lo llamo “patronicidad” [patternicity]: la tendencia a encontrar patrones significativos en datos con y sin sentido. Al segundo proceso lo llamo “agencialidad” [agenticity]: la tendencia a atribuir sentido, intención y agencia a los patrones. No podemos evitarlo. Nuestros cerebros evolucionaron para conectar los puntos de nuestro mundo en patrones con significado de explican por que suceden las cosas. Estos patrones de significado se transforman en creencias y estas creencias dan forma a nuestra interpretación de la realidad. […] Una vez que las creencias están establecidas, el cerebro empieza a buscar evidencia que las respalde.

Entre otras múltiples hipótesis, “una de las más rumiadas en los pasillos de la ciencia de la religión es la tendencia innata a ver patrones regulares o intencionales aun allí donde no los hay-coincide Golombek-. La naturaleza no tiene intenciones, ni moral ni propósitos: somos nosotros quienes vemos espejos humanizantes por todos lados.

Otro enfoque explica la persistencia de las creencias religiosas por una necesidad natural de identificación con el grupo de pertenencia. Se atribuye un protagonismo especial en esta propensión a un sistema del cerebro conformado por las “neuronas espejo”, que se activan tanto cuando un individuo actúa como cuando la misma acción es realizada por otro.

(ADN CULTURA, Nora Bär, Viernes 21 de noviembre de 2014)

I.50. Experiments on Babies

baby EEG

Child wearing EEG sensors watches animation

Research by neuroscientists Prof. Jean Decety and Jason Cowell at the University of Chicago, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August, claims to show that infants of between 12 and 24 months already have a moral sense. A series of experiments tested 73 babies and toddlers with respect to moral discernment. In the first experiment, they watched a short cartoon depicting characters engaging in either pro-social behaviours, such as sharing or helping, or antisocial behaviours, such as hitting or shoving. An EEG recorded brain activity and eye monitors showed researchers where the children’s attention was directed while watching the film. Afterwards, the tiny tots were given the choice to play with toys decorated with the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ characters from the film, and the researchers noted which toys the children reached for. The children also played a sharing game to test their altruistic inclinations. Finally,



their parents were asked to complete a questionnaire designed to reveal their and their children’s inclinations to empathy and justice. The results appeared to show that the children’s reaction to the tests was not random, suggesting that they had a sense of the moral issues. Their behaviour was found to be strongly in line with their parents’ values regarding justice and fairness.

(News report by Anja Steinbauer, Philosophy Now, October/November 2015)

I.51. The Evolution of ReligionThe cult of cereology

I had an epiphany myself on this matter, every bit as numinous as the ones that happened to Moses, Saul of Tarsus or Joseph Smith – well, almost. It came in the early 1990s, when I got involved in the controversy over the origin of crop circles. When I first read about neatly circular patterns of flattened wheat and barley appearing in English fields, it seemed obvious to me that they were likely to be man-made. That somebody had found a way to trample corn down in a neat circle as a joke after going to the pub seemed vastly more plausible than that aliens or some unknown physical forces had suddenly materialised in Wiltshire and gone about their business undetected at night, and only in fields of grain close to roads, for no discernible reason. At the very least it should be considered as a null hypothesis.

So I did the sensible thing. I went out and made some crop circles myself, to see how easy it was to do. My second attempt was good enough to fool a local farmer into a state of high excitement. With a sister and two brothers-in-law, I entered a nighttime crop-circle competition organised by some fans of the supernatural and designed to show how hard they were to ‘hoax’. Our results and those of the other teams taking part easily proved the opposite: they were easy to make. Yet the crop-circle craze grew and grew, spawning books, films, guided tours and even an institute of ‘cereology’, with nobody apparently having the courage or the incentive to insist that they were likely to be manmade. Soon some people were making serious money from the cult through books and lectures. The circles were getting more and more elaborate, and more and more obviously man-made. Yet the explanations now focused on things like ley lines, alien spacecraft, plasma vortices, ball lightning, or quantum fields. Some thought they were messages from Gaia to tell humanity to combat global warming. The entire field was pseudoscience of the most blatant kind, as the slightest brush with its bizarre practitioners easily demonstrated.

