Worldview of the Fertile Crescent

After dwelling on the prehistoric worldview, let us now study the worldviews that succeeded it after the appearance of writing, which is the line that divides prehistory from history. For a long time, it was thought that writing first appeared in Sumer, ancient Mesopotamia, and then from there it spread to other civilizations. The discovery of a form of writing in Central America, with no connection to the Fertile Crescent or the Far East, proves that writing arose in different civilizations disconnected from each other.

This is just one of the many proofs that there is only a single model of development, and that human nature is the same because the planet is populated by a single hominid, Homo sapiens, who left Africa about 200,000 years ago. Writing is, therefore, concomitant with the appearance of the first civilizations. In each of these civilizations appeared different version of it.

The first and oldest version of writing is the cuneiform writing that appeared in Sumer (4000 B.C.). For this reason, Sumer is also known as the first human civilization. Then came the hieroglyphic writing of Egypt (3,000 B.C.). The pictorial writing of China appeared around 1,200 B.C. and the Mayan writing of Central America in the year 500 B.C. Not much is known about the writing of the Harappa civilization in the Indus Valley but in some circles, it is regarded as the second form of writing after Sumer. This form of writing dates back to 3,500 B.C., but to date it has not been deciphered, and therefore does not count as writing, but as symbols disconnected from each other.

We will therefore study these first great ancient civilizations that are at the base of the civilizational nuances that we find here and there in this globalized world with fewer and fewer differences. These civilizations are the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, the Chinese, and finally, the Central American comprised of the Mayas, the Aztecs, and the Incas. Let us first look at the Fertile Crescent (the Cradle of Western civilization) and the cultures that succeeded from there, starting with Sumer, until the appearance of the First Empire.

The Sumerian civilization arose somewhat earlier than the Egyptian civilization. However, these two cultures grew and developed at the same time, with little or no relation to each other, because they were separated by a desert and, maybe because of that, they never confronted each other in war.

SUMERIAN
It is questioned today whether Sumer predates Egypt. However, until the contrary is unequivocally proven, we adopt here the orthodox view that the Sumerian civilization, the first on the planet, arose just before the Egyptian, 4,000 years before Christ, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq).

The regular flooding of the rivers made the land fertile and allowed for an agriculture based mainly on cereals which, as we have studied in previous texts, permitted goods to be stored for a long time, thus freeing man from the tutelage of nature and the constant search for food, like other living beings.

We will study the Fertile Crescent from the first Sumerian civilization to the appearance of the First Empire.

Religion
The Sumerians knowing that they could not control the wind, the air, the sun, and other elements, believed that a higher power controlled these realities. The Sumerian word for universe was AN-KI, meaning the god AN and the goddess KI. The children of this divine marriage were ENLIL, the god of air, who was seen as the most powerful god, like Zeus in Greek mythology. ENKI was the goddess of love and war. Eros and Thanatos, affection and aggression, were controlled by the same deity. Apart from these, there were many other less powerful gods, and each city-state had its own protector god.

Anthropomorphic Polytheism
The Sumerians believed that their gods were very much like people; they ate, drank, slept, and got married. Unlike humans, however, the gods lived eternally and exercised power over humans. For this reason, humans had to keep them happy, with prayers, offerings, and sacrifices so that they would be favorable to them and bring fortune and prosperity to the city. If that did not happen, they could bring war, floods, and other disasters.

Ziggurat, the First Temple in History
In Mesopotamia, at the center of every city on a higher place, there was always a ziggurat, that is, a temple in a helical shape or tiered mound. This temple is common to all civilizations around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers: Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, and Babylon.

The Philosophy of Sumerian Life in the Poem of Gilgamesh – the first work of world literature
In the epic story of the hero Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, the first pearl of world literature written on clay tablets around the year 3,400 B.C. in cuneiform writing invented by the Sumerians, it describes the humanity represented in Gilgamesh, awakening from his long sleep of unconsciousness, realizing, at the same time, his brutality, but also his culture and wisdom.

Gilgamesh gives us an idea of how the human being sees himself and the world around him. He overcomes all the enemies and obstacles that come his way, and sees himself as an all-powerful being. As the result, he does not accept his limitations, especially his mortality. He is not perfect and at the beginning of the poem, he is a bad king, which leads the people to protest to God against him. But then wisdom gradually tames him, revealing himself to be a person of great feelings, especially in his friendship with the uncivilized Enkidu.

Many realities come together in this story, feeling of loneliness, friendship, loss of a loved one (his friend Enkidu), love, revenge and the fear of death. Gilgamesh is a leader, strong, fearless, and handsome, a demigod, and king of the city-state of Uruk in old Sumer.

He has a sex life that is unbridled, instinctive, and without feeling, but when he meets his friend Enkidu, he discovers an affection for another human being that he never felt before for a woman. This affection leads him to put aside sex and pleasure, that is, to trade Eros for Philia. From then on, he is no longer interested in women and does not allow himself to be seduced even by Enki, the goddess of war and love.

In this culture, men are dominant because women cannot control sex and love (eros). Love and war are emotional acts, not of reason, hence both realities are represented by the same deity unlike in Greek and Roman mythology. The leader is male, someone who stands out from the others, for his physical strength, courage, and wisdom. However, among the Sumerian kings there is a list that includes a woman, Kubaba, as queen of the city-state of Kish.

Gilgamesh battles against the fatality of mortality and seeks a way to defeat the inevitable. In the end, after being unable to find immortality and a way to relive his life, Gilgamesh finds peace in death.

Inventions
Sumer is famous for the invention of beer and even had a goddess named NinKasi as the goddess of beer. The Sumerians invented the wheel, the plow, the bow, bronze, and the measurement of time, dividing the hour into 60 minutes, and the minute into 60 seconds.

AKKADIAN EMPIRE
As there were no deterrents either from the north or the south, nor from the east or the west, in this same place in Mesopotamia several civilizations succeeded one another until the consolidation of the great empires. While all this is happening, Egypt, as we shall see below, develops its own civilization, hieroglyphic writing, and way of understanding life.

At around 3,000 B.C., the Sumerians had a significant cultural exchange with a group from northern Mesopotamia, known as the Akkadians – named after the city-state of Akkad. The Akkadian language is related to the Semitic languages of Hebrew and Arabic.

The term Semitic comes from the biblical character Shem, son of Noah, the supposed progenitor of Abraham and, consequently, of the Jewish and Arab peoples. Around 2,334 B.C., Sargon of Akkad came to power and established what may have been the world's first dynastic empire. The Akkadian Empire ruled over both the Akkadian and the Sumerian speakers in Mesopotamia and Levant – modern day Syria and Lebanon. The Akkadian Empire collapsed in 2,154 B.C., 180 years after its founding.

ASSYRIAN EMPIRE
Assyria owes its name to its original capital, the ancient city of Ashur, in northern Mesopotamia. Ashur was originally one of several Akkadian-speaking city-states ruled by Sargon and his descendants during the Akkadian Empire. Hundreds of years after its collapse, Assyria became a great empire.

For much of the 1,400 years from the late 21st century B.C. to the end of the 7th century B.C., the Akkadian-speaking Assyrians were the dominant power in Mesopotamia, especially in the north. The empire reached its peak near the end of this period in the 7th century. At its peak, the Assyrian Empire stretched from the borders of Egypt and Cyprus in the west to the borders of Persia – present day Iran – in the east.

BABYLONIAN EMPIRE
Finally comes Babylon the Great, where the Jews, according to the Bible, were exiled. One of the most important works of Babylonian culture was the compilation of a code of law around 1754 B.C. called the Code of Hamurabi, which mirrored and improved upon the earlier written laws of Sumer, Akkad, and Assyria. The Code of Hamurabi is the oldest code of law in the world. Written around 1754 B.C. by the sixth king of Babylon, Hamurabi, the Code was written on stone slabs and clay tablets. It consists of 282 laws, with punishments scaled according to social status, adjusting "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth", to avoid spiraling violence.

The Babylonian Empire, founded by Hamurabi, lasted 260 years, until Babylon was sacked by invaders in 1531 B.C. In the period between 626 B.C. and 539 B.C., Babylon reasserted itself in the region with the Neo-Babylonian Empire. This new empire was overthrown in 539 B.C. by the Persians who ruled the region until the time of Alexander the Great in 335 B.C.

The Babylonian Myth of Creation
In addition to the oldest code of laws, Babylon also has the oldest myth of creation of the universe and human beings. It says that in the beginning there was the god Apsu and the goddess Tiamat who had several children. Because the younger ones were noisy when they played, and Apsu could neither sleep or work, he decided to kill them. However, the young gods discovered the plan and anticipated it by killing Apsu.

