DEATANIZING SATAN OR THE DEVIL

19/10/2022 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

In these times of political and presidential campaigns, it is not uncommon for a candidate to demonize his opponent. There is even an odd division between who is from God and who is from the Devil or Satan.

This term Satan (in Hebrew) or Devil (in Latin) has gained many meanings, positive and negative, throughout history. This occurs in many religions especially the Abrahamic ones (Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

However, we must say that no one has suffered so many injustices and has been so “demonized” as Satan himself. In the beginning it was not like that. For this reason it is important to briefly do the story of Satan or the Devil.

He is counted among the “sons of God” like the other angels, as it is said in the book of Job (1:6). It is in the celestial court. Therefore, it is a being of goodness. It’s not the bad figure that will win later. But he received from God an unusual and ungrateful task: he had to put to the test good people like Job, who is “a man of integrity, upright, fearing God and shunning evil” (Job 1:8). He must submit him to all kinds of tests to see if, in fact, he is what everyone says about him: “there is no other like him on earth” (Jn 1:8). As evidence promoted by Satan, he loses everything, family, possessions and friends. But he doesn’t lose faith.

There was a major mutation starting in the 6th century BC, when the Jews lived in Babylonian captivity (587 BC) in Persia. There they were confronted with the doctrine of Zoroaster which established the confrontation between the “prince of light” and the “prince of darkness”. They embodied this dualistic and Manichean view. Satan was born as a part of the kingdom of darkness, the “great accuser” or “adversary” who induces human beings to acts of evil. In sequence, the confrontation between God and Satan takes place. In late Jewish texts, from the 2nd century BC, especially in the book of Honoch, the saga of the revolt of angels led by Satan, now called Lucifer, against God is elaborated. It narrates the fall of Lucifer and about a third of the angels who adhered and ended up expelled from heaven.

The question then arises: where to put them if they were expelled? There he made use of the category of hell: burning fire and all the horrors, well described by Dante Alighieri in the second part of his Divina Comdia dedicated to hell.

In the First Testament (the Old) there is almost no mention of the devil (cf. Chron 21,1; Samuel 24,1). In the Second Testament (New) it appears in some accounts “...they will be thrown into the fiery furnace; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Mt 8,12;13,42-50; Lk 13,27) or in the parable of the rich man and the poor Lazarus (Lk 16,23-24) or in the Revelation (16,10 -11).

This understanding was assumed by ancient theologians, especially by St. Augustine. He influenced the entire tradition of the Churches, the doctrine of the Popes and has reached this day.

The category of hell and eternal damnation was decisive in the conversion of native peoples in Latin America and other mission places, producing fear and panic. Their ancestors, it was said, because they were not Christians, are in hell. And it was argued that if they did not convert and did not allow themselves to be baptized, they would meet the same fate. This is in all the catechisms that were elaborated shortly after the conquest with which to convert the Aztecs, Incas, more and others. It was fear, which once led and still leads to the conversion of multitudes, as shown by the great French historian Jean Delumeau. It is by appealing to the Devil, to Satan, that today, in times of rage and social hatred, one seeks to disqualify the adversary, often made an enemy to be demoralized and eventually liquidated.

Here we must overcome all the fundamentalism of the biblical text. It is not enough to quote texts about hell, even in the mouth of Jesus. We must know how to interpret them so as not to fall into contradiction with the concept of God and even to destroy the good news of Jesus, the Father full of mercy, like the father of the prodigal son who welcomes the lost son (Lk 15,11-23) .

First, human beings seek a reason for the evil in the world. He has great difficulty in assuming his own responsibility. Then transfer it to the Demon or demons.

Secondly, the meaning of demons and the hell of horrors represents a pedagogy of fear to make people seek the path of good through fear. Devil and hell, therefore, are human creations, a kind of sinister pedagogy, as mothers still do to children: “If you don't behave right, at night, the big bad wolf will come to bite your foot”. The human being can be the Satan of the earth and society. He can create “hell” for others through hatred, oppression and the mechanisms of death, as is unfortunately happening in our society.

Third, Satan or the Devil is a creature of God. To say that it is a creature of God, means that, at every moment, God is creating and recreating this creature, even in the fires of hell. Otherwise, it would return to nothingness. Can God, who is infinite love and goodness, propose to this? Well says the book of Wisdom: “Yes, you love all beings and hate nothing of what you have done; if you hated something you would not have created it; and how could anything subsist if you didn't want it... you spare them all because they belong to you, oh sovereign lover of life” (Wis 11,24-26). Pope Francis said it clearly: “there is no eternal damnation; she is only for this world.”

