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Special Portuguese Spanish    

Year 9 - N° 448 - January 17, 2016

ROGÉRIO COELHO
rcoelho47@yahoo.com.br 
Muriaé, Minas Gerais (Brasil)

 

Translation
Eleni Frangatos - eleni.moreira@uol.com.br

 
 

Rogério Coelho

How the Devil
was born
It is evident that the Saints of today are the successors of the ancient pagan idols
Part 2 (Final)

According to Carlos Roberto Nogueira, the concentration of evil in a character is only visible in the New Testament. There satan (noun) becomes Satan (proper noun). From an opponent (with a small "o") he turns into the Opponent (with a capital "O"). The form of Jesus’ enemy, the one who tests His goodness, is ready.

Greeks. With the religious unification achieved by Rome in the fourth century AD, Christianity, stopped being a persecuted sect (remember that Paul of Tarsus was a Roman soldier who hunted Christians until he had his divine vision in the Syrian desert) and began to pursue: it changes into an official cult and it is mandatory for all Empire. Full of divergent currents in its beginning, Catholicism becomes increasingly closed but of a general feature (Catholic = Universal). Pagan is now all the past and the present alien to the Roman Empire. 

With the growing power of the Latin Christians, we have a special issue: the attempted extermination of the entire Greek cultural tradition. Some manifestations are easily visible as the destroyed oracles and the noses and broken arms of the Greek sculptures, such as what was done in our times by the religious leaders of Afghanistan, destroying the enormous and representative statues of Buddhism. Any form of parallel cults linked to fertility and nature, as the sacred rural parties of spring, are now strictly prohibited. But the ban was often unsuccessful. For failing to curb these practices the way it wanted, Christianity uses the weapons of the enemy. It maintains the sole God above, but produces a multitude at a lower level: the saints”.

It is evident that the Saints today are the successors of the ancient pagan idols, because the Church failed to eradicate idolatry. It's the old story: if you cannot fight the enemy, better join him. Not even the old rural parties stopped happening: they were replaced by urban parties that have survived to this day. Just see what happens at the Catholic churches in the months of May and June.

DEMONOLOGY

In fact, what we have today is no different than the pagans had at that time. It was indeed necessary for the advent of the "Comforter promised" to put order in the Planetary House that accepted us.

Despite the growing emphasis that the Devil is gaining within Christianity, hitherto God's victory over the Devil is considered indisputable. The latter exists in the world to be overcome and to give more glory to the heavenly absolute power. The picture changes only at a much later historical moment with another great theoretician of the Christian religion: St. Thomas Aquinas.

We are in the thirteenth century and the Catholic Church lives the apogee of its territorial, political and economic domain. To remain so, it must demonstrate its power with ever more visibility, one might even say, with daring and violent overt. In this context, and this imperative need for the Church to sustain its slave type of domain, St. Thomas Aquinas potentiates the Devil figure in such a way that, from the popular folklore symbols, he invents a science to combat it: the demonology. In this festival of ignorance Catholics are still surpassed by the said Evangelical (Protestants) where the "mise-en-scène" of the pastors almost operate by violence in an attempt to expel the Devil from the body of the terrified sheep of their docile herds with a frustrating and backward reasoning.

Thus there are now well-defined rules to identify the evil character that could only be defeated with the indispensable help of the Christian Faith. Therefore, the Devil wins more accurate physical contours, even with the help of great painters who worked for the Church exclusively, not saving the resources to color with the bold colors of ignorance the infernal panels with the purpose of causing fear. 

SCAPEGOAT 

"The hybridism human/animal" - continues explaining Laterce5 - "a form used by the old Eastern peoples to represent the supernatural, will be the basis to compose an essentially deformed figure. A recurring presence are the feet of the goat, an animal chosen by many pre Christian cultures for rituals and sacrifice of praise to the gods (hence the expression scapegoat).

In addition, a Greek god particularly threatening to the dogmas of Christianity was Dionysus, patron of dance, music, theater and drunkenness; i. e., the unruliness proper of the chaotic effervescence of artistic creation. And what is the most striking feature in the appearance of Dionysus? His goat hooves. The presence of these hooves in the popular imagination helped to put, at once, the Greek and oriental religious tradition in an intimate connection with the evil forces. Thus the Devil becomes an omnipresent obsession and it stops being an individual to be characterized as a group of fighters (legion of demons) and therefore, anyone anywhere can be "possessed", and therefore in need of being helped by the exorcism of the Church.

The persecutions of the "Holy" Inquisition reach all those who diverge from the predetermined Christian standard, which in the opinion of attentive ecclesiastical authorities had part with the demo. Any philosophical shoot that began to flourish and emerge above the rigid dogmatic context imposed was presto and mercilessly mowed. The charges that usually carried the condemned to death, constituted themselves in the most absurd, banal and arbitrary libel: a family was condemned to the stake by changing the bedding on a Friday; redheads have in the color of their hair the sign of the relationship with the fire of Hell and physical disabilities are, by analogy, deformed spiritual and forgotten by God, therefore, burn them at the stake! 