Imagine, then, my surprise when I wrote about this, gently mocking the irrationality of not thinking they were manmade, and found myself attacked as an idiot for being closed-minded about supernatural causes. The problem was, you see, that I was ignoring the ‘experts’ in crop-circle science who said I was wrong. I found I was treated like a heretic: one or two of the attacks were quite vicious. Journalists working not for tabloids but for Science magazine, and for a television documentary team, meekly repeated the patently false argument of the self-appointed ‘cereologists’ that it was highly implausible that crop circles were all man-made – they imbibed the argument from authority with consummate ease. I learned for the first time about the stunning gullibility of the media, and its unthinking reverence for any voice of self-appointed authority. Put an ‘ology’ after your pseudoscience and you can get journalists to be your tame propagandists. I had watched Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but had not quite taken in how utterly true to life it was.

A television team did the obvious thing – they got a group of students to make some crop circles one night and then asked a top ‘cereologist’, Terence Meaden, if they were ‘genuine’ or ‘hoaxed’ – i.e. man-made. He assured them categorically on camera that they could not have been made by people. So they told him the circles had been made the night before. The man was pole-axed, and left floundering for words. It made great television. Yet even then, the programme’s producer ended the segment by taking the cereologist’s side: of course, not ALL crop circles are hoaxes, only this one. Ye gods!



That same summer, two men called Doug Bower and Dave Chorley confessed to having started the whole craze in 1978 after a night at the pub. They gave dates, times, techniques – plenty of convincing detail. A newspaper commissioned Doug and Dave to make one, then asked another top ‘cereologist’, Pat Delgado, to judge its authenticity. Delgado too made a fool of himself by insisting that the crop circle could not possibly be a ‘hoax’. So did the bubble burst? No. The ‘cereology’ experts promptly went on television to say it was Doug and Dave who were talking nonsense. (Shades of Life of Brianagain: the true messiah denies he’s a messiah.) Everybody just went on believing. In some parts of the country they still do, though I am glad to say the cereologists have gradually faded into obscurity. Even Wikipedia now says crop circles are (mostly) man-made. But the true believers are still out there. A recent book argued that people like me are part of a ‘debunking campaign perpetrated by the British Government, the CIA, the Vatican, and their allies in mass media to brainwash the public’.

I.52. The temptations of superstitionI have never forgotten that experience – it taught me just how ready people are to believe supernatural explanations, to trust ‘experts’ (or prophets) even when they are blatantly phony, to prefer any explanation to the mundane and obvious one, and to treat any sceptic as a heretic to be shouted at rather than an agnostic to be persuaded by reason and evidence.

The central theme of the origin of religions is that they are man-made, like crop circles, but also that they have evolved. They are much more spontaneous phenomena than legend later admits. Like technological innovation, they are the result of selection among variants, of trial and error within cultural experiments. And their characteristics are chosen by their times and places. They are also glimpses into just how gullible we are about prescriptive explanations of the world.

I.53. The climate godBlaise Pascal argued that even if God is very unlikely to exist, you had better go to church just in case, because if he does exist the gain will be infinite, and if he does not the pain will have been finite.

I.54. Diabluras de un molinero quemado en la hogueraVictor Hugo GhittaSe llamó Domenico Scandella, vivió en la región del Friuli en el siglo XVI y ejerció el oficio de molinero. Le decían en el pueblo Mennochio, padeció dos procesos inquisitoriales debido a la vehemencia y franqueza con que expresó su desconfianza en la Iglesia y murió en la hoguera en 1601, quemado vivo por orden del papa Clemente VIII. Como Dios manda. Menuda vida.Sabía leer y escribir, algo poco frecuente en ese tiempo para su condición social, y ese privilegio le regaló el don de la palabra: en la plaza pública o en los talleres de los más variados oficios, allí donde hubiese alguien dispuesto a escucharlo (aunque sucedía a menudo que sus vecinos preferían hacer oídos sordos a sus inconvenientes denuestos), el bueno de Mennochio maldecía a los cuatro vientos. El caso interesó a Carlo Guinzburg, historiador italiano, que en 1976 publicó El queso y los gusanos (reeditado por Ariel), una visión de la ideas que circulaban en las clases subalternas en la Edad Media. El clásico en cuestión, tan bien escrito, es una de las altas cumbres de ese género al que llamamos microhistoria.

(La Nación, Sábado 07 de mayo de 2016)

I.55. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)by Terence Green

Turn your gaze inward

Observe your own finite self



Behold – feeble man.