Tiamat vowed revenge for the death of her husband. Filled with fear, the rebellious gods solicitate the help of cousin Marduk. He captured and killed Tiamat, later tearing her body to pieces, and spreading her blood. This is how the universe was created, according to the Babylonian myth. That is, creation is an act of violence and not of goodness, as it is in the biblical myth of creation.

The cosmic order requires the violent suppression of the feminine and is mirrored in the social order by the subjection of women to men and men to their ruler. In the beginning was chaos and violence was used to establish order. Thus, the use of violence is justified because without it, there would be no order. The myth of redemptive violence is the victory of order over chaos by means of violence.

After the creation of the world, Marduk threw into prison the gods who were on Tiamat's side. As they were protesting because the food in the prison was not good, Marduk and his father Ea (son of Apsu), killed one of them and from his blood, created human beings to be servants of the gods.

Therefore, according to the Babylonian myth of creation, violence is natural and is embedded in our genes. It was not humanity that created violence as an act of disobedience to God, as in the case of the biblical myth. In the Babylonian myth, violence has always been present, being part of the cosmic and human nature. Human beings are naturally incapable of peaceful coexistence and peace must be imposed from above by the ruling power. Much later, this was the idea behind the "Pax Romana" imposed by the Romans.

The smartest and most powerful therefore stand before others as kings, pharaohs, czars, emperors, princes, priests and teachers, representatives of God's goodness and justice, with the mission to fight the wicked and punish them.

The "legal" violence of the leaders of society opposes the "natural" violence to subdue the wicked, to deter others from their evil tendencies, and to facilitate social coexistence. Hence the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is born, to restrain the violence that is natural to human beings and to make it possible to live together.

THE EGYPT OF THE PHARAOHS
It is certainly the most emblematic and fascinating culture of the ancient world, not only for the grandiosity of the pyramids and so many other monuments that they left us, but they continue to arouse curiosity in man today. Archaeology has even changed its name to Egyptology, because of the millions of historical documents that this civilization has left behind.

The Egyptian civilization spans several distinct periods: the First Kingdom (3,000-2,660 B.C.), I and II dynasties; the Ancient Kingdom in the early Bronze Age (2,660-2,180 B.C.), III to VI dynasties; the First Middle Kingdom (2,180-2,040 B.C.), VII to XI dynasties; the Middle Kingdom (2,040-1,780 B.C.), XI and XII dynasties; the Second Middle Kingdom (1,780 to 1,560 B.C.), XIII to XVII dynasties; the New Kingdom (1,560-1,070 B.C.), XVIII to XX dynasties; the Third Intermediate Period (1,070-664 B.C.), XXI to XXV dynasties; the Late Period (664-332 B.C.), XXVI to XXX dynasties; the Greek Dominion/the Ptolemaic Period (332-30 B.C.) and the Early Roman Empire (30 B.C.-359 A.D.).

The success of the ancient Egyptian civilization came, in part, from its ability to adapt to the conditions of the Nile River valley for agriculture. The predictable flooding and controlled irrigation of the fertile valley produced surplus crops, reported also in the Bible in the story of Joseph of Egypt.

This rationalized agriculture allowed for a considerable increase in population. With resources to spare, the administration sponsored the mining of the valley and surrounding desert regions, the development of a writing system, the organization of collective and agricultural construction projects, trade with the surrounding regions, and an army designed to assert Egyptian dominance.

To motivate and organize these activities there was a bureaucratic force of elite scribes, religious leaders, and administrators, under the control of the pharaoh who ensured the cooperation and unity of the Egyptian people in the context of an elaborate religious belief system.

Life in Egypt
•    "Do not separate your mind from your tongue and all your projects will succeed"
•    "Let not your knowledge be a cause for arrogance; take counsel both with the wise and the ignorant”
Almost everyone was involved in agriculture and probably connected to the land. In theory, all the land belonged to the king, although in practice those who lived on it could not be easily removed and some categories of land could be bought and sold. Abandoned land reverted to state ownership and were transferred to others who would farm it.

A strong central state made possible the massive constructions Egypt is known for. How the construction of the great pyramids in the fourth dynasty (2,575–2,465 B.C.) was accomplished is still a puzzle to this day. People's houses were made of adobe or unbaked earth bricks; temples, pyramids, royal palaces, and tombs were built of stone.

Unlike cuneiform writing that allowed other languages to be written, hieroglyphic writing only permitted a single language to be written. However, it is from these hieroglyphs that our alphabet, the roman alphabet, is derived. This civilization left us numerous literary works, such as treatises on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and magic, as well as various religious texts, collected later in the famous library of Alexandria.

In ancient Egypt they ate all kinds of meat, including pork. Marriage was monogamous, divorce was possible and easy, but costly. Women had a somewhat lower status than men; married women had the title of housewife, but they also worked in agriculture alongside their husbands.

The pharaoh was considered divine and his divinity was reaffirmed in sumptuous rituals. However, he was an inferior deity to the great gods. He was the guarantee of unity of the well organized and hierarchical Egyptian society. It was for this reason that monotheism was invented in Egypt, precisely as a unifying factor between people and social classes.

It was Pharaoh Akhenaten who promulgated the existence of one single god, the god Aten, that is, the sun god replacing the whole pantheon of gods. However, this monotheism was short-lived. The Egyptians, like all the peoples of that time and place, were naturally polytheistic. It is likely that the Jewish idea of a single God arose at this time and they retained it later during their period of slavery in Egypt and after their liberation.

Conclusion: At the end of the Neolithic period, between the Chalcolithic and the Bronze Age, the first human civilizations were born around the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers. The fertile land in the basins of these rivers provided a surplus of crops and this, in turn, a superior culture, evident in the technological inventions, writing and monuments left behind by these civilizations, the basis of Western civilization.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

The Prehistoric Worldview

It is commonly accepted in anthropology and archeology that today’s human being is Homo sapiens descended from other extinct primate species. From 4 to 6 million years ago, there were other hominids, still belonging to the animal kingdom: Ardipithecus ramidus in Ethiopia; after this came Australopithecus afarensis, the technical name for Lucy, which also inhabited Ethiopia in the region called Afar.

This was followed by Homo habilis and Homo erectus that inhabited East Africa. From this descended Homo heidelbergensis which is the common ancestor of fully human Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. We have common ancestors with the chimpanzees, monkeys, and gorillas. However, we evolved into what we are today, while the same did not happen with the rest. Why?  

Science will never find out why the human being was the only species of living being that evolved. It will never find out because the answer lies in God who thought of us as the ultimate exponent of evolution of species, ever since life appeared in the ocean in the form of a single-celled organism called Archaea.

Worldview and Self-awareness
We know that Homo sapiens acquired the same anatomical structure that we have today about 130,000 years ago. But when did it become authentically human, that is, gain awareness of itself? Most paleontologists think this began to happen about 40,000 years ago when the turning point in human creativity occurred when Homo sapiens left Africa and arrived in Europe, developing tools, first of stone, then of metal, to act on the reality around him. In a process of knowing and mastering the nature around him, man came to know himself as different from the reality around him.

In addition to tools, the abstract and symbolic thinking, typical of modern man, can also be seen in the decoration of their cave walls with cave paintings, which tell us a little about their lives and minds in splendid paintings of deer, horses, and wild bulls, as well as their funeral rituals. The same is expressed by the body ornaments they wore and the statuettes modeled in clay, exalting women’s femininity, and fertility.

In both the Stone Age (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic) and the Metal Age (Chalcolithic or Copper – Bronze – Iron), Man did not yet have a defined worldview, because in order to have a worldview or a vision of the cosmos or the world around him, it was necessary, in some way, for him to be able to abstract from himself. Prehistoric man was still, like all animals, living mostly in symbiosis with nature. Since he did not see himself as separate from it, he could not have an idea of it.

Like the baby who at birth has its umbilical cord cut off from nature, so primitive man experienced a rupture through the process of gradually gaining self-awareness. In gaining self-awareness, the human being still saw himself in nature, but in opposition to it; nature was no longer so much a prodigal mother but more of a stepmother, because now he had to wrestle sustenance from it, as the baby must cry if he wants to drink milk.

Worldview and Science
Man sought to emancipate himself, to free himself, from the bonds and tutelage of nature, to gain independence and autonomy in relation to it. Even today these are the values on which the life of the human being as an individual being is based. In this battle for freedom, he has created increasingly more powerful tools to modify nature and adapt it to his needs. With the discovery of fire, he could combine different elements creating new ones.

He replaced hunting by domesticating animals, so that he could have meat whenever he wanted and not when nature allowed for it; he replaced fruit gathering with agriculture, so that he could store food when it was scarce and have time for other things like inventing, discovering, creating.