PRINCE OF DARKNESS

In the nineteenth century, a movement "incensed" by the Church to increase its power towards the East, the Crusades (the design of the Nazi swastika is made up of two superimposed crosses, that is, "crusades" - Coincidence?), had as its motto the concept of Holy War against paganism and as object the expulsion of the Arabs from the region where Jesus was born and lived. The physical composition of the Devil wins new items: goatee beard and a dark skin, characteristic of the Moors. And so, nourished by the placenta of ignorance and shameful subaltern interests, the Devil will be composed until it reaches its present "status quo".

The monarchical absolutist model of the Middle Ages helps to compose the idea of ​​the leader of all the demonic army: Satan is now the Prince of Darkness, the reverse of Christ, the Antichrist, who would one day rule over the Earth. But there was a much more important hidden reason, this time financial, to highlight the demonic forces: the profitable sale of indulgences!

Let me explain: the biblical Apocalypse seemed to be coming true due to wars and plague. And with the infernal panels being painted from above the pulpits with the strong terror colors, the necessary dependence was created and the Church used this profusely for its profit: tickets to Heaven were guaranteed through the sale of indulgences for which the nobles paid a very high price. There we have the Devil appointed the Church’s minister of economy. Without the Devil there would be no fear and no one would be interested in the precious "passport".

However, as no situation lasts forever, from the sixteenth century onwards, with the advance of modern science and the new philosophical humanists, we have a decreasing importance of religion in everyday life. With this, the Devil also lost ground...

Today, despite our world increasingly rationalist and desecrated, the Devil is present in rituals of some Protestant currents, in satanic cults and in the world of fiction in a fair number of dubious quality movies, among which some are an exception: "Rosemary’s Baby” by Roman Polanski, and "The Exorcist" by William Friendkin. 

FATE OF HUMANITY 

Laterce concludes with philosophical wisdom: "reading the Devil in the Christian imaginary suggests that our desire was always to carry Evil to a distant world from us, transcendent, only that increasingly we have evidence that Evil is indeed of human order".

At the end of "The Book of Spirits," Paul of Tarsus left the following letter to all of us, Christians of today: "to gravitate to the divine unity is the fate of Humanity. To achieve it, three things are necessary: ​​Justice, Love and Science. Three things that are the opposite and contrary: ignorance, hatred and injustice. Well! I tell you, in fact, that you lie to these fundamental principles, compromising the idea of ​​God, because you overstate His severity. You doubly jeopardize it by imagining that the creature's Spirit has more clemency, virtue, love and true justice than the Infinite Being. It is necessary to destroy the idea of ​​Hell, making it ridiculous and unacceptable to your beliefs, as it is in your hearts the hideous spectacle of executions, the fires and the tortures of the Middle Ages.

Believe me: or you resign yourselves to let all your dogmas perish in your hands, preferably that they change, or live them allowing them to benefit from the emanations that the Good, at this point, pour over them.

The idea of ​​Hell, with its fiery furnaces, and steaming boilers, could be tolerated and understood in an age of iron; however, in this century of lights, it is just a ghost that may, at best, frighten little children because as soon as they grow a little, they stop believing in Hell. If you still persist in this terrifying mythology, you will create incredulity, the mother of all social disorganization. I tremble just to imagine an entire social order shaken and crumbling on its foundations, due to lack of penalty. 

PUNISHMENT, WHAT IS IT?

Men of burning and living faith, forefront of the day of light, work not to maintain fables that have aged and are discredited, but to revive the true penalty, consistent with your customs, feelings and the enlightenment of your time…

What is punishment? The natural consequence caused by going astray from the Divine Law; a certain amount of necessary pain to make man experiment suffering; the sting that, through sorrow,  makes the soul seek for salvation. Punishment only aims at rehabilitation, redemption... Wanting it eternal, due to a not eternal fault, is to deny it the whole reason for being.

"Oh! Verily I say, cease, cease to put in parallel, in its eternity, the Good, the Creator’s essence, and the Evil, essence of the creature. It would create an unreasonable penalty. On the contrary, claim for the gradual softening of punishments and penalties due to transgressions and you will consecrate the divine unity, and united feeling and reason".

Created for profit and to meet the eager of domination of a parasitic caste, the Devil was killed and buried by the Spiritist knowledge that clearly informs us that it is not credible that our Heavenly Father, the God of Love and Goodness, could have created a being eternally doomed to evil, stating, however, that all Spirits are created simple and ignorant, and that the evil ones are simply Spirits of incipient evolution, but able to raise to the highest spiritual ranks in the infinite course of time.



 


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