For much of Montaigne’s life, it was highly fashionable for Protestants and Catholics to kill each other. For a man of delicate sensibilities like Montaigne, the Wars of Religion were altogether distasteful, not to mention just plain inconvenient. Luckily for a man of delicate sensibilities, Montaigne was the heir to a decent fortune, a considerable estate, and a delightful château, and so in 1571 he locked himself away in it and turned his attention to something much more pleasant – namely, himself. For the next ten years, while the men of God dedicated themselves to merciless slaughter, Montaigne sat quietly alone in candid contemplation of all manner of very human foibles. On one of the beams of his study he had engraved the words of the Roman poet Terence, Homo sum humani a me nihil alienum puto (“I am a man; I consider nothing human alien to me”), and with this in mind he proceeded to give an unnervingly frank account of himself. At the end of his decade of reflection, he emerged with the Essays that would ensure his lasting fame. He wrote about sadness, idleness, liars and prognosticators; he considered names, war horses, ancient customs, and the vanity of words; he reflected on cannibals, pedants, crying and solitude; and he spoke of anger, smells, three good women, and thumbs. Few were the corners of human experience into which his torch did not shine. In his Essays, he created a style of writing much imitated ever since, conversing directly and pleasantly to the reader – so much so you feel as if you’re listening to an old friend. A profound admirer of the Stoics and Epicureans, it was as a sceptic that he felt most at home, famously asking himself, ‘Que sais-je?’ (‘What do I know?’). He might have answered, with respect to humanity, a great deal.

© Dr Terence Green 2016

Terence is a peripatetic (though not Peripatetic) writer, historian and lecturer. He holds a PhD in the history of political thought from Columbia University, NYC, and lives with his wife and their dog in Wellington, NZ. He blogs at hardlysurprised.blogspot.co.nz.

(Philosophy Now, June/July 2016)

La Iglesia, entosystema, Public Choice. Igual que los K se apoyan unas castas y grupos corruptos, pedófilos, que son los únicos intermediarios con Dios. Por eso viene la reforma, el evangelismo, por el rechazo a los grupos de control, papisas, Inquisidores, asesinos de herejes e infieles (S. Bartolomé, brujas, científicos, judíos, árabes).

El problema no es la Religión ni Dios, son los funcionarios.

I.56. Prohíben “Blancanieves y los 7 enanitos” por indecenteLa Escuela Internacional SEK, una institución privada española ubicada en Qatar –un Estado soberano árabe ubicado en el oeste de Asia– retiró de su biblioteca el libro de Blancanieves y los siete enanitos porque algunos padres lo catalogaron de indecente, según informó el diario Doha News.

Seguramente, los hermanos Grimm, autores de la versión más famosa de este cuento de hadas, nunca imaginaron que su historia sería vetada a los más pequeños. Pero así lo pensó uno de estos padres cuando se quejó en Twitter de que el libro contenía “imágenes inapropiadas” de “contenido sexual” y añadió que no era un libro para chicos.

Las autoridades del país árabe se hicieron eco de las quejas rápidamente y abrieron una investigación al respecto.

Según informó el diario qatarí, el director de la escuela aseguró que “la escuela ha tomado medidas inmediatas y ha retirado el libro de la biblioteca”. El director añadió que, además, “se han ha revisado y aplicado los procedimientos para asegurar que este tipo de incidente no vuelva a suceder”.



A través del mismo diario, la escuela presentó su disculpas formales “por cualquier ofensa que esta situación pueda haber causado”.

(Clarin.com, 22/01/2016)

I.57. In the hands of an angry God

Belief in divine punishment may be inherent and a useful evolutionary adaptation, helping humans overcome selfishness

But Dominic Johnson argues in “God Is Watching You”, belief in God—specifically, in supernatural forces that can punish—is a useful evolutionary adaptation.Mr Johnson has doctorates both in evolutionary biology, where most of the research in the belief instinct has been done, and political science. He assembles well-known features of the mind in a tidy case. Human brains have a “hyperactive agency-detector device”, seeing agents (spirits, gods and the like) in natural phenomena and random happenings. This is useful. There is little harm if you overreact to something that turns out not to exist. But underestimating a rustling in the undergrowth, which might conceal a predator, could be fatal, leading to evolutionary selection of a tendency to see agents everywhere.