Fourthly, Jesus' great message is the infinite mercy of God-Abba (dear father) who loves everyone, even the “ungrateful and evil” (Lk 6:35). The affirmation of eternal punishment in hell directly destroys the good news of Jesus. A punishing God is incompatible with the historical Jesus who announced God's infinite love for everyone, even for sinners. Psalm 103 had already intuited this: “The Lord is merciful and forgiving, slow to anger and rich in mercy. He is not always accusing nor bears a grudge forever. He does not treat us according to our sins... as a father feels compassion for his sons and daughters, so the Lord will have mercy on those who love him, because he knows our nature and remembers that we are dust...The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting” (103,8-17). God can never lose any creature, however perverse. If he lost her, even one, he would have failed in his love. Well, that can't happen.

Well said Pope Francis who tirelessly preaches mercy: "Mercy will always be greater than any sin and no one will be able to put limits to the love of the God who forgives" (Misericordiae vultus, 2)

This does not mean that one will enter heaven anyway. Everyone will go through the judgment and clinic of God, to be purified there, recognize their sins, learn to love and finally enter the Kingdom of the Trinity. It is the purgatory that is not the anteroom of hell, but the anteroom of heaven. Whoever is there purifying himself already participates in the world of the redeemed.

Hell and demons and the main one, Satan, are our projections of the evil that exists in history or that we ourselves produce and for which we do not want to blame ourselves and we project them onto these sinister figures.

We must finally free ourselves from such projections in order to live the joy of Jesus Christ's message of universal salvation. This delegitimizes all Satanization in any situation, especially in politics and in charismatic Pentecostal churches that use the figure of the devil and hell in a totally exorbitant way. It scares the faithful rather than comforts them with the love and infinite mercy of God.

Leonardo Boff is a theologian, philosopher and wrote: Life beyond death, Voices, many editions 2021.

The next election as a plebiscite: biophilia (love for life) versus necrophilia (love for death )

16/09/2022 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

Leonardo Boff

At Easter Mass, one of the most beautiful hymns of the Gregorian is sung in which it is said: “death and life, looking at each other, fought a duel” (mors et vita duello conflixere mirando). And it concludes: “the lord of life, reigns alive” (dux vitae, regnat vivus).

I refer to this liturgical text as a metaphor of what I see taking place in the next elections: a plebiscite in which a political duel is effectively fought between two projects for Brazil and two models of President. I don’t want to say it, but one of the most brilliant legal intelligences in our country, ex-governor of Rio Grande do Sul, ex-minister of justice, Tarso Genro, affirms it:

“For Jair Bolsonaro there are no opponents, there are only enemies to be slaughtered by weapons. As a politician who defends the execution of suspects, the shooting of “30,000 compatriots”, the assassination of a peaceful and democratic president, torture as an inquisitorial method, the end of political democracy, who maintains that the dictatorship’s mistake was not to torture , but it was “not to kill”, which publicly expresses its admiration for Hitler and mocks the torture suffered by a worthy woman – who was being removed from the Presidency –, as this politician was cowardly naturalized by the neoliberal “establishment” and by the large chains of communication, after having committed and repeated many barbaric crimes and still having made a conscious genocidal propaganda against vaccination?”

Here it is clear a project of death that, if Bolsonaro is reelected, will implement it. It is the domain of necrophilia, the promotion of death and its derivatives such as hatred and lies.

On the other side of the duel, there is another representative, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. I don’t want to be a manicist who only considers the good on one side and the bad on the other. Good and evil mix. But it must be recognized that in Lula the good gains more expression. It presents a project whose centrality lies in life, starting with those who have the least life: the 30 million hungry, the 110 million with food insufficiency, the millions of unemployed or underemployed, workers and retirees who have seen their rights diminish. the frozen minimum wage.

To summarize, the first thing to do is to guarantee the minimum: food, health, work, education, housing, land to produce food for the people, security and opportunity for those who are historically the descendants of the slave quarters (54% of the population) to be able to enter higher, university or technical education.

To govern is to take care of everyone, but always starting from the humiliated and offended. The inspiration comes from Gandhi who said: doing politics is having a loving gesture towards the people and taking care of common goods. Or in the words of Pope Francis in his Fratelli tutti: politics has to be done with tenderness “which is love if it makes close and concrete, a movement that comes from the heart and reaches the eyes, ears and hands”(n.196). It is the realm of biophilia, of love for life.