The worldview as a vision or conceptualization of the world around us, as a mindset or standard against which we measure and judge all things, is affected and confronted by each scientific discovery. Each new scientific conclusion forces our mind to conceptualize reality in another way, to look at the world in another way. In other words, an authentic metanoia operates in our mind, that is, a mental paradigm shift takes place.

The discovery of fire
This discovery changed people’s lives so much that fire came to be understood mythologically as having been stolen from the gods. Fire was for our ancestor like Aladdin’s lamp, which through friction would appear as if by magic, and men could do with it whatever they wanted.

Fire played an important role in the cohesion of families and communities, as everyone gathered around the campfire to warm themselves. Since no one wanted to be left out in the cold, fire acted as a deterrent to antisocial behaviours.

It allowed daylight to be extended well into the night, and since one could not work at night, the extra two or three hours of faint light served for cultural events, for sharing experiences, and for the transmission of culture from parents to children. Light at night increased the safety of humans from animals that hunted at night, as it served to scare them away.

However, the most important use of fire at this time was for food preparation. Cooked or roasted food improved human diet. Certain foods are more nutritious when cooked than raw. The increase in population and the survival of human beings are due to the discovery of fire and its use in cooking. Finally, it was precisely fire that allowed humans to move from Stone Age to Metal Age.

Egalitarian Society of Old Europe
In a time, span from upper Paleolithic period, about 50,000 years ago, to the beginning of Chalcolithic period (Copper Age), Homo sapiens left us not only the famous cave paintings, but also countless of female statues where the sexual attributes of women are accentuated and even exaggerated.  

Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas believes that these statuettes are proof of the existence of a non-matriarchal, but more egalitarian society in old Europe after Homo sapiens left Africa. In these ancient societies, women and men lived as equals in practically all aspects of daily life. In addition, women were accorded a higher status because of their reproductive ability. In fact, the identity of women as life-givers was closely linked to the life-giving mother goddess who served as the focal point of the old European religion.

The role of the father in prehistoric antiquity was non-existent, like it is in animals closest to us in the evolution of species. This happened because the female body, by its physiognomy, gave evidence of maternity, while the male body gave no evidence of paternity. In the Neolithic period, as well as in the upper Paleolithic period, religion was centered on the woman’s power to generate life.

We can conclude that the first deity worshipped by human beings was a goddess, not a god. Reverence was given to the goddess Mother of all that lives, identified either as nature or earth. Earth, as a planet or as soil, nature as well as the names of all continents are feminine names.

The man observes with fascination how from the bosom of the earth comes the life of plants which are the life of animals, and to the bosom of the earth this life returns when plants and animals die. He also observes the similarity between the image of the earth and the woman, since she alone generates life. Given the rudimentary intelligence of human beings at that time, the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth had not yet been established, because cause and effect were separated by nine months.

In a time when humans would have no more intelligence than a mouse has today, let us think that if a mouse eats a poison and dies, immediately the other mice will never touch that poison again, because they establish a connection between the death of their counterpart and the powder it ate. However, if the poison is an anticoagulant by which the mouse does not die right after ingesting it, but on the next occasion it injures itself in a fight or an accident and bleeds to death, the connection between death and the anticoagulant is not established, which makes the anticoagulant the best poison.

While paternity was not established, the women of the tribe held a certain power and high esteem, being respected by the males, even though the latter by nature possessed greater physical strength. Alternatively, we can look at living beings closer to us in the evolution of species, to see similar situations.

Let us look at dogs, how the males revere the females, especially when the latter have just given birth (life givers): the males do not go near them and, although physically they are stronger, the males do not use physical violence against the females, even showing them a certain "reverence". In case of conflict, the female prevails, not only because it becomes very aggressive, drawing strength from weakness, but also because the male moves away as a sign of respect and does not confront the female, although it could do so because it has a superior physical strength.

In all cultures, divinity is a generator of life. On the other hand, also in Rudolf Otto’s view, divinity is identified in all cultures as a "misterium tremedum et fascinans", which we can translate as the love and fear of God. When God is represented as a woman, immediately all women are an image of this God, so they will be as respected as God is.

There has never been and we can say that there will never be a society that is purely matriarchal, as long as man has greater physical strength than woman. However, matrilineal or egalitarian societies have existed and may still exist.

When the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth was established, man's status began to rise. He then began to be seen as crucial to the reproductive process that guaranteed life. The original goddess of Mother Earth came to be complemented by a consort, first thought of as the god Father Sky. The rain falling from the sky was the divine semen sent to impregnate Mother Earth so that life could emerge.

Herbert W. Richardson in his book, Nun, Witch and Playmate, writes that this maternal understanding of God and human life prevailed until the dawn of self-consciousness, when a division appeared in human life between the natural instinct and the emerging ego that dared to face and confront that instinct.

When this happened, there was a turning point in the human worldview, that is, a new definition of all aspects of life. When human life is defined in a new way, the God worshipped because of human life is also defined in a new way. Anthropologists understand that this happened around 7,000 BC.

Genesis of the Andro-centric Worldview in the Bible
The Protestant bishop John Shelby Spong in his book, Living in Sin? describes very well how the Bible echoes the process of transition from the feminine conceptualization (goddess Asherah) to the masculine conceptualization (Yahweh) of divinity. This process did not happen overnight, it was a lengthy and painful process, with numerous relapses. The first book of Kings (18:40) gives us an example of the persecution that the followers of Yahweh brought against the followers of the fertility gods, in the episode of the confrontation between the prophets of Baal and Elijah, the prophet of Yahweh.

In the 7th century BC, there were still small shrines dedicated to the fertility goddess Asherah and her consort Baal, in which liturgies explicitly sexual were held that included sacred prostitution, both male and female. Neither the reformation of Deuteronomy nor that of Ezra in the 5th century BC were able to completely extinguish these practices.

Yahweh was a solitary male God, who created everything by means of the spoken Word, without needing a female partner. The older cult of Baal started from the observation of the sexual power of reproduction.

John Shelby Spong sees in the story of Abraham a biblical echo of the moment when the human being gained self-consciousness. He broke with nature, as Abraham broke with his homeland of Ur, in fertile Mesopotamia, to pilgrimage through the desert, discovering himself. The gods of fertility demanded human sacrifices; Abraham broke with this tradition, by not sacrificing his son out of an inner impulse.

With the emergence of consciousness and thought, human survival no longer depended so much on nature taking its course, but on human thought knowing, discovering, and mastering nature.

The successful suppression of the fertility cult, with its female deity, is part of the historical context of the creation of Yahwism, in which the goddess Eve, mother of all living beings, coexists with evil and is banished forever from paradise by the superior male god.

From there follows the biblical insistence on the all-male nature of God and the corresponding attribution of divine (i.e., masculine) prerogatives to men, who alone, the myth argues, were created in the image of this God.

Thus was born the andro-centric worldview of life, the dominance of the male over the female that extends to our days. With the appearance of fatherhood, not only was the value of motherhood overshadowed, but women were deprived of their place in society. As fatherhood is not as patent as motherhood, establishing fatherhood became the cornerstone of patriarchal society that insisted on controlling women's reproductive behavior. Thus was born the value or countervalue of virginity and other forms of domination of women.

Conclusion – While God was conceptualized as Mother, women were respected, admired, and lived on an equal footing with men. With the conceptualization of God as Father, women were deprived of their dignity, dominated, tortured, vituperated, vexed, and outraged to this day in all cultures and civilizations.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Worldview, Science and Common Sense

God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.

And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.  Genesis 1:28-31

Science came to replace myth in explaining reality. The Romans saw storms as battles between the deities; the Greeks understood lightning as spears of the gods against humans. Today we know that storms form when moist warm air rises rapidly into the higher and cooler layers of the atmosphere, forming clouds and rain. Lightning is a form of electricity that develops inside the clouds. Thunder is caused by hot air that expands until it bursts.

Since the beginning of humanity, our species has been avidly pursuing knowledge. We call science the set of techniques and methods used to achieve knowledge. A noun from the Latin ‘scientia’, it refers to the verb ‘scire’, meaning to know.  Man was created on the last day of creation, for God rested on the seventh day, and it is science that makes him the king of creation. By it, man dominates, controls, and administers the goods that God has placed in his hands.

Science - Art - Culture - Worldview
The human being expresses his idiosyncrasy, his way of being, of behavior, his thinking, values, religion, beliefs, philosophy, etc., in arts and not in science. Art expresses knowledge, science is an instrument to know, to understand the world around us, exploring its possibilities in order to make, through technology, our lives more enjoyable.

Science has to do with our daily bread; as such, it is pragmatic, objective and is labor. Art has nothing to do with our daily bread, because it is what we do out of love; as such it is subjective. There is always an objective in the one who wants to know, while the one who expresses himself in an art has no precise objective, he simply seeks a form of expression. The object of science is the unknown, and that of art is what we already know.