Another component in the belief instinct is a belief in justice, the idea that most people get what they deserve. (This may be one reason why even 30% of those Americans unaffiliated with any church nonetheless believe in punishment in hell.) A third factor is the tendency in most people to put greater emphasis on punishment than on reward: losing $100 is far more painful than winning the same amount is pleasing.

Mr Johnson brings his political science into the picture by arguing that societies which punish cheaters are more likely to survive and grow. He quotes John Locke, a 17th-century English philosopher: “Those who deny the existence of the Deity are not to be tolerated at all. Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon or sanctity for an atheist.” Those bonds and covenants allow societies to co-ordinate action and plan for the future.

“Learning religion is part of human nature. Learning science is a battle against human nature.”

(The Economist, January 23rd 2016)

I.58. A moral Starting Point

How science can inform ethics

Why is it wrong to enslave or torture other humans, or take their property, or discriminate against them? That these actions are wrong, almost no one disputes. But why are they wrong?

For an answer, most people turn to 1) religion (because God says so), or 2) to philosophy (because rights theory says so), or 3) to political theory (because the social contract says so). In The Moral Arc, published in January, I show how 4) science may also contribute an answer. My moral starting point is the survival and flourishing of sentient beings. By survival, I mean the instinct to live, and by flourishing, I mean having adequate sustenance, safety, shelter, and social relations for physical and mental health. By sentient, I mean emotive, perceptive, sensitive, responsive, conscious, and, especially, having the capacity to feel and to suffer. Instead of using criteria such as tool use, language, reasoning or intelligence, I go deeper into our evolved brains, toward these more basic emotive capacities. There is sound science behind this proposition.

According to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness—a statement issued in 2012 by an international group of prominent cognitive and computational neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists and neuroanatomists—there is a continuity between humans and nonhuman animals, and sentience is the



most important common characteristic. The neural pathways of emotions, for example, are not confined to higher-level cortical structures in the brain but are found in evolutionarily older subcortical regions. Artificially stimulating the same regions in human and nonhuman animal brains produces the same emotional reactions in both. Attentiveness, decision making, and the emotional capacity to feel and suffer are found across the branches of the evolutionary tree. This is what brings all humans and many nonhuman animals into our moral sphere.

The arc of the moral universe really is bending toward progress, by which I mean the improvement of the survival and flourishing of individual sentient beings. I emphasize the individual because that is who survives and flourishes, or who suffers and dies, not the group, tribe, race, gender, state or any other collective. Individual beings perceive, emote, respond, love, feel and suffer—not populations, races, genders or groups. Historically, abuses have been most rampant—and body counts have run the highest—when the individual is sacrificed for the good of the group. It happens when people are judged by the color of their skin, or by their gender, or by whom they prefer to sleep with, or by which political or religious group they belong to, or by any other distinguishing trait our species has identified to differentiate among members instead of by the content of their individual character.

The rights revolutions of the past three centuries have focused almost entirely on the freedom and autonomy of individuals, not collectives—on the rights of persons, not groups. Individuals vote, not genders. Individuals want to be treated equally, not races. In fact, most rights protect individuals from being discriminated against as individual members of a group, such as by race, creed, color, gender, and now sexual orientation and gender preference.

The singular and separate organism is to biology and society what the atom is to physics—a fundamental unit of nature. The first principle of the survival and flourishing of sentient beings is grounded in the biological fact that it is the discrete organism that is the main target of natural selection and social evolution, not the group. We are a social species, but we are first and foremost individuals18 within social groups and therefore ought not to be subservient to the collective.

This drive to survive is part of our essence, and therefore the freedom to pursue the fulfillment of that essence is a natural right, by which I mean it is universal and inalienable and thus not contingent only on the laws and customs of a particular culture or government. As a natural right, the personal autonomy of the individual gives us criteria by which we can judge actions as right or wrong: Do they increase or decrease the survival and flourishing of individual sentient beings? Slavery, torture, robbery and discrimination lead to a decrease in survival and flourishing, and thus they are wrong. QED.

(Michael Shermer, Scientific American, February 2015)

I.59. One Will to Rule Them All

Steve Neumann on morality, games and Bilbo Baggins.