These two projects, like a duel, are facing each other in this election. It is up to the citizens to make their discernment: finally which country do we want? Which President is the most bearer of life, means of livelihood, hope and a taste for living? We are not stones that just exist. We don’t just want to exist, we want to live and live in peace with each other.

What we have experienced in the government of the current President was the downgrading of our humanity, the abandonment of thousands surrendered to the virulence of Covid-19 and who died when they could have been saved if it were not for the tenacious official denialism.

What hurts and embarrasses us the most is the lack of composure of the highest authority in the nation, who should live the virtues that he would like to see carried out in the people, such as solidarity, care for one another and for our natural wealth and the promotion of of our science and culture, attacked by him in a vexing way. On the contrary, the spread of hate, fake news, stupidity, profanity and all kinds of discrimination against Afro-descendants, indigenous peoples, quilombolas, women, the poor and LGBT+ among others predominated.

We will only be able to overcome this political-social and necrophilic scourge if, in the duel, we opt for the biophilia project. Here I still use the ex-governor Tarso Genro: “A week before the election, a great political agreement on governance and governability must be made, defeating Jair Bolsonaro in the first round, united around the strongest name to win and lead the nation to the democratic and social destiny that our people deserve”.

That name is emerging as a voter favourite, Lula da Silva. He is a survivor of the great national tribulation, he showed that he was able to humanize politics, taking Brazil off the hunger map and creating social and popular policies that created opportunities for the excluded, for many others and, above all, restored dignity to the impoverished.

The fate of our nation is in our hands. It depends on the option for what takes Brazil out of the ditch into which it was thrown and allows us to reduce the harmful social inequality and, finally, grant us the joyful celebration of life. The next duel election on October 2nd will mean the great test: which Brazil and which President we really want. May the project of biophilia, of love of life, triumph, especially that suffered by the great majority.

Leonardo Boff is a theologian, philosopher and writer and published: Brazil: concluding the refoundation or prolonging dependency, Vozes 2018.

The Earth in labor pains: will the great saving leap come?

03/09/2022 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

With a little more, a collapse of the bases that ecologically sustain life on the planet could occur. Which of the heads of state and big managers (CEOs) of the mega-corporations reflect and make decisions in the face of such a limit-situation of our Common Home? Perhaps they are aware of the real situation, but they do not give it importance, because if they were given it they would have to completely change the mode of production, give up the fabulous economic gains, change their relationship with nature and get used to a more frugal consumption and more solidary.

Because that does not happen, we understand the words of the UN Secretary General, António Guterrez, recently in Berlin at a meeting on climate change: “We have only one choice: collective action or collective suicide.” Earlier, in Glasgow, on the occasion of the COP 26 on climate change, he peremptorily stated: “either we change or we are digging our own grave”.

Perhaps the most imminent danger of the change in the situation of our Common Home is the alarming global warming, confirmed in recent times. In the 2015 Paris Agreement, it had been agreed to restrict the rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius until 2030 to avoid major damage to the biosphere. With the massive release of methane, due to the melting of the polar caps and premafrost (which goes from Canada to the confines of Siberia) millions of tons of methane have been released. This is 28 times more harmful than CO2. Due to these changes, the ICLL admitted that not in 2030 but in 2027 there would be a temperature increase of between 1.5 and 2.7 degrees Celsius.

The extreme events that are currently occurring in Europe, India and other places, with great fires and heat never before experienced, and at the same time the unusual cold in the South of the world, are showing signs that the Earth has lost its balance and is looking for another.

Summarizing the speech: if we continue this trend, what future awaits us? Could the human species have reached its climax, like all species in their time, and disappear? Or can it happen, thanks to human ingenuity or the forces of planet Earth combined with the energies of the universe, that it takes a leap in quality and thus inaugurates a new order, giving continuity to the human species?

If this happens, a situation that we predict, it will not happen without many sacrifices of lives of nature and of humanity itself. 67 million years ago a meteor almost 10 km long fell in the Caribbean, destroying the dinosaurs and 75% of all life forms, but respecting our ancestors. Couldn’t something similar happen with our planet Earth?

Probably not a grazing meteor, but some other immeasurable ecological-social disaster. If we survive, the Earth will have made the saving leap and delivered the long-awaited birth. The labor pains will have passed and finally the biocene and the ecocene will have been generated. Life (bio) and the ecological factor (eco) will gain centrality, compromising our care and our whole heart. May this desideratum be a viable utopia that allows us to continue on this beautiful and smiling planet.

*Leonardo Boff has written The painful part of Mother Earth, Dabar 2021; Inhabit the Earth,,Dabar 2022..