The cultural human being does not express himself in science and his worldview is not an object of science nor of interest to science. But science has the ability to change our worldview from one moment to the next. Think, for example, of the Copernican revolution, when man discovered that it was not the Sun that revolved around the Earth, but, on the contrary, that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Any scientific discovery can turn our thinking upside down and force us to rethink things and look at reality with new eyes.

Culture evolves, science revolutionizes
There are social revolutions that have nothing to do with science. The so-called French Revolution can be seen rather as a slow evolution of absolute monarchy until it becomes extinct. In this sense, all social revolutions can be seen as evolutions, for those who have eyes to see and predict, like the prophets of all times.

Pure and true revolution is a scientific discovery – it is not foreseen and takes everyone by surprise. It has the potential to pull the rug from under our feet, to leave us dumbfounded, confused, outraged, traumatized and even aggressive. Imagine what it was like for religious people when Darwin discovered that the human being had the ape as his closest relative, in an evolution of species where all sorts of life have a common trunk and relate to each other.  Even today there are people who reject this idea.

And it is not only the people who rejects certain discoveries. Einstein himself, who revolutionized the world with his theory of relativity, had difficulty accepting an essential postulate of quantum physics, the so-called Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, to the point of even saying that God does not throw dice.

The materialistic worldview of which we will speak at length is the one that rules the world of philosophy, science, politics, and mass media today. Today's intellectuals, if they are religious, that is, if they have faith in the existence of God, are ashamed to say so in public, because the current tendency is for intellectuals to be atheists or agnostics.

This materialistic attitude towards life and reality is more in line with Newton's deterministic and mechanistic physics, which sees the world working mechanically with the precision of a clock than with today's quantum physics and mechanics, where even the laws of nature escape determinism. The world of quantum physics is a magical world, where the material and the spiritual overlap, where the tangible and the intangible embrace and miracles occur.

Universities, politics, intellectuals are therefore out of step, lagging, out of fashion, to the extent that they have not yet adapted to the new reality, they still live with a false worldview. To catch up, they must divorce themselves from Newton and marry Heisenberg. The world is not and does work as they think it does.

The Scientific Discoveries That Revolutionized Our Worldview

In the field of energy
The discovery of fire, the application of animal power (horse, donkey, ox), windmills, caravels, water mills, tidal mills, steam machine (coal), explosion engines, automobile, boat, airplane (fuel), hydroelectric power, wind power, solar energy, nuclear power, batteries that power countless of small applications that we use in our daily life – each energy source has changed the world and the way we look at it and relate to it.

In the field of biology and medicine
The English physicist Robert Hooke (1635-1702) published the first drawings of cells observed under a microscope, boosting research into the fundamental units of life.

The Evolution of Species, of Darwin, dethroned the book of Genesis as an historical book, and proved that life on our planet began in the sea and that all sorts of life come from a common trunk, making plants and animals related in their common origin.

Penicillin – the first of the antibiotics, discovered by accident by the Scotsman Alexander Flemming in 1928 (although there were earlier studies on the subject), was a true milestone in the history of medicine, as it went on to save countless lives from various infectious diseases.

Anesthesia – the American physician Crawford Long (1815-1878) used ether for the first time as a general anesthetic during surgery.

X-ray – the German Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen is considered the great inventor of x-ray (although other scientists studied its effects before and after his discovery), a form of electromagnetic radiation that can penetrate solid objects which has allowed medical diagnoses to be more rigorous, not only based on symptoms and surgeries.

Genetics – the Austrian monk Johann Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) created the idea of a gene by breeding and cultivating pea plants, and studying and tracking the results of their dominant and recessive traits.  

The double stranded spirals of DNA – the beautiful structure of DNA was credited to scientists Francis Crick and James Watson in 1953. What came out of this: genetic engineering has grown enormously in the past 50 years, reaching the ethical discussion of being able to make a "copy" of living beings like what was done with the sheep called Dolly.

The unconscious – the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) published his book, Studies on Hysteria, demonstrating that man does not completely master the mind and proposing the idea that the unconscious is responsible for desires and dreams, and for so many reactive behaviours in our daily life.

In the field of war
Since the discovery of iron, and the invention of gunpowder, human beings seem to be more creative and motivated by hatred than by love. Many discoveries were born in the field of war and only later were peaceful applications found for them. The atomic bomb turned into nuclear energy; the system used in guided missiles turned into GPS to guide us.

The radar – a team of researchers led by Scottish physicist Robert Watson-Watt (1892-1973) created the first radar. Although it was originally an instrument of war, radar is now fundamental to navigation.

The laser beam – Theodore Maiman (1927-) built the first laser. Among other uses, these beams serve today as scalpels in medicine, and rulers in science and in military weapons.

In the field of communications
Gutenberg's printing press, photography, cinema, sound recording, radio and television, the computer that emerged as a typewriter with memory are today transversal to all human activity and integrate most of the machines that man has created, from the automobile to the airplane to the washing machine.

The telegraph, the telephone, the fax machine, the internet, and the mobile phone have revolutionized the way humans communicate with each other and have transformed the already  globalized world into a common home.

The transistor – the Americans John Bardeen (1908-1991) and Walter Houser Brattain (1902-1987) invented the transistor. Imagine the world without transistors: there would be no personal computers or cell phones.

The artificial satellite – the former Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 – a sphere 58 centimeters in diameter weighing 84 kilos. Satellites have revolutionized the world of communications.

In the field of quantum physics and mechanics  
The Big Bang Theory, of Father Georges Lemaître, postulates that the universe originated from an explosion of a small point, in which all existing matter was condensed. With this theory, it is no longer only the Bible that speaks of the beginning and the end of the world, for these are also the object of science. Consequently, many now say that the Bible was correct all along.  

The discovery of the telescope by Galileo to observe macro reality and the discovery of the microscope to observe micro reality are at the basis of the advances in modern physics, starting with the theory of relativity which revolutionized the way human beings understand the universe, space and time, which told us that matter is a form of energy and energy is a form of matter. The discovery of subatomic particles, and the magical and unpredictable world they form, has not yet changed our way of thinking, our worldview, but it will soon do so.

Science and "applied culture", i.e., common sense
Common sense is a form of knowledge based on everyday experience and public opinion of a given social group or culture, which is passed down from generation to generation. It is composed of values and traditions, and operates based on a logic of probabilities that guarantees the confidence of the individual to be able to live and relate in the most appropriate way with his world, that is, that guarantees his way of being and living.

Much of this common sense comes from our own experience, whenever we learn from our own mistakes. However, life is short, there is no time to try out every experience; furthermore, it would be dangerous to do so, therefore we can also learn from the mistakes of others. For example, I don't need to take drugs to know that they are harmful to health.

In this sense, common sense is positive. On the other hand, uncritically assimilating postulates from the past without verifying them opens the door to cultural clichés and prejudices that pass from generation to generation, without anyone questioning or confronting them. When confronted with scientific knowledge, with the reality of the present, some of these postulates may prove to be completely irrational and yet people continue to cling to them because they give them a sense of security. There is a proverb that explains this attitude: "Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t".

The scientist is the one who researches to obtain knowledge, to clarify a doubt, to solve a problem, to explain a reaction or a phenomenon of nature. Unlike common sense, which often consists of a belief that, even without empirical verification, no one doubts, science begins by doubting everything and everyone, since appearances deceive.

Science is born as a reaction to common sense. However, common sense integrates the scientific discovery that becomes part of public opinion and is synonymous with common sense. Yesterday’s science vulgarized, that is, assimilated by the people, becomes common sense, in the same way that a scientific discovery finds its practical application in technology.

Science has changed the way we look at the world. This realization gave rise to positivism as a philosophical school, which understands that science is the way to progress and order in society. It is precisely at this point that it clashes with common sense which does not want to lose its place in people's minds.

Science has long ceased to be the expression of the innate curiosity of the human being who wants to know for the mere pleasure of knowing. Cutting-edge research requires money and generates a lot of profit in technological patents. Scientific research is now paramount in our capitalistic world; it is a gold mine. Therefore, people attack it with a thousand and one conspiracy theories, some true, some false, disseminated by social media.

In the case of medicine, doctors prescribe chemicals for everything and for nothing. Instead of advising people to exercise, to change their diet, they give them a pill to reduce cholesterol that will destabilize the body's natural balance, because the profits of the pharmaceutical companies are enormous. One of the reasons for my mother's death, confirmed by a doctor, was that she was overmedicated. It is ironic, because if she was overmedicated, it is because the doctors overmedicated her.