(…) a small but vocal range of Naturalists scientists and other thinkers insist that the sciences will eventually have ultimate and final authority on all questions of morality and value. Moral science will not only be able to tell us what we should value, but why we should value it. On the other hand, there are philosophers who say that all this moral theorizing is just theorizing, and thus morality is the proper province of philosophy. These philosophers don’t believe that science plays no role in moral philosophy, of course, they just locate the project at the center of a Venn diagram, the intersection of ‘ethical reasoning’ and ‘empirical evidence’ being ‘morality’. The most avid researchers of this new moral science, such as Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene, have made great strides in establishing a kind of genealogy of morals, as well as uncovering the background processes of our moral reasoning. But both Haidt’s Social Intuitionist model and Greene’s idea

18 Methodological individualism



that humans have an automatic mode and a manual mode19 when it comes to moral judgment, are still description and not prescription.

Letters, Philosophy Now, Apr/May 2015

I.60. I SAMUEL 8

Contra la idealización popular y bélica de la Confederación se cierne el presagio oscuro de un porvenir en que un monarca regirá los destinos de Israel:

Against the popular & warlike idealization of the Confederate looms a dark foreshadowing of a future in which a monarch will govern the destiny of Israel:

Estos serán los usos del rey que reinará sobre vosotros: tomará a vuestros hijos para el servicio de sus carros. Los designará capitanes al mando de mil hombres y al mando de quinientos; y los pondrá a arar sus campos y a recoger sus cosechas, y a fabricar sus arreos de guerra y el atelaje de sus carros. Y tomará a vuestras hijas para que le sirvan como confiteras, cocineras y panaderas. Y tomará vuestros sembradíos, vuestras viñas y vuestros olivares y los dará a sus servidores. Y tomará el diezmo de vuestras cosechas y de vuestras vendimias…Y el diezmo de vuestros rebaños; vosotros seréis siervos suyos…Ese día lloraréis por el rey que elegisteis vosotros mismos; y ese día el Señor no escuchara vuestro llanto. (Samuel I, 8:11 y sig)

The Bible

The most important book in the development of Western civilization was the Bible, which of course just means "the Book" in Greek. Until recent times it was the touchstone for almost all debate on morality and government. One of its most resonant passages for the study of government was the story of God's warning to the people of Israel when they wanted a king to rule them. Until then, as Judges 21:25 reports, "there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes," and there were judges to settle disputes. But in I Samuel, the Jews asked for a king, and God told Samuel what it would be like to have a king. This story reminded Europeans for centuries that the state was not divinely inspired. Thomas Paine, Lord Acton, and other liberals cited it frequently.

1. And it came to pass, when Samuel was old, that he made his sons judges over Israel.2. Now the name of his firstborn was Joel; and the name of his second, Abiah: they were judges in

Beersheba.3. And his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted

judgment.4. Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah,5. And said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to

judge us like all the nations.6. But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed

unto the LORD.7. And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto

thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.8. According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt

even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee.

9. Now therefore hearken unto their voice: howbeit yet protest solemnly unto them, and show them the manner of the king that shall reign over them.

10. And Samuel told all the words of the LORD unto the people that asked of him a king.11. And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons,

and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before

19 Striking similarity with the emotional and rational dichotomy of the human brain.



his chariots.12. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear

his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.

13. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.14. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and

give them to his servants.15. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his

servants.16. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and

your asses, and put them to his work.17. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.18. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD

will not hear you in that day.19. Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have

a king over us;20. That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and

fight our battles.21. And Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he rehearsed them in the ears of the LORD.22. And the LORD said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, and make them a king. And Samuel said

unto the men of Israel, Go ye every man unto his city.

82*Algunos pasajes de la tradición bíblica destacan que en los tiempos anteriores a la monarquía habían imperado el desorden y la arbitrariedad: “En aquellos días no había rey alguno en Israel y cada persona obraba según le parecía personalmente más correcto”(Jueces, 17:6)

82*Some passages of the biblical tradition emphasize that in the days before the monarchy disorder and arbitrariness had prevailed:“In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit”

(Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait; Jan 1, 1977)

(David Boaz, The Libertarian Reader , 1996These findings spawned my Wealthy Theory create: they were either wealthy, or noble, sponsors that finance their livelihoods of Knowledge, that explains the way brilliant people had to or if they were very outstanding found political or wealthyQuién sabe cuál habrá sido la difusión que alcanzó el Diálogo concerniente a los dos principales sistemas del mundo, de Galileo, que data de 1624 y algunos consideran el primer intento de divulgación de la ciencia. En su obra, el sabio ubica en Venecia a tres nobles, Salviati, Sagredo y Simplicio, y los hace discutir en italiano (y no en el latín en el que se escribían los textos de la época, sólo para iniciados) sobre los modelos del cosmos de Ptolomeo y Copérnico. (Nora Bär, La Nación, Viernes 03 de julio de 2015)

XI.61. [...]