The importance of the religious factor in the current brazilian presidential elections

19/08/2022 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

That religion has a powerful political force, confesses Samuel P. Huntington in his controversial book The Clash of Civilizations (1977 he was one of adviser in the desastrous Vietnam’s war), which today, with the new Cold War, has become relevant again. He states: “In the modern world, religion is a central force, perhaps the central force that mobilizes people…What ultimately counts is not so much political ideology or economic interests, but religious convictions of faith, family, blood and doctrine; it is for these things that people fight and are willing to give their lives” (p. 79, 47, 54). He himself was heavily critical of American foreign policy for never giving importance to the religious factor. And he had to feel in his own skin Islamic terrorism with a religious background.

Let’s consider the situation in Brazil. I quote here the reflection of a person deeply inserted in the popular environment with an acute sense of observation. It is worth listening to his opinion, because it can help in the campaign to defeat those who are dismantling our country.

He states: “I fear that by appealing more and more to the religious factor, stirring up the phantom of communism = atheism and religious persecution, the negationist and the “enemy of life” may eventually still threaten to win.

“For, it is inescapable to recognize: the people en masse are religious to the bone (superstitious the “intellectuals” will say, never mind)”.

“They sell their body and soul for religion, indistinctly understood as ‘that God thing’, especially the Brazilian, syncretist that he is.”

“And this appeal, I am not saying that it is good, but only that it has a tremendous force and I fear very much that it could be decisive at the moment of deciding the vote.”

“Unfortunately, this issue carries little weight in the campaign of Lula and his allies. I would say almost the same thing with respect to the two other values that Bolsonaro and all the “!new right” of the world boast: God, Homeland and Family, the trilogy of Integralism that the old left doesn’t want to see even painted. And yet that is where the new right is mobilizing the masses in the world and also in Brazil”.

“And note how easy it is for a candidate of the new right like Bolsonaro to present to the electoral mass this triad: him praying (God), with a Brazilian flag (Homeland) and with Michelle by his side (Family), three scenes of guaranteed commotion and irresistible attraction for the people. Who can be against prayer, the green-yellow flag, and a wife (especially if she is very feminine)?

“Intellectuals can speak all they want against this right-wing populism. But that it works, it works. And that’s what matters to the right, and I think it should also matter to the left, without offending ethics, because it is perfectly possible to defend these three flags, once integrist, as moral values, on the condition, however, that they are not exclusive: of those without religion, of other homelands, and of LGBT+respectively.”

“But even if Lula wins, which the polls indicate, the issue of the three flags above will remain. And the Bolsonarists will continue to wave them, as the new right is waving them around the world (see Trump, Putin, Le Pen, Salvini et caterva). And it is the “God flag”, above all others, that will be most politicized by the new right, and this the less the old left has digested this issue and the less attention the Church itself, progressive or liberationist that it may be, seems to pay to the changing Zeitgeist, designated as post-modern.”

The great challenge of the campaign of the coalition around Lula/Alckmin, which also belongs to the historic Christian churches, especially the Catholic Church, is how to attract these masses, manipulated and deceived by the Pentecostal churches, to the values of the historic Jesus, much more humanitarian and spiritual than those presented by the self-proclaimed “pastors and bishops” and true wolves in sheep’s clothing. These are religious expressions of the market, of the misleading propaganda and styles that directly contradict the biblical message and that of Jesus, because they directly use lies, slander, and fake news.

It is worth showing how the Jesus of the Gospels was always on the side of the poor, the blind, the lame, the lepers, and the sick women, and he healed them. He was extremely sensitive to the invisible and most vulnerable, men and women, in short, to those whose lives were threatened. Love, solidarity, truth, and welcoming everyone without discrimination, such as those of another sexual option, seeing in the blacks, quilombolas and indigenous people our suffering brothers and sisters, are worth much more.

It is important to be in solidarity with them and to stand with them to make their own way. This behavior is worth much more than the “prosperity gospel” of material goods that we cannot carry for eternity and, deep down, do not fill our hearts and do not make us happy. Whereas the other values go with us as an expression of our love for our neighbor and for God and bring us peace in our hearts and a happiness that no one can steal from us.

Logically, it is important to undo the slanders, refute the falsifications, and eventually use the available means to legally incriminate them.

It is always worth believing that a little light dispels all the darkness and that truth writes the true page of our history.

Brazil deserves to come out of this devastating storm and see the sun shining in our sky, giving us back hope and the joy of living.

Leonardo Boff wrote Brazil: conclude the refoundation or prolong the dependency, Vozes 2018; The ambitious fisherman and the charming fish: the search for the just measure, Vozes 2022.

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