We said that science starts from doubt and that common sense is based on a belief. In relation to science itself, scientists have a blind belief in its ability to build a better world, while common sense, now at the forefront of culture, doubts science and its unclear goals more than ever.

Science generates profit, common sense is free and is oriented to the defense of human life; science is not always in favor of human life, it seeks to solve the immediate without considering the repercussions or side effects. For example, wheat and corn genetically modified to fight pests, end up killing monarch butterflies and unbalancing nature. Science often solves one problem by creating two or three more. As the people rightly say, he did not die of the disease, he died from the cure.

Conclusion: A scientific discovery modifies first our way of seeing reality, that is, our worldview; subsequently, the technological application of this discovery will, eventually,  change the culture.
                                                                                                                        Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Worldview and its expressions

We reflected that worldview is like the motherboard of a computer to which elements such as myths, legends, folk tales, beliefs, rituals, religions, archetypes, symbols, norms or rules and values are added. All these components are in some way abstract, virtual and need a physical support to make themselves seen.

We can study the worldview of ancient peoples who no longer exist, their myths and legends, their symbols and beliefs, through the documents they left behind. We know a lot about the worldview, their way of living and thinking, of peoples like the Vikings of northern Europe, the Mayans and the Aztecs of Central America.

To discover the structure of a people's way of thinking, its worldview and the elements that it is made of, such as myths and beliefs, religion, rules and values, we need to study the vehicles where these elements are embodied or expressed. These forms of expression coincide with the seven classical arts. We prefer to divide them into a more anthropomorphic manner, using our five senses: literary, graphic, visual, auditory and audiovisual arts.

VISUAL ARTS: architecture, sculpture
The first things humans made -- stone hammers, axes and chipped stone knives -- were tools that had more to do with science than art. These tools were connected to learning about things and surviving in a hostile world. We are referring to the Stone and Metal Age, therefore thousands of years ago.

Immediately after man left Africa, about 150,000 years ago, the first artistic manifestations, that perhaps also had the practical purpose of teaching hunting techniques, were the cave paintings, related to the graphic arts, since they are in some way the precursor of writing.  

The three oldest buildings of humanity belong to the first human civilization that our planet knew, the Fertile Crescent, known today as the Middle East. They are: Tell Qaramel, built around 11,000 BC in Syria, 25 km north of Aleppo; Göbekli Tepe, built in 9,600 BC in southeastern Turkey, 12 km from the city of Sanliurfa, and the Tower of Jericho, built in 8,000 BC in what is known as the oldest and lowest city in the world.

We can study the different worldviews, from the most ancient to the most modern, by the type of buildings that were created. Ancient peoples did not build sumptuous palaces with swimming pools together with all the luxuries to live in.

They were more concerned with the afterlife than the here and now; this is evident in the pyramids of the Egyptians, the Mayans and the Aztecs to the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, and from the Gothic cathedrals to the Hindu and Buddhist temples, transcendence and religion are the main reason to build, not politics nor the “good life”.

One has to wonder... what does this materialistic, consumeristic, utilitarian, pragmatic, atheistic, agnostic world leave to posterity? Nothing or reflections of its inner emptiness, like the skyscrapers, the so-called modern and contemporary paintings that are no more than four scribbles that even an elementary school child could do. Modern human beings do not create art, so today's tourism lives on the visual arts created by ancient peoples many, many years ago.

GRAPHIC ARTS: painting, drawing, writing
The oldest cave paintings are found in the Iberian Peninsula and France, the oldest being from 62,000 years ago. In the progression from painting to writing, the oldest document in the world comes precisely from the oldest culture as well, the Sumerian of the Fertile Crescent - the cuneiform writing of ancient Mesopotamia, predating the Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The cave paintings illustrate the prehistoric man's worldview, his life, his customs and even his feelings. These carvings or artistic manifestations of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods often depict hunting scenes, but also dances and other scenes from daily life, cosmic phenomena, religious myths, customs, and military campaigns.

Ever since man began to paint, he has never stopped doing so. Much of what we know of the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece were transmitted to us by these carvings, images, drawings, graffiti left behind by these civilizations.

The image was the first form of human expression, and it was the evolution of this form of expression through images that led us to the small drawings that translated ideas - the cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia, together with the Egyptian hieroglyphics, which were the predecessors of the Greek and Roman alphabet.

Other languages, like the Chinese, have maintained and still maintain to this day a pictorial form of writing, that is, each letter is a small engraving or drawing that represents a concept, an idea; so, they need thousands of drawings to express themselves. If we consider that human beings began using images 40,000 years ago and that writing was only invented 3,500 years ago, images can be considered as the prehistory of writing.

From the beginning, image was born from communication and for communication; it was born from our need to communicate and as a form of communication. It reached its peak in the second half of the 20th century when photography was invented, that is, the fixation or recording of the image in photographs. In our visual society, we often hear that "a picture is worth a thousand words".

LITERARY ARTS: literature, proverbs, humanities
If human beings were solitary beings like the tigers, they would never have developed a language. Language was born within society, within community, as a way for humans to communicate with each other. This need happened when humans became bipeds and were able to look at each other in the eye.

It probably started by expressing needs, like when we travel to a foreign country whose language we do not speak, and we try to communicate our needs by sounds and gestures. At a later stage, human beings expressed emotions, feelings, and later thoughts.

What really makes a people or a nation is its literary work. You cannot think of a nation like the Jewish people without the Torah, without the books of the law and the prophets. What defines and characterizes the Greek people are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; the ex libris of the Italian people is the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri; what defines the character of the Spanish people is Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha; the Russian soul is found in Dostoyevsky’s book, The Brothers Karamazov. The Portuguese or Lusitanian soul is in Camões’ Lusíadas.

For our first King, Afonso Henriques, Portugal was his land, his domain. It was Camões, however, who created Portugal’s nationality; it was him who gave the Portuguese a prehistory, the deeds of the Lusitanians, and carved the Portuguese character and history in the course of the nation’s great epic, the discovery of the sea route to India. He was faithful to the roots of the Portuguese language, writing in verses in the style of the medieval songs of platonic love, the cradle of the Portuguese language.

The proverb is certainly the literary genre that has the highest concentration of culture, idiosyncrasy and worldview in the fewest words. Easy to remember because it rhymes, it often uses a metaphor or comparison, that is, it never uses abstract language, but one that is narrative and metaphorical. The proverb passes from generation to generation more readily than any other form of culture because it is easy to remember; people use it in their daily lives as advice and to justify and encourage specific behaviors.

AUDITORY ARTS: music, oratory
The word music is of Greek origin and it means the "art of the muses". It consists of an association of sounds interspersed with pauses or short periods of silence over a given time. Music is, in fact, the art of combining sounds with silence. The history of music goes hand in hand with the development of human intelligence, language and culture. There are also those who think that music predates humanity, if we consider the melodious singing of some birds.

It is likely that in the human species, music appeared 40,000 years ago, judging by the dance scenes that appear in some cave paintings suggesting a probable musical accompaniment. Over time, primitive flutes and other instruments, such as the xylophone, emerged. Musical instruments are divided into three types: percussion, strings and wind. The human voice is the most complex musical instrument, since it is at the same time a string and a wind instrument.

Word communicates thought, music communicates feeling, emotion. In this sense, music is the universal language of communication, used to raise awareness for a cause, for religious purposes, to protest, to accompany movies and to intensify a message or emotion. Think of a horror movie without the type of music that usually accompanies it, it would not be so scary. Like language, it is part of the idiosyncrasies of a people and speaks of its culture – for this reason there is the so-called popular music. It translates attitudes, feelings and cultural values of a people.

Oratory is the art of speaking in public communicating ideas, ideologies and thoughts with eloquence, articulation and clarity, to teach or persuade listeners and motivate them to a certain action. It is a very important weapon in politics and in religion, for good and for evil. Both great politicians and philosophers as well as prophets were good public speakers, like Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandhi, Martin Luther King. However, the great dictators also had the same power to convince, like Hitler and Stalin.

Oratory has the gift of uniting different and dispersed wills into one, it turns many heads into one head; it transforms individuals into a community or a mass, a flock, both for good and for evil.  

AUDIOVISUAL ARTS: theatre, cinema, dance
Audiovisual arts combine sound and image. That is why they have more power than sound and image separately. Theatre, cinema and dance are some of the most important arts that move crowds and also the economy.

In the old days, the great film actors began their careers in the theater, and cinema at that time was much like theater. Skills such as expressiveness, both linguistic and corporal, diction, the tone of voice were favored. Today, cinema is more about action than dialogue, so the skills of the stage actor are reserved more for theater and less for cinema. Theater is in clear decline if we compare it with cinema.