XI.62. [...]

XI.63. [...]

XI.64. [...]

XI.65. [...]

XI.66. Conclusions

If measurements of 1) greater tax-compliance in religious people than in less or non-religious people are correct and 2) if measurements of the world's growing religiosity are correct, this suggests these should



have a strengthening effect on the sustainability of the State Myth, because 3) as taxes are the nutrient of the state, it is safe to say that religiosity acts as a support of the entrenched State Myth. 4)This is an interesting concordance with Jesus Christ´s opinion: “Christ answered the Herodians according to their condition. "Show me the tribute-money," said he; -- and one took a penny out of his pocket; -- if you use money which has the image of Caesar on it, and which he has made current and valuable, 1) that is, if you are men of the State, 2) and gladly enjoy the advantages of Caesar's government ,3) then pay him back some of his own 4) when he demands it; "Render therefore to Caesar that which is Caesar's, 5) and to God those things which are God's" (Thoreau, 2007)” (and he was probably speaking “ex Cathedra”).

However, informality, tax evasion, ellusion and inversion keep growing and are very impressing size (see section… page.. nº …)

In this connection I hope not to fall into Voltaire´s mockery of the deistic scenario of the supreme being that decided suddenly to actualise a universe after an eternity of non- creation merely for the sake of one tiny planet in a small solar system of the particular galaxy as the specific habitation for a congenial Man Friday life form. It is the arrogantly anthropocentric belief shared by many millions of god-believers: that the whole complexity of the universe, of space and time, was specially devised by their god (s) with the sole motive of producing human beings on Earth as “objects of his love”. I relish Voltaire´s mockery of this idea, in which a house-fly, finding itself in the Palace of Versailles, looks around in amazement at the size and splendour of the structure and its decor, and thinks to itself: “Fancy, all this has been created just for me!”

I expect that my difference with Voltaire´s Versailles fly is that I could compile some pearls, connect them, and notice some pattern while the fly produced nothing.



Appendix A: Connection between God and morality by religious affiliation20BY CHRISTINE TAMIR, AIDAN CONNAUGHTON AND ARIANA MONIQUE SALAZAR

20 Pew Research Center, The Global God Divide, July 20, 2020, available at https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/07/20/global-religion-appendix-a-connection-between-god-and-morality-by-religious-affiliation/ accessed 03/03/21.


https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/07/20/global-religion-appendix-a-connection-between-god-and-morality-by-religious-affiliation/

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/07/20/global-religion-appendix-a-connection-between-god-and-morality-by-religious-affiliation/

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/07/20/the-global-god-divide/pg_2020-07-20_global-religion_a-01/


There are differences by religious affiliation in many countries on whether it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values.

While majorities in three of Lebanon’s largest religious groups (Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Eastern Rite Catholics) see belief in God as essential to be moral, a larger majority of Lebanese Muslims (82%) than Eastern Rite Catholics (57%) share this view. Additionally, there are large differences by religion in Israel. Over seven-in-ten Muslims in the country say it is necessary to believe in God to have good values, while only 44% of Jewish respondents say the same.

Respondents in the three African countries surveyed say that belief in God is important for morals and values, regardless of religious affiliation. In Nigeria, similar shares of Christians (93%) and Muslims (94%) say belief in God is necessary to be moral and have good values. This pattern holds in Kenya, where similar shares of Protestants and Catholics (94% and 97%, respectively) share this view. In South Africa, 85% of Protestants and 88% of both Catholics and those of traditional African or ancestral religions say it is necessary.Next: Appendix B: Economic categorization .



Hell: Exothermic or Endothermic? This answer to a college chemistry exam was sent to me recently and restores my faith in the new generation of college students. The answer was purportedly in response to the bonus question on a University of Arizona chemistry midterm: “Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?”

Here is the student’s answer:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving, which is unlikely. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose. 2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, ‘It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,’ and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct..... ...leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting ‘Oh my God.’

The student reportedly received a well-deserved A+


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· Web view2021. 3. 17. · manifests itself most obviously in the distribution of resources. Two monkeys walking in the same direction simultaneously discover a desirable piece