Initially, cinema was intended to communicate values, within the hero/villain binomial, where the hero always won. Modern cinema, however, is no longer used for pedagogical purposes, but rather to show reality as it is; therefore, we often see injustice triumph over justice, lies over truth and crime over law and order. This situation is dangerous, because those who watch these films without a critical conscience, especially the younger generations, can develop the conviction that what we are and what we should be are the same thing, have the same value, and that in life anything goes... anything is proper…

Dance has always been a very important cultural manifestation. Culturally, very little can be said of ballet or classical dance; but the tango says a lot about the Argentinian culture, the pasodoble says a lot about Spanish culture, and the samba represents well the Brazilian culture. All peoples have their own way of dancing. If whoever sings prays twice, then whoever dances prays three times.

"Ars lunga vita brevis", art is eternal, life is brief. By cultivating an art, the individual enters into a symbiotic relationship with it. He gives it his temporality, elevating this art to a new height or record; it in turn gives him its eternity, both in the mind of the human community, humanizing him, and like in the mind of God, making him his child.

Conclusion: "Ars lunga vita brevis" - “Arts are eternal, life is short”. Therefore, use your lifetime to cultivate arts and human values and you will be eternal, you will live forever in God and in the memory humanity.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

The Worldview and Its Components

I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me, and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.  John 15:5

“In him we live and move and have our being” … Acts 17:28

For a Christian, Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life; he is the vine to which all branches are connected in order to receive the sap of life. Disconnected from him, we wither, dry up and die. As branches grafted onto Christ (Romans 11:11-24), it is in him that we live, move and exist; without him we can do nothing, since from him we receive our life, our salvation. Christ is for Christians the motherboard, the foundation, the bedrock on which their lives rest, the cornerstone that keeps them standing (Ephesians 2:20-22).

Worldview, the motherboard of our mind
The motherboard of a computer is a board, usually made of hard green plastic, with an electrical circuit imprinted in copper or aluminum that allows us to connect all the components of a computer - the processor, the memory, the CPU, the video card, the network card, the audio card, the computer’s communication ports to the outside that allow it to be connected to other devices.

The motherboard of a computer serves us perfectly as an allegory or metaphor of what a worldview is and how it is composed of elements that are individually different from each other, each with a different function, but which sit on the same board, on the basis of which they interact harmoniously. Let us see what these elements are and what their individual function or contribution to the worldview is.

Worldview, as a system or foundation of our thinking and our life, is an ordered collection of many elements. Just as our DNA or genetic code is composed of many genes, so a worldview is composed of many elements. Some of these elements are:

Myth
In today’s language, most of the time when we hear the word "myth", it is in reference to something that is not true. When we say or hear "this is a myth”, it means nowadays, "this is false”. In reality, a myth may or may not be true, that is to say, it is never historical, but it is never false either. Historical and true are not always synonymous. Historical means that it happened; myths are accounts that describe realities and as such never happened; however, what they say of these realities is completely true in the times and societies where they were born.

Within the context of cultural anthropology, myth is a pre-scientific explanation of reality, a fantastic and phantasmagorical account of oral tradition, usually involving gods who embody and represent the forces of nature as well as general aspects of the human condition.

Within cultural anthropology, myths belong to a discipline called cosmogony, which consists of accounts about the origin, nature and function of everything that exists and that human beings do not understand. As a collection of myths, mythology is a way of making sense of human existence. Its various stories were born to satisfy human curiosity about fundamental questions such as "Where do we come from?", "Where are we going?" or "Why is it raining one day and sunny the next?".

Examples of Myths
The myth of Cronos – Cronos was the god of time, hence the words chronology, chronometer, to measure time. In ancient Greece, the reality of time was explained by the existence of a god who was the lord of time; this lord bore children and after birthing them, ate them. Of course, this is not historical, but it is true.

That is, within a primitive mentality it serves perfectly well to explain the concept of time. Every day that I wake up and get up because I am alive, I have one more day in my existence, one day to live; at the end of it, when I go to bed, I have one day eaten up, consummated, and consumed, one day less in my existence.

The myth of Androgyny – In the Greek tradition, Zeus, the king of the gods, created a being that possessed both genders; like a man and a woman glued together back-to-back. Later, Zeus became afraid of his creature, just like the human being is afraid of so many things he invents, like the atomic bomb, and used the usual weapon, division: "divide and conquer" and divided the androgynous being into two, thus creating the male and the female.

This is how the reality of romantic love was created; since they were initially united, the tendency is to reunite; hence the sexual attraction. The two, man and woman, spend half their lives looking for their significant half or their soulmate, as they still say today.

The myth of Adam and Eve – The Bible says in three mythological accounts of the creation of human beings what Greek mythology says in one.

In Genesis 1:27 – So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. We are told that the man and the woman, both created in the image and likeness of God, are equal in dignity.

In Genesis 2:7 – The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. We are told that the human being is connected to all that exists, almost alluding to the fact that he is the result of a long evolution.

In Genesis 2:22 – And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.  We are told that the two are flesh of the same flesh and belong to each other.

The myth of the origin of evil – Both the Greek and the Hebrew mythology blame the woman for the origin of evil. Just as they attribute to her the "scientific" curiosity for knowing and comprehending and discovering the reason for things. In Greek mythology, Pandora was the wife of Zeus who out of curiosity opened the box that contained all evils; upon discovering it, Zeus came running to close it, but many evils had already escaped and soon reproduced in many others, in a sequence of cause and effect. In Hebrew mythology, Eve ate and fed Adam the forbidden fruit.

The myth about love and death – Orpheus, a musician and singer to whom his father Apollo had given a lyre, fell madly in love with Eurydice with whom he was going to marry. However, before the wedding, Eurydice was bitten by a snake while fleeing from an admirer and died; inconsolable, Orpheus descended into the world of the dead and asked Hades to return his beloved to him. Hades accepted on the condition that when he left the underworld with her, he would not look back. Distrustful, Orpheus, as always happens with romantic love, looked back and lost Eurydice again. Immersed in a deep sadness, he would not eat or drink or respond to the seduction of other women, so they decided to kill him; through death, he was finally reunited with his beloved.

The myth of Narcissus – Narcissus, son of the river god, Cephisus, possessed a stunning beauty that aroused the love of many nymphs, including Echo. However, self-absorbed, Narcissus was arrogant and proud, and in love with his own image, he spent his time gazing into the placid waters of the river at his own reflection. One day, while engrossed in his own reflection, he fell into the river and drowned.

In psychology, narcissism is the term given to a concept developed by Sigmund Freud that determines the exacerbated love of an individual for himself; synonymous to selfishness, a self-centered person who denies the social dimension of the human person.

Legends and Folk Tales
The protagonists of mythological narratives are always gods; those of legends are always humans, heroes of antiquity at a certain historical moment who stand out for their contribution to humanity. For this same reason, myth is historically timeless, legend is historical, although it exaggerates the facts, distorting them, giving them a fantastic and excessive air to increase the fame of someone important from the past.

They are the characters of human imagination, half historical and half fictional, that captivate the human mind because each of them reflects a facet of our personality, like King Solomon, Pericles, Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Spartacus, Charlemagne, Godfrey of Bullion, Joan of Arc, Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Robin Hood, etc...

Characters like Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Tarzan; Superman, Spider-Man, Snow White, Cinderella... are fictional characters that belong to another literary genre similar to that of legend: folk tale. The only difference is that a legend starts from a historical character and magnifies him beyond reality, while a folk tale is timeless because it always starts with "once upon the time, in a distant country"; it never places us in time or space, but within the human psyche, revealing aspects of it.

Beliefs
Much of what we said about myth applies to belief. Because every myth is a belief, but not all beliefs are myths. Belief is more generic, that is, many of our beliefs are also myths. Myth belongs to the realm of philosophy, cultural anthropology or cosmogony; belief belongs more to the realm of psychology, religion and spirituality, because it is an inner conviction about an aspect of reality that is beyond the five senses and all empirical verification.

Belief is the mental acceptance or conviction of a "truth", idea or theory with or without empirical evidence. It is to hold something as true that cannot be proven or dis-proven by science. In this sense, it enters the field of intuitive knowledge so it does not belong to the logic-deductive knowledge of science.

Belief can be irrational, that is, superstitious or it can be reasonable. The First Vatican Council defines Faith as a reasonable belief. Witchcraft, magic, conferring on a material object, like a key, a horseshoe, a horn, spiritual value or power is an irrational belief and therefore a superstition, a return to the time when animals spoke and things had souls: to animism.

There are beliefs in modern life demonstrably false, and yet they continue to exist because they fulfill a positive function. Even children know that Santa Claus does not exist; however, in the collective conscious or unconscious imagination, he represents, personifies the love, kindness and generosity of a father, of a mother, of God as our Father.

Rituals
Because myths are narratives that explain the “why” of many human and nature realities, rite or ritual is to put into practice, acting out, expressing, or applying the myth or belief in real life. The purpose of the acting out or expression of the myth through ritual is to reinforce the belief in the myth.

A ceremony ritual, sacred or non-sacred, is an act that is always performed in the same way and celebrates a belief or myth that is important in the context of a culture or religion. The performance or celebration of rituals has a very important psychological and spiritual function; it relieves stress and anxiety, increases self-confidence, and reinforces faith or belief. Rituals remind us of what is most important in life and keep us united to the vital source; they give us a sense of stability and continuity in our lives.

We perform many rituals, even in our modern lives, and we do not even realize that we are doing them. But the fact that we do so proves their importance and function in our emotional and rational balance. The entry into adulthood, the bachelor parties, the ribbon cutting at an inauguration, tossing of the hat on graduation day, the bride tossing her bouquet to unmarried women during the wedding reception, the birthday celebration, the blowing out of one candle for each year.

Our Christian life is full of rites. All the sacraments have a belief and a ceremonial act behind them. The imposition of hands, the blessing, the baptism, are the gateway to the community – in fact, the priest comes to the door of the church to receive the neophyte. The Eucharist is the reconstitution of Christ's life, doctrine, his passion and death, for we do it in memory of him and it keeps us united as a community. Confession is a liberating catharsis from the negative actions of our lives; when we hear "I absolve you" ("ego te absolvo" in Latin) we feel cleansed, willing to start over. The anointing of the sick is a refreshment in our pain.

Religion
As we said before, it is itself a worldview, because it answers the questions "where we come from" and "where are we going", as well as it gives meaning, reason and purpose to everything that exists, structuring not only nature, but also the life of men in relation to themselves, to God and to nature. Among many things, religion encompasses beliefs, myths and rituals.

Archetype
It is an element of Greek philosophy, especially neoplatonic, which designates ideas, models, primigens or prototypes, paradigms of human behavior that reside in the collective unconscious of humanity, as demonstrated by Carl Jung, Freud's disciple. For Plato, archetypes are mental forms, primordial ideas imprinted in the soul before it takes on a body.

Jung discovered in our collective unconscious 12 paradigms, models or patterns of behavior that may or may not coincide with the functions of individuals in society or professions, but they also configure a way of being and behaving towards oneself and others. These are: the Sage, the Innocent, the Explorer, the Ruler, the Creator, the Caretaker, the Magician, the Hero, the Villain, the Lover, the Fool, the Orphan. The list could go on and on, even in relation to significant characters who shape standardized models of behavior.

In addition to these that are restricted to forms of behavior, there are other paradigms imprinted in our collective unconscious, which refer more to society and the way it operates. For example, I have as a paradigm or archetype of process: Egypt - Desert - Promised Land. Karl Marx, despite being an avowed atheist, consciously or unconsciously followed this archetype in his historical materialism. For him, Egypt was capitalism, the desert was the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Promised Land was communism or a classless society.

Recovery from an addiction also follows this archetype. Egypt is the addiction that has taken away your freedom and the control of your life; the desert is the price to erase or the purification of the body and mind from the toxins that enslave you; in the desert you feel the urge to go back, like the Jewish people after they escaped Egypt, or the withdrawal syndrome for the one struggling with an addiction, and finally, the Promised Land when you are completely free from this addiction.

Symbols
Emblems, shapes or signs that contain a powerful meaning within the culture, representing its model of life or its ancestral tradition, or some element considered iconic or totemic and identifying it, such as, for example, the cross for Christianity.

Norms, Rules and Laws
Every worldview also contains a code of laws, norms or rules of conduct to harmonize the coexistence among individuals, to determine the rights and duties in the relationship of individuals with each other and with the community at large. A regulation by which companies choose to govern themselves, either explicitly (legal format), through a protocol or subjectively.

Not all laws are spoken or written in stone. There are unwritten laws or norms, and yet everyone observes them. The way we dress often obeys an unwritten norm; similarly, opening the door for someone and letting them pass first, not picking your nose in public, and so many other little things we obey that are not written anywhere or obey any code of conduct.

Values
They are more inherent to human nature in general than to a particular worldview. Values such as freedom, equality, justice, truth, honesty, love, fidelity, are invariable in time and space. Duty, commitment, shape human life and are invariables from culture to culture or from time to time. A given worldview may have a slightly different interpretation of them, without varying the fundamental. 

Conclusion – Inserted in the motherboard of a computer are all the components that make it work as a harmonious whole, likewise, a worldview is composed of myths, rites, beliefs, norms, symbols, archetypes, and values that give meaning and shape to our lives.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Worldview, Culture and Human Nature

Human nature, culture and worldview are implicitly linked concepts, because each one has to do with the other two. Let us first try to define each of them individually and separately, and then see what makes them interdependent on each other.

HUMAN NATURE
The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.  Genesis 2:7

Life on our planet has a single origin. As different as plants and animals may seem to us today, every living thing on our planet has common ancestors. Life comes from a common trunk.

The human being is one of the 8.7 million living species that inhabit this planet. He belongs to the animal kingdom, to the class of mammals, to the subgroup of primates or hominids, and is a cousin/brother of the monkeys, gorillas and chimpanzees, with which he shares 98% of the DNA. He is the child of a still unknown father, having been born 5 million years ago in East Africa, more precisely in the deepest and longest valley on our planet, the Rift Valley.

Unlike other living beings that have evolved little or nothing at all over the past millions of years and have lived and still live today in the same habitat, the human being has evolved to the point of transcending his original habitat. He left Africa a little over 200,000 years ago and colonized the entire planet not only geographically, but also in terms of dominating all other species of living beings.

Why did only our species evolve? Since we and we alone are, in Karl Marx's view, the moment when nature gained consciousness of itself. It is a mystery that science has yet to unravel. We know that through evolution, we are descendants of a primate that, in order to satisfy its needs and to survive, instinctively began to adapt to its environment, then seeking to make the best use of the environment’s resources. It first lived like the animals in symbiosis with nature.

In his effort to know the environment in order to better adapt to it, the human being developed his cognitive abilities, to the point of taking possession of his environment. This is the way the Homo sapiens came about; now, more than adapting to the environment, they sought to adapt the environment to themselves.

What defines us as human beings
Millions of years of evolution have made us human, without ceasing to be animals. Biologist Konrad Lorenz has found numerous similarities between human and animal behaviours. Many of our reactions and decisions when faced with life-threatening situations are more animal-like than rational.

At the end of the day, we have not lost the reptilian brain common to all vertebrates, nor the mammalian one common to all mammals. These brains predate the authentically human one, the neocortex, and are, so to speak, closer to our being, because the reptilian brain that commands all vital and survival functions is always connected; the mammalian one is almost always connected, but sometimes disconnects; the neocortex is almost always partially disconnected. So, for a behaviour to be authentically and genuinely human, the connected neocortex must disconnect the other two, especially the reptilian one.

In this sense, there are characteristics that seem to be uniquely ours, but are in fact common to other animals close to us on the evolutionary scale; the only difference is that in us they are more developed. For instance:

- Acquiring knowledge and have the ability to transmit it socially through some form of language, other animals, like the orcas, also have it. Adapting to the environment and the changing conditions of life, many animals are also capable of this, like the cockroach that defends itself from all the poisons we invent to kill it;

- Living in community, other animals also do this, like the ants, lions, ducks, geese, bees, elephants, chimpanzees. The only difference is that ours is more complex and perhaps more democratic, where, of course, democracy exists;

- Loving our children to the point of giving our lives for them, noble as it may seem, this is something we have in common with any mammal, it is pure maternal instinct. What we truly have that is unique is everything that is located in the neocortex, the largest of our three brains. Let us then see what is uniquely human and identifies us as such.

Self-consciousness – cogito, ergo sum
Only the human being gains self-consciousness, around the age of 6 or 7. Self-consciousness is the splitting of our psyche into two, which allows us to be observers and observed, the ones who know and at the same time the topic of our knowledge. "Know thyself," Socrates shouted in the early days of Western philosophy.

This self-awareness of ours does not only concern the present. Since human life takes place in three times that are always interactive, this self-consciousness extends to the past as historical memory that gives us feedback of who we are: the knowledge of our talents, values, defects, and limitations such as death. Only human beings are aware of their own finitude, that one day they die and cease to exist, at least in space and time.

Knowledge of the past, of who we really are, is then used by our reason to extend into the future and program it, using the imaginative capacity and abstract mind that only humans have to project beyond the immediate. Certain philosophies of the Far East urge us to put both the past and the future aside. They forget that those who live in an eternal present, without a past or future, are animals not humans.

Cogito, ergo sum – Descartes’ maxim, “I think, therefore I am”. In the pure present in relating with others, society, the physical and geographical environment, self-consciousness, or reason works like a computer, that analyzes, collects data about a given problem, and projects possible solutions.

In addition to self-consciousness and reason, human life is based on two values: freedom and equality.

Freedom
While all animals live in symbiosis with nature, which regulates, governs and guides them by means of their instincts, the human being is the only animal that has emancipated himself from nature. Freedom, autonomy, independence are the values on which the human life of the individual, of the person, is based.  As we said, there are other animals that live in society, but in these societies the individual does not exist for itself, it is a slave of the society to which it belongs.

Man is free in relation to others, he is not anyone’s slave, nor does he live for anyone else, but for himself; he is free in relation to his animal substratum, because he has the power to control his basic instincts and postpone immediate gratification.

The human being is the only one who holds his life in his own hands, who has power to give it a meaning and a direction. He has free choice, free will, which allows him to decide on the totality of his life, as well as on each of its parts. You can make mistakes in the decisions you take, and you may have to pay for the harmful consequences of your choices.

Part of freedom in relation to the environment, to others and to oneself, lies in the ability to transcend oneself; in relation to matter, through scientific and technological progress; in relation to material things, by developing the spiritual self, both in his relationship with God and with things and others, expressing himself symbolically through culture, art, music, religion, habits, customs, clothing, etc.

Equality
The human being is an intrinsically social being, is born from a loving relationship, grows up and becomes an authentic human being only if he or she is loved unconditionally, and always lives as a member of a family, as part of a community, organization or institution. Individually one is either a father or mother, son or daughter, grandfather or grandmother, aunt or uncle, nephew or niece. There is no human existence beyond these categories, and belonging to any one of them, puts you in a relationship with the others.

The other person is another ‘I’; not a ‘you’, not an external entity, strange, foreign, distant, but my neighbour, so close that he or she is another ‘I’, an alter-ego, from which the word altruism comes from. Love is the highest value in social life, to live is to love. Empathy, mercy, and compassion are what hold individuals together in groups.

What is due to me is due to him, because he is a human being just like me and we all come from the same common trunk born in the Rift Valley 5 million years ago. Equality and coexistence in society are based on the principle that my rights are my neighbour’s duties, and my duties are my neighbour’s rights.

Life in society makes individuals citizens with rights and duties. Law is born to govern society, and ethics, which discerns what is best and more appropriate, defines the guidelines of social behaviour. Life in society created written and spoken language for communication between individuals, with the aim of working as a team to foster unity, peace and harmony.

Can human nature change?
Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So, God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Genesis 1:26-27

We were created in the image and likeness of God and if God does not change, then human nature does not change either. If human nature changed, then God would have to incarnate again and again throughout history, in each of these hypothetically ever-changing human natures to also be for these generations the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Since human nature does not change, it is God and his Word collected in the Bible that inspires and leads to God, both the men who lived 2,000 years ago and those who will live 10,000 years from now, if we still exist as a species.

Human values are proof that human nature does not change, neither in time, from one generation to another, nor in space from one culture and another. The concepts of justice, truth, honesty, fidelity, love, compassion, etc. are invariable over time in all cultures. The feeling of love that Cleopatra and Mark Antony experienced is the same as that of Romeo and Juliet experienced years later, as lovers experience and will experience in every time and place.

Separated by time, place and culture, the prophet Amos and Bishop Oscar Romero used exactly the same gauge to discern what is just and what is not. Mahatma Gandhi used the same concept of nonviolence that Jesus used centuries earlier. The peoples of the Fertile Crescent built pyramids and offered human sacrifices to their gods. But just like the Sumerians and the Egyptians in the fertile crescent, the Mayans and the Aztecs in Central America also built pyramids and yet these peoples never knew of each other’s existence.

Human nature, what the human being essentially is, does not change. In philosophy, the essence, the being does not change; what changes are the accidents, the variables, the circumstances. Our understanding of human nature may vary and change, just as we may discover in ourselves talents that we thought we did not have; yet they were already there, though unknown to us. We may acquire new ways as we adapt to our environment, for example, losing our tails because we no longer climb trees, but what is essentially human remains unchanged in time and space.

CULTURE
How is it that human nature does not change if we have diversity of cultures and languages, and language is considered to be the soul of a culture? There are two factors that caused the diversity of cultures and languages throughout human history.

The first was the absence of communication between peoples. For this same reason, in an increasingly globalized future, the diversity of languages and cultures will cease to exist or will be greatly attenuated. The second was the geographical factor: different peoples lived in different latitudes and longitudes, with climatic differences.

The diversity of cultures and languages would therefore be the adaptation of human beings to different geographical topographies. For example, it is not the same to live on the mountains as by the sea; as for different climates, it is not the same to live in the tropics, with two seasons, as to live in a temperate zone with four seasons, or in the Arctic.

The indigenous peoples living in the Arctic have numerous words for "snow", while in Ethiopia, in Africa, the same word is used for snow as for frost, which are two different things. On the other hand, we notice that the languages of the Nordic peoples because of the cold factor are more consonantal, and the mouth barely opens, while the languages of the tropical peoples are more vocal, causing the mouth to open fully.

The colour of the skin, eyes and hair, the shape of the eyes, nose, mouth and lips, as we have explained in previous texts, are also an adaptation of human beings to the environment in which they have been living for at least 25,000 years. If a tribe of Pygmies from the Congo were to move to Norway today, 25,000 years from now, they would be indistinguishable from the Norwegians.

Barring some minor differences, the adaptation of human beings to their environment is common to other animals. The adaptation of the environment to themselves, creating culture, is proper only to human beings. Only humans create a culture as an “artificial” habitat, in the correct sense of the word "ars facere", making art. In this sense, man is a cultural being, because he is not content with what nature gives him but creates a second nature in which he lives in, that is culture.

The human being made in the image of God is a creator like Him. The only difference is that while God creates out of nothing, the human being creates by combining and mixing the elements of creation. Culture is like the house that the human being builds with elements that nature supplies. Nature does not give houses, it is man who builds them; the diversity of houses represents the diversity of cultures, because it points to the place where they are built - sloped roof where it snows, flatter roof where it does not snow. The same can be said of clothing and everything that the human being makes, invents or manufactures with his creative mind, to make life more comfortable.

The tree is nature, wood, chair, and table are culture; hair is nature, hairstyle is culture; sound is nature, words and music are culture; fire is nature, anvil and barbecue are culture.

The Tarzan myth teaches us that in humans, the cultural factor is more important than nature. If a human baby is raised by chimpanzees, he will be like a chimpanzee. On the other hand, if a baby chimpanzee is raised by humans, with the same education as a human baby, it will never be human. If in a sparrow’s nest, we place a masked weaver's egg, when this masked weaver is an adult it will not make its nest as a sparrow does on top of a branch, but like a masked weaver, suspended from a branch. The human being is born an animal and becomes human through education and acculturation. The animal is born already practically in an adult state, it needs no time for socialization.

Culture is at the same time the adaptation of the human being to the environment and the adaptation of the environment to the needs of the human being. Culture is this interaction between the environment and the human being, and the human being and the environment.

WORLDVIEW
God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Genesis 1:31

We can use the biblical text of the creation of the world as a metaphor for the relationship between worldview and culture. Culture is God's creation, looking at it and seeing it as good is God’s worldview of what he has created. God who is love has a loving view of all that he has created, out of love.

God created the world, and man from the world created by God created culture. Worldview is man's view of what he created. Unlike God, not everything he creates is out of love, and since he creates many things out of hatred, like the instruments of war, in the end he cannot say that what he has created is good.

To paraphrase the expression "God made the world, the Dutchman made Holland", God made the world, man made culture, man adapted or customized this world, like someone customizing a computer to meet his needs.

The worldview is an abstraction of culture, because it makes culture an object of study. Worldview is the knowledge that I have of my culture, the mental image or representation, consciously or unconsciously, that I have of my culture.

Every human being has a worldview, because it is what guides him in life. At the same time, the worldview possesses us, because whatever we do or think, we do it within and in the context of a worldview. In this sense, the worldview seems to encompass culture because it is a set of ideas that an individual has about the world, and these ideas are the product of the culture in which he or she is embedded. As our culture goes, so will our worldview or view of the world be.

The worldview is the basis of all cultural manifestation that is made up of motivations, assumptions, beliefs, commitments, certainties, and ideas, through which reality is experienced and interpreted, from the subjective-private level to the objective-institutional level shared by society.

Conclusion: Human nature is what we are, our essence, culture is our existence at a particular time and space. Worldview is the sense we make of our essence and our existence.
 

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC