Believing after Karl Marx

"Until now, philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." — Karl Marx

Karl Marx is more a sociologist and economist than a philosopher. Although he continued his atheistic philosophical reflection, he accepted Feuerbach's ideas and tried to apply them in the fields of economics and sociology in his criticism of capitalism. As he himself says, he is not interested in theories that lack practical application that can change the world.

He aims to understand how religion has performed over time, what it has served, and who it has served. He discovers that it has been an instrument of oppression used by the ruling classes against the poorest. This is a simplistic view, which even Marx himself must have recognized, but it is the one that best serves his theory. In other words, dialectical materialism is at the service of historical materialism.

Biography of Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Karl Marx was born in 1818 in the city of Trier, then a territory of Prussia, into an upper-class German family. His father was a successful lawyer and government advisor. At the age of seventeen, Marx went to study law at the University of Bonn, following in his father's footsteps.

However, the young university student got involved in parties and fell into a bohemian lifestyle. To put an end to this, his father, Heinrich Marx, transferred him to the University of Berlin. There, the defiant younger Marx discovered philosophy, the field in which he would earn his degree.

At the age of 23, Marx defended his thesis in Philosophy, obtaining a doctorate, which enabled him to enter an academic career. However, due to his criticism of the Prussian government, he was prevented from teaching at universities, forcing him to work as a journalist.

Marx's radical positions led to his expulsion from various Prussian, German, and French territories, and ultimately, he was expelled from Cologne, Germany, in 1848. In England that same year, he published the Communist Manifesto together with Friedrich Engels. From 1843 until the end of his life, Marx survived on inheritances, financial support from Engels, and from occasional articles he wrote for newspapers. It was in London that he wrote his most important work: Das Kapital.

Religion as the Opium of the People
The son of a Jewish convert to Protestant Christianity, Marx was even married in a church. However, he was a revolutionary. In his emblematic work, Das Kapital, he analyzed the evils of capitalism and viewed religion as an obstacle to progress—that is, to the evolution of capitalism towards socialism and communism.

Marx fully agrees with Feuerbach: God is a projection of man, and religion is therefore "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of a spiritless age. It is the opium of the people”. As well as being a projection, religion is a drug, an alienating behavior that prevents us from being ourselves, from taking the reins of our destiny or the helm of our boat. In short, it is an obstacle to progress.

Marx's atheism is more economic and social than philosophical. He has no interest in the essence of religion, be it Jewish or Christian, and is in fact ignorant of Christ or the social principles of Christianity.

What interests him is the role religion plays in society. Thus, Marx's atheism may be due to the type of religion practiced at that time, which in itself may have had little to do with Christ’s Christianity. Indeed, the classless communist society of the future could very well be the Promised Land of the Jews, the Kingdom of God of Jesus of Nazareth and the Christians.

What in Feuerbach was just a philosophical idea, in Marx it is a manifesto, an operative idea. However, it should be noted that Marx firmly believed that both capitalism and religion would collapse on their own, without the need of an intervention, like a fruit that ripens, rots and falls from the tree.

Nonetheless, his followers understood that they needed to be given a push, and that is precisely what Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong did with militant atheism, which resulted in the deaths of millions of people during most of the 20th century. Poor Marx, realizing while he was still alive that there were so many versions of his theories, even declared himself a non-Marxist.

Listen, Marx
To Marx, I would say that so far it has been more the religious who have brought benefits to humanity than the atheists, who brought gulags, dictatorships, and religious persecutions, resulting in the death of around 30 million people throughout the last century. Religion can be seen as the opium of the people when it is disconnected from life and social reality, but in essence, it is not the opium of the people.

As Karl Marx said, the human being is the moment when nature becomes aware of itself. Of all living beings, we are the only ones with the capacity to think and have some control over our destiny and life. It makes no sense that our fate should be the same as that of a louse or flea: nothingness. If that were so, I and many others would rather not have been born than share the same fate with lice, cockroaches, and fleas: nothingness.

Here lies the absurdity of atheism: it makes no sense that an intelligently ordered universe, which has progressed as far as human life, should suffer the same fate as the rest of living beings. Why would we have come this far? So that we would be more aware of our misery, and suffer more than all other living beings?

Precisely at the moment when we become aware of ourselves, of our existence, and the relative power we have over it, we also realize that one day we will die—that is, that one day we will cease to exist. At least animals, which also die, are spared this suffering of knowing. They do not think, they do not know they exist, and therefore, they do not know they will die.

Why, then, do we have consciousness? To masochistically experience suffering, pain, anguish and anxiety in the face of death and our miserable condition compared to other living beings?

Animals have no power over their own lives: nature has implanted a "chip" in their system known as instinct, which automatically governs their lives. Living beings travel on autopilot; they cannot err, nor are they ever right or wrong—or rather, they are always right, always fulfilling the vocation for which they were created. Unlike them, humans have some power over their life and can transform it into heaven, or hell by making mistakes. Wouldn’t it be better if we too lived on autopilot, given that we all share the same end?

To animals, nature is a prodigal mother, giving them everything, even clothing them. When they emerge from their mother’s womb, they are already equipped with everything they need to live. Human beings, on the other hand, are born as the most vulnerable and helpless of all living beings and it takes them a long time to reach adulthood: years of education, school and university, and then, in order to survive, they have to work most of the day to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, while our fellow animals eat, sleep and play, their days away. What is the point of all this? Wouldn’t the animal’s life be better if everything truly ended in insignificance?

Conclusion - Although certain types of religion can become alienating, the religion of Jesus, far from being opium, is rather the leaven of a more fraternal world, based on equality and justice.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Self-Knowledge

"Know thyself" - Oracle of Delphi (469 B.C.)  
"You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" - John 8:32  

After discovering who I am, the place I occupy and the time in which I live, through the practice of self-awareness, the search for the meaning of my life requires me to question my identity, to know myself, to understand who I am, what I am, and how I am.

To live life meaningfully, I need to know my talents, natural inclinations, and tendencies, my flaws, my way of being and acting, so that I know what I can count on before deciding what to do with my life.

A Continuous Process
Human beings are not physical objects that can be delimited, measured, and weighed, nor can they be placed in a test tube; they are not static and thus are not the same over time; they grow, change, and transform. There are as many general rules as there are exceptions, so a final definition is not possible, because human beings always escape any kind of conceptualization.

Although it is not possible to define the human being completely and once and for all, we can nonetheless find constants, feelings, emotions, ways of acting and thinking that repeat themselves, revealing a certain type of character and personality that can guide us in living the present moment with meaning. These are inconclusive conclusions that serve to formulate other questions and to gradually give direction and purpose to our lives.

The Johari Window
This technique helps us to understand clearly the relationship we establish with others and with ourselves. Like the traditional windows in our homes, it is divided into four small panes and two intersecting areas. The first area concerns what others know and do not know about me; the second concerns what I know and do not know about myself. From the intersection of these four areas, various types of "self" emerge: the open self, the blind self, the hidden self, and the unknown self.

The Open Self: This is made up of the attitudes, values, and behaviors that I know and others also know about me. This is the public self, an area that contains information that is known to everyone: name, age, facts, talents, etc.

The Blind Self: This is made up of things I do not know about myself, but others do. This is proof that human beings are social beings. Our individuality is formed in continuous confrontation with others, starting with those who are most significant to us, like our parents and siblings.

We are incapable of seeing our face as it truly is. The image we see in the mirror is always a distortion of reality since there are no perfect mirrors. Others see my face as it really is; thus, one of the keys to my intimacy, to my self-knowledge, lies with others. One who is inside the forest sees only trees and not the entire forest; the other brings me objectivity and a global view of who I am…

 "Who do people say that I am? (…) But who do you say that I am?" (Mark 8:27, 29). Others may have a very different idea and image of me, and theirs is just as true as mine. I am, at the same time, what I think I am and what others think I am.

It is important to maintain a friendly relationship with a person who is significant to us, so that he or she can always give us feedback on who we are and how we are perceived by others. Even Jesus himself needed this feedback from His disciples.

The Hidden Self: This is made up of what we know about ourselves that we choose not to reveal to others, out of fear or for other reasons; it is what we call our privacy and intimacy, feelings, and past experiences we prefer not to disclose. In general, if this area is too large, we may be judged as lacking authenticity.

It is psychologically healthy to have someone who knows everything or almost everything about me; it is essential to have a friend with whom I am an open book, with whom my self is fully open. But, for safety’s sake, there cannot be too many of these people.

It is not without reason that people say, "May God protect me from my friends, for I can defend myself from my enemies," or, "Do not reveal your heart, even in pain, for he who bares his heart betrays himself”.

The Unknown Self: This is made up of all the material in our unconscious that sometimes surfaces without warning when something unexpected happens; it is information about ourselves that is still undiscovered and unknown to us or to others; areas of recognized talent, potential, motives, or childhood memories that lie dormant, influencing our behavior in ways unknown to us.

The unknown self is subject to a maxim of psychology that could well have been inscribed in the modern-day Oracle of Delphi: what we know about ourselves we can control; what we do not know controls us. It is in this sense that Jesus advises us to know the truth, for only by knowing the truth about ourselves can we be free, can we have our lives in our own hands, possess ourselves so that we can give of ourselves.

As for the unknown self, we are a mystery to others and to ourselves. We are not a mystery only to God. In this sense, we can compare ourselves to an iceberg: there is a large part of our personality that is not directly and voluntarily accessible, like a database for which I do not have the password.

However, it is not entirely concealed and locked away like a safe. There are moments and circumstances in which the unconscious reveals itself; these are moments that are out of our control and which we must take advantage of. We can say that these are messages that our unconscious sends to the conscious, messages that must be understood, decoded, and used in daily life.

Lapsus Linguae: These are statements we inadvertently make without meaning to and sometimes out of context; this is what people call "a slip of the tongue” that reveals the truth. It is a way the unconscious reveals itself to the conscious. Since they are unconscious, the person who says them is not aware of them, but a friend or a therapist can reveal them through feedback.

Dreams: We all dream, we always dream and dreams are always exclusively about us. Each object, each character, is part of us. Dreams are always subjective, never objective: if I dream about my father, it is not truly him I am dreaming about but the kind of relationship I have with him, how I perceive him, etc.

Working on or analyzing a dream is like traveling into the subconscious. Often, dreams are metaphorical, phantasmagorical, or even ridiculous; these are ways the unconscious draws our attention to something.

Body Language: What I say, what I do, is conscious; body language is unconscious, only the other person is aware of it and can interpret it. Because it is unconscious, what I say through body language is truer than what I say out aloud. In fact, as we say in Portuguese, "gesture is everything”, and much of our communication is non-verbal. It says more than what I say in words because I do not control it.

Growing as a human being is synonymous with growing in self-knowledge. This knowledge is not solely the result of introspection; a psychotherapist once said that no amount of introspection or self-examination will be enough to know ourselves. We can analyze ourselves for weeks or meditate for months and not advance even an inch; it is like trying to smell our own breath or making ourselves laugh by tickling ourselves.

Introspection is obviously a factor in the process toward greater self-knowledge, but it is not the only one. The process consists of two other factors that act in the form of a dynamic triangle.

What I learn about myself through introspection is complemented by feedback from people who are important to me; in this way, the four selves are harmonized and somehow fused into a single self. When I live in a loving relationship with people who care about me, their feedback can help me know more and more about my unconscious.

The Adventure of Living  
"The situation makes the thief" – Feedback on who I truly am is not always given to me by others, but by the situations in which I find myself and the experiences I go through. Mistakes, failures and successes say more about me than introspection. To know who I am, I must observe my behavior, whether or not I meet what is expected of me. I can only know if I have a talent when I try to use it when the time is right.

"Nothing ventured, nothing gained" – I do not know whether or not I have a talent until the day I am confronted by a situation that requires it. Winston Churchill and what he represented to England in World War II cannot be understood without it. It was this man's response to the challenge of the moment, WWII, that made him great. Heroes, saints, are made and known when they are put to the test, when faced with great challenges.

Tools for Self-Knowledge
There are psychological theories that have become very popular and can help people know themselves better. In the line of religion and mysticism, we have the Enneagram; in the line of Freud's existential psychology, we have Transactional Analysis; in Jung's line, we have Myers/Briggs.

Conclusion - Self-knowledge is an ongoing and never-complete process of uncovering who we are, harmonizing our talents and limitations in order to live with meaning, purpose and authenticity.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Integral Worldview

My reflection this year on worldview, as the skeleton or framework on which our ideals lie or the Magna Carta that governs our thinking and our lives, was inspired by reading a book called, The Powers That Be, by the Protestant theologian Walter Wink. The book is not about worldview, but about the powers that govern this world. However, in five pages of this book, Wink describes the 5 worldviews that have governed the imagination of human beings thus far.

These 5 worldviews are as follows: the ancient, the spiritualist, the materialist, the theological, and the integral. I understand that there are more worldviews than those cited in this book, and also many more beyond the ones I mention in this year's articles. As can be seen, three of the worldviews that Wink mentions are part of my study: the materialist, the spiritualist, and the integral, the latter is the topic of this text.

As we have said, the materialist worldview is the one that governs the world of culture, politics, arts, science, high finance, and universities. These environments have been completely sterilized of any religious sentiment, manifestation, thought or symbol. Western culture, the daughter of Christianity, has thrown its mother in prison and carried out an "ethnic cleansing" of many elements associated with Christianity.

As for other elements, Western culture stole them without mentioning their Christian origin, like for example, the baptismal registry books that the republicans that overthrew the monarchy in Portugal,  stole from the Churches to begin the civil registry. It also stole other elements by changing their names; historians, instead of saying before or after Christ, say before or after the common era to denote year.  

Western society has become so materialistic that it is almost inhuman, cold, selfish, and where nobody cares about anyone; individualism and selfishness have grown out of proportion; atheists and agnostics say they have values, but we do not see them in action anywhere. In this climate of such materialistic inhumanity, many take refuge in spiritualism and, following the law of the pendulum, adhere to a spiritualism that denies and demonizes all matter. They constitute small communities that are authentic oases in this materialistic desert.

The integral worldview is a worldview that seeks to reconcile man with his nature. As we have already said, we understand that modern man represses religious feeling in the same way that a Puritan society represses sex. The integral worldview also aims to overcome the dualisms typical of the spiritualist worldview, to seek the synthesis of these thesis and antitheses: spirit vs. matter, soul vs. body, creationism vs. evolutionism, sacred vs. profane, pure vs. impure, etc.

This new mentality, this new worldview, this new optic, and way of seeing things, is rising from the ashes of materialism, like a Phoenix reborn. It is not a crude, ignorant, reactionary spiritualism that has science as its enemy, but the living of religious feeling in the light of science, in constant dialogue with it. It is a faith that allows itself to be purified by science from all myths, superstitions, and irrationalism; it is a science that allows itself be guided and inspired by faith, that is not ashamed of it. Few are those who already live in this dimension, the majority of the population is either materialistic or spiritualistic.

History of Materialism
From religion to anti-religion, the history of materialism is a history of evolution of the experience of religious feeling. It all began with matter impregnated with spirit, breathing spirit through its every pore: this was the stage of animism. As human beings got to know the material realities of the world around them, they started stealing the souls of these realities.

In moving from animism to polytheism, human beings stole the souls from countless material realities, and to those handful few they did not know, they attributed to them the status of gods, that is, of leaders of a reality such as time, sea, love, war. For the sake of simplification, human beings concentrated these unknown realities into one single deity, but they did not stop there.

Because of the scientific discoveries of the 19th century and their practical applications in the 20th century, human beings began to think that they had discovered everything there was to discover. They became proud and so full of themselves that they destitute the religious sentiment, declaring that it was not God who had created man in his image and likeness, but rather man who created God in his image and likeness. Later, not content with his delusion, he killed God and put himself in his place.

Little by little, however, modern man is realizing that religious sentiment is neither an invention of ignorance nor an explanation for unexplainable things. The very fact that no matter how much the human being knows, there will always be things that he still does not know, proves that matter seems to have certain properties in common with Spirit after all.  

Some intellectuals of our time, not defining themselves as religious, go so far as to say that if God did not exist, he would have to be invented. Yes, because they recognize that this world, as it is structured, presupposes that most human beings are believers. Because if the contrary were true, things would not be as we find them in this world. So, as I have said elsewhere, atheists and agnostics are lucky that most are believers. In fact, the world as it is structured can survive with an agnostic minority, as long as the majority, as is the case, is a believer.

The integral worldview is going to suppose a return of what was stolen back to its owner; giving Spirit back to matter, because neither matter is as material as materialists think, nor is Spirit as immaterial and incorporeal as spiritualists think. The integral worldview will somehow imply a return to animism, but not the same uninformed animism of primitive men or ours when we were children; it will be an animism that will place the spirit at the center of every thing. Today we know from science that visible matter is after all composed of invisible and intangible subatomic particles.

Physics is the Soul of Science
When we talked about worldview and science, we said that scientific discoveries make us change our perspective about everything around us, the way we relate to the environment, our view of life; it is not the same to think that the Earth is the center of the universe than to think that it is not the Earth, but the Sun, and ultimately not even the Sun, is the center of a universe that probably has no center. It is not the same to think that matter and energy are two realities of a different nature than to think that matter is a form of energy and energy is a form of matter, just as water exists in three different physical states, and none is similar to the other, so much so that they even look like different realities.

Every scientific discovery can provoke a metanoia, a conversion, a change of mind, a worldview, or a new way of looking at things. Our mind, our faith, and our life have to adapt to the evolution of our knowledge of the reality that surrounds us and with which we relate. The science that can most stir our worldview is Physics, because it is the one that studies the most basic and fundamental things of our life, such as matter and the cosmos.

It is in this sense that we can state that the materialist worldview is out of fashion because it has not kept up with the latest scientific discoveries in the field of physics, especially quantum physics. The materialist worldview is right and makes sense in the context of mechanistic physics like Newton's, where reality works with the precision, cadence, rhythm, and prediction of a Swiss watch.

This worldview was itself misleading because it featured a watch without a watchmaker. But more than that, since Einstein we know that reality has nothing to do with the precision of a watch, but if it were a watch, it would not be precise as the Swiss kind, because it would be relative, that is, it would not always mark the same hours.

The New Quantum Physics and Quantum Mechanics
Quantum mechanics changes our minds, modifies our paradigms, attacks the logic that has governed science and our lives, because it breaks down boundaries that used to seem insurmountable and puts an end to the dualisms that opposed realities that we used to think were very different and even contrary, such as matter/energy, static/dynamic, visible/invisible, tangible/intangible, predictable/unpredictable, material/spiritual, scientific/philosophical.

Matter/Energy – The heart of matter is intangible like energy; the heart of matter, the world of atoms and subatomic particles is, in fact, energy.

Atoms can be matter, insofar as we try to weigh and measure them; but the particles that compose them have electric charges and move, that is, they exhibit the properties of energy. We can conclude that they are matter in their essence, describable, qualifiable and quantifiable, but that they are energy in their existence, because they exhibit a voltaic power, they react, and create waves.

Matter is energy in potential, energy is matter in potential. Combustion transforms matter into energy: this is what happens at the center of the sun, where hydrogen atoms fuse, creating helium and energy.

Visible, solid matter is composed of invisible elements, and the further we travel to the center of matter, the less matter (mass) and the more empty space we find, so matter seems to be reduced to tiny vibrating fibers of energy. Subatomic particles are in fact manifestations of energy. Therefore, what seemed so visible and solid is now reduced to electromagnetic waves. As the result, we can conclude that our body and everything that materially exists is reduced to vibrating energy.

Matter in itself does not exist, for it is merely a storehouse of energy, it is nothing more than condensed, accumulated energy. For example, plants, through photosynthesis, convert the radiant energy of the sun into chemical energy that is stored in organic molecules, as if the plant were a battery, a storehouse of energy.

Matter/Spirit - Materialism has no reason to exist, because matter is formed by invisible, almost spiritual elements, and we certainly cannot understand matter without knowing its soul. The atom is the soul of matter, so not only human beings have souls, matter does too. The soul of matter is as invisible as ours within our body.

Inert/Living - It is no longer clear that life only exists in organic matter; there is no longer such a big difference between organic matter and inorganic or inert matter. Subatomic particles reveal to us that life exists not only at the level of cells, but also at the subatomic level of quarks. Of course, this is a different form of life.

Visible/Invisible  - "If quantum mechanics hasn't shocked you deeply, it's because you haven't understood it yet. Everything we call real is made up of things that truly cannot be understood as real." Niels Bohr

The boundary between the visible and the invisible is also broken in matter. The mass of an atom is less than 1% of its size, the rest is void, that is, the space between the nucleus and the electrons. As stated above, if the nucleus of an atom were the size of a basketball, the electrons would be several kilometers away from the nucleus.

Static/Dynamic - The matter that forms objects appear static, it seems stationary, but in fact, this is an illusion: in reality, everything moves. As stated earlier, the electron orbits around the nucleus of the atom at a speed of 2,200 kilometers per second. Matter is therefore not static as it seems, but dynamic.

In quantum mechanics, everything is an illusion: visible matter is composed of invisible elements; it is apparently static, when in reality it is in motion; it is apparently very different from energy, but it is in fact a form of energy.

Pure/Impure - There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile, (Mark 7:15). ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ (Acts 10:15)

There was a time when the sexual act was seen as something dirty, ugly, sinful, and impure; It was only seen as a lesser evil when it was performed in the context of marriage for the sole purpose of procreation. But even then, Christian couples were advised not to enjoy the pleasure of sex and to abstain completely from sexual intercourse during Lent. For the rest, it was seen as a " remedium concupiscência", a palliative for voluptuousness, not as an act of love.

Love is the soul of the sexual act, which is one of the expressions of love in its function of uniting people into one body and one soul. And since it is the act by which the two will become one flesh (Mark 10:1-12), then resulting in three, the genesis of a human being is the fruit of the unitive love between two people, hence in no way can it be an impure act.

Sacred/Profane - When St. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit, and when Jesus tells us that instead of praying to be seen by others, we should do so in our room (Matthew 6:5), we should pray within ourselves in spirit and truth, not on Mount Gerizim or in the temple of Jerusalem (John 4:23-54), where then lies the profane? Was not everything created by God? If everything and everyone was created by God, nothing is profane, everything is sacred.

Good/Bad - Love as a human need (to love and to be loved) does not seem, at first glance, to be connected with morality, but it really is. When we judge we do not love, when we love we do not judge; universal love, especially love of enemies, overcomes the dualistic thinking of good versus evil, and can take us to the eternity that is God, the one who makes rain come down on the just as well as the unjust, and loves everyone unconditionally. We are called to be like Him.

It is also said that love is blind; that lovers tend not to see each other's faults and shortcomings, and naturally refrain from judging each other. And it also seems that when love disappears, only defects and deficiencies are seen. This leads us to conclude that only love can free us from being hypercritical of each other, taking us back to the Garden of Eden.

God/Devil  - There is only God, the devil does not exist, his myth was created to exonerate God from the creation of evil. Evil, or individual evils, were created by man when he misused his freedom. The possibility that this would happen, that is, the possibility that men could sin, choose evil, was created by God in making man free. There is no equally viable alternative to good, to God; he who does not gather with me, Jesus says, scatters, for there is no devil with whom he can gather....

Quantum Mechanics Proves the Power of Faith
Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, ‘Why could we not cast it out?’ He said to them, ‘Because of your little faith. For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there”, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.’  Matthew 17:19-20

In classical deterministic mechanics, knowing the initial position and momentum (mass and velocity) of all particles belonging to a system, we can calculate their interactions and predict how they will behave.

This is not the case in quantum mechanics; Heisenberg's Principle highlights that it is impossible to know both the exact position an electron occupies in the electrosphere of an atom and the speed at which it moves around the nucleus; the more we know about its speed, the less we will know about its position, and vice versa.

According to Niels Bohr, when measuring a subatomic particle, the very act of measuring forces the particle to give up all possible places where it could be and (uncertainty principle) selects the location where you can find it; it is the act of measuring that forces the particle to make that choice.

Unlike Einstein, Bohr accepted that the nature of reality was inherently confusing; Einstein preferred to believe in the certainty of things in themselves and at all times, not just when they are measured or observed. Bohr even went on to say that he "would like the moon to stay in its place even when I'm not looking at it." When Einstein, already quite annoyed, said that "God didn't play dice," Bohr impassively replied, "Stop telling God what to do.”

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot be behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." Max Planck (1858-1947) Nobel laureate, founder of quantum theory.

Integral Worldview
‘No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.’  Mark 2:21-22

Those who still have their minds shaped by the deterministic principles and precision of mechanistic physics cannot understand quantum physics and mechanics. Their materialistic wineskins cannot understand a matter impregnated with spirit, bizarre, illogical, judicious, mystical; the Dane Niels Bohr, one of the creators of the new science, once said that only those who did not understand quantum physics were not scandalized by it.

The integral view of reality sees everything as having an outer and inner aspect. Heaven and earth are thus seen as the inner and outer aspects of a single reality. The spirit is at the center of every created thing. This inner spiritual reality is inextricably related to an outer form or physical manifestation.

Heaven or spirit is not up and matter down, but rather the spirit is within the matter. It is in a sense the immanence of God who is at the center of everything. Everything is in God and God is in everything. This is not pantheism that everything is God, but panentheism: everything is in God and God is in everything. This worldview is shared by Native American religions, which speak of father heaven and mother earth.

The soul or spirit, as described by St. John, is also governed by the same principle of uncertainty that governs the interior of matter in the subatomic particles from which it is formed: ‘The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ John 3:8.

The integral worldview reconciles science with religion, matter with spirit, the inner world with the outer world. The enchanted world of subatomic particles has proved to the scientist that after all he cannot grasp everything with his reason and be the master of reality that he thought he was during the time of Newton's mechanistic physics. The new physics tells the man of today to "Grow up!”

Conclusion: the agnostic materialists, out of touch with the reality of today's quantum physics, continue to be formatted according to Newton's mechanistic physics; by robbing the spirit of matter, they eat a bread that feeds but tastes like nothing. The spiritualists, denying the corporeality of matter, live like penitent souls in a world that, being in itself a valley of pleasures and joys, has become a valley of tears. By stealing matter from spirit, they eat a bread that may taste good, but does not nourish. The integral worldview is like a whole grain bread, which nourishes and tastes good; it gives health to the body and joy to the soul.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Believing after Feuerbach

Religious sentiment belongs to human nature, is part of it, and generally refers to God as man’s friend – every religion tends to establish a relationship of friendship with God. Atheists, on the contrary, deny that religious sentiment is innate to human beings and tend to see God as man’s enemy, an obstacle to his self-realization, growth and progress.

There have been cultures and civilizations without science and technology, but there has never been one without religious sentiment, without religion. This is because self-awareness, which emerges in human life around the age of 6 or 7, is contemporary with the certainty that one day we will die.

Because of cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, I know that one day I will cease to exist. The three questions that every human being asks of himself or herself – where I come from, where am I going, and what is the meaning of life – surface in the consciousness on the day he or she becomes self-aware. Religion is the answer to these three questions.

Biography of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)
Born in Rechenberg in 1804, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach was a German philosopher known for his study of humanist theology. He was a student of the philosopher Hegel, but abandoned his Hegelian studies to take up studies in the natural sciences in 1828.

His most important work is called “The Essence of Christianity”, in which he discusses the true essence or anthropology of religion and concludes that all religion is a form of alienation in which people project their concept of the “human ideal” onto a higher being. Feuerbach makes the transition from German idealism to the historical materialism of Karl Marx and the scientific materialism of the second half of the 19th century.

Religion as Man's Projection
Homo homini Deus est – Christianity set itself the goal of satisfying man’s unattainable desires, but for this very reason, ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help, it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in Heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and the effort to achieve it. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason, did not give him what he truly wants.

For Feuerbach, theology is pure anthropology, for it was not God who created man in his image and likeness, but on the contrary, it was man who created God in his image and likeness. Everything that is said about God belongs to man; the images of God and everything we know about him is anthropomorphic. Man, projects all his aspirations, desires and ideals outside of himself, onto an abstract being he calls God. “God is nothing more than the human spirit projected towards the infinity”.

“My first thought was God, my second thought was reason, my third and last thought was man”. This brilliant philosopher began his career as a student of theology, later abandoning it to become a disciple of Hegel. Feuerbach was the first great atheist of modern times. A real blaze of fire, which is what his name means. In truth, I believe that all those who came after him said little or nothing truly new, merely repeating his basic ideas with other words.

For this reason, Feuerbach is the great inspirer and precursor of Karl Marx, in the sense that he is the first to proclaim and fight for man’s emancipation from the tutelage of religion, which weakens him and deprives him of his own power. For Feuerbach, “Morality that does not aim at happiness is a word devoid of meaning”. And he warns us that “whenever morality is based on theology, whenever what is right becomes dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, and infamous things can be justified and imposed”.

As brilliant as it may seem, Feuerbach’s criticism of faith and religion is nothing more than sophistry. Man’s projection outside himself says nothing about the existence or non-existence of God: God can exist with or without projection.

Human projection, precisely because it is human, has more to do with human nature than with God’s nature. Thus, human projection can explain why the thought of God has always existed in the minds of all men at all times; but it has nothing to say about the hypothetical existence of God. On the contrary, the persistence of the very thought of God in our minds is more proof of God’s existence than of His non-existence.

If a person is thirsty or has a desire to drink water, it is because there must be water to quench his thirst; it is more logical to think that water creates the desire than to think that the desire creates water; especially since, chronologically in the history of the Universe, long before the appearance of man, there was already water; therefore, water pre-exists the desire to drink it. I believe that if water did not exist, neither would thirst.

Returning to the sequence of Feuerbach’s thoughts from God to Man, unfortunately, Feuerbach did not stop at the third thought, God – Reason – Man. After having lowered and degraded God to the category of pure human conjecture, he did not stop there but continued with his fourth thought which was the sensible, with the fifth which was nature, and with the sixth which was matter, going so far as to foolishly state that “man is what he eats”.

In other words, when you degrade God, you end up degrading the creature He created in His image and likeness as well. According to the book of Genesis, God took us from matter (clay) and made us as persons in His own image and likeness. If we deny God’s existence as a person, we also deny our existence as persons, because we owe it to Him.

If we are not a person, then we return to what we were before God created us, that is, matter. In conclusion, what Feuerbach is doing to the human being is a Darwinian involution…

Conclusion – For Feuerbach, it was man who created God in his own image, projecting his aspirations and ideals onto God, and not the other way around. However, the human desire for something transcendent can be proof of God’s existence. There is no thirst without water and no water without thirst.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Spiritualist Worldview

When we speak of the Christian worldview, we are referring more to the contribution of Christianity to humanity and how humanity is indebted to it in many respects as a global religion. As we have spoken about the biblical worldview, referring to the Hebrew people, and therefore to the Old Testament; in speaking of the Christian worldview, we focus more on the content of the Christian narrative or, if you will, on Judeo-Christianity. The spiritualist worldview is a Christian worldview, but with a strong Greek influence.

During the time of Christ nothing was written down, in any language; the New Testament writings report in Greek the events that happened in Hebrew and Aramaic. That is, the authors of the New Testament were at the same time writing and translating. “Traductor, traditor” says the wise Latin proverb meaning the translator is a traitor.  The historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth occurred in a purely and exclusively Hebrew context; however, those who reported them to the world did so in a foreign language: Greek, knowing that they were doing so for Christian communities in the diaspora and that the new faith had little future in Israel.

From the Italian Peninsula to the west, the Romans imposed their language on the populations they conquered, because these peoples were primitive and did not know writing; but to the east of the Italian Peninsula, Greek prevailed, because it was the language of the soul of the rich Hellenic culture, which in many ways was superior to the Roman’s. For this reason, and because all the authors of the New Testament beginning with St. Paul knew Greek, it was in this language that they poured out the Word of God made Man.

Unbiblical Christian Worldview
‘…because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.’ When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed, but others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’ At that point Paul left them. Acts of the Apostles 17:31–33

Paul's discourse in the aeropagus is a clash of two different cultures, based on two different anthropologies or the human being’s ways of perceiving: the Greek dualistic one of mortal body and immortal soul, and the holistic biblical one of both the body and the soul can be mortal and immortal, depending on whether or not they adhere to the God of life.

The spiritualist worldview is not from biblical revelation, but rather an adaptation or enculturation of Christianity to the Hellenic culture, dominant in that time and place. This unrevealed worldview was imposed on the Church and governed it throughout the Middle Ages. It still rules many consciences today. As often happens in life, you go to others with the intention of converting them and they end up converting you. This is what happened when the new faith began to walk in the paths of ancient Greece.

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

In both the Old and the New Testaments, creation is a work of love. God liked what he made, never giving up on his work, especially the creation of human beings who, unlike other creatures, were created in his image and likeness.

In the second century, a new worldview emerged that challenged this Judeo-Christian belief that creation was basically good. In this new worldview, creation is not good, but evil. It represents the fall when the spirit or soul that lived with God was exiled into the body, into matter. The soul or spirit is intrinsically good, the matter is intrinsically evil. The world is a prison and as such, a "valley of tears”.

If the human being is composed of two opposing elements, then he lives a schizophrenic life as if he had two personalities. If this is so, how can we look positively on the incarnation of the Word of God, Jesus Christ?

Having become trapped in mortal bodies, the spirits became subject to the warped and ignorant powers that govern the world of matter. Consequently, sex and earthly life in general were considered evil. The task of religion was to rescue the spirit from the flesh, to recover the spiritual heaven from which the soul had fallen.

Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, and the sexual attitudes associated with Puritanism, continue to be powerful factors in spiritualism today, in addition to sexual disorders, eating disorders, negative self-images, and the rejection of one's own body that led to the self-flagellation widely practiced by saints and non-saints, by friars, monks, and nuns, as well as by lay people.

This spiritualistic and negativistic view is reflected in the spirituality of many to this day, in placing much emphasis on gaining and not losing Heaven. As the catechism taught, the enemies of the soul come from three sources: the world, the devil, and the flesh, referring of course to the body, especially the sexualized body.

Spiritualism in the Bible
This negative worldview of the body and the world, of matter in general, infected the later writings of the New Testament, since they were already written at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second. Admittedly, we do not find this tendency in the earlier writings when Hellenism was not yet dominant in the Church.

Negative view of the world in St. John's writings
We know that we are God’s children, and that the whole world lies under the power of the evil one. 1 John 5:19

The word "world" appears 185 times in the New Testament, 78 in the Gospel of John, 8 in Matthew, 3 in Mark, and 3 in Luke. In the three letters of St. John, it appears 24 times. Compared to the other gospels and other New Testament’s writings, John uses and abuses the word "Cosmos" or world, why?

To the Greeks the world is not a divine creation. In this, John differs from them, since in the prologue of John’s Gospel, it is clear that the world is from God. However, John's description of the fallen world has many connotations to the Hellenistic conception of the world as completely opposed to God. The dualism in John is ethical rather than philosophical, that is, the struggle between the good of God and the evil of this world.

The world mostly appears in a negative light, as being the habitat of sin. Christians are in the world, but not of the world – this reminds us of Plato's cave and how in this world we live as exiles. The world was good in its essence because it was created by God, but once fallen, it is existentially evil. As St. John often repeats, this world, or the prince of this world, is a synthesis of all the forces inimical to God.

We conclude that the exaggerated use of the term "world," as well as the negativity associated with it, in comparison with other biblical authors, denotes an approximation of St. John to the Hellenic conception of the world as something fallen. In contrast, he then says that God wants to save the world, which represents a Christian thought, because for the Greeks the world has no salvation because it was neither created nor willed by God. He then turns around and says that the disciples, although they are in this world, are not of this world, a thought which is very dear to the Greeks.

Negative view of the body in St. Paul’s writings
Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh… Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Galatians 5:16-25

This classic text of St. Paul, written in his own handwriting, foreshadows a fundamentally Greek and unbiblical belief that the soul or spirit is essential and intrinsically good and, to paraphrase the gospel, is known by its fruits graphically described above. The body, or the flesh as Paul calls it, unlike the soul, is existentially and intrinsically evil. That is, neither the body can do good works nor the soul can do evil works.  

In biblical understanding and according to biblical anthropology, both body and soul can be evil, either one or the other can be good; there is no body without a soul and no soul without a body, many of the deeds listed above do not originate in the body, but in a perverted spirit, such envy for example, have little or nothing to do with the body.

Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile. Matthew 15:17-20

St. Paul's text on the works of the flesh is diametrically opposed to Jesus’ way of thinking in the gospel. Evil does not come from the world outside, but when it enters the body, the soul is already infected and corrupted; in other words, evil resides in the soul, it comes from within, it does not come from outside. Contrary to what St. Paul has said, evil does not originate in matter or in the flesh and then influences and corrupts the spirit, but the other way around, evil comes from the spirit which corrupts matter or flesh.

When we see an apple with a small hole on its skin, the hole was not made by a larvae trying to get into the apple, but by a larvae trying to get out of the apple. We are apples with a bug inside of us. Just as the apple was conceived with a worm, that is, when the plant was flowering, an insect deposited its egg which then hatched into a larvae, so we were conceived with the original sin, so that evil resides in us in our spirit, not in matter or body which is intrinsically evil according to Greek philosophy and anthropology.

Hebrew Anthropology
May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Thessalonians 5:23

Hebrew anthropology, underlying biblical anthropology, is fundamentally unitary. This means that it intends to contemplate the entire personal reality from a certain perspective. Firstly, the human person is all of him "basal," that is, flesh. Secondly, the human person is "nefes", that is, he possesses a personality that we can approach from a psychological point of view (the psyche). And lastly, the human person is also all of him, "ruah", that is, spirit, insofar as we understand ourselves as beings open to the transcendent. We find clear testimony of this Old Testament anthropology in 1 Thess. 5:23, which is ultimately unitary because it looks at the whole of human reality from a certain perspective.

Greek Dualism
The Greeks are dualists in the purest of sense; for them there are two kingdoms, that of this world, which is existential, visible, transient, sensual, sensible, and deceptive, and that of God’s Kingdom, which is the essential, eternal, and unchanging. The human being has one foot in this world and one foot in the other world. His soul belongs to the realm of the essential, unchanging, and eternal, to God, and his body belongs to the realm of this world, of existence.

The body is not evil in itself, but it is a hindrance to the soul, a heavy burden. The body is the prison of the soul. Salvation, for Plato, lies in reason, which enlightened can come to dominate the passions of the body, governing life itself. With death, the soul is freed once and for all from the prison of the body to finally enjoy the immortality that is reserved for it, precisely because it is immortal in nature.

The French philosopher Descartes (1596–1650), an exponent of this kind of dualism, goes so far as to say, about the relationship between the soul and the body, that it is like that of the horse and rider; the soul is the rider, and the body is the horse that must be spurred on and guided by the rider. They are of a different nature and the connection between the two is very slight.

Theological Problems Raised by Greek Dualism
"This is all very confusing, please explain to me, Father," asked an Irish parishioner, "when we die our body goes to earth, our soul goes to Heaven and we, where do we go?"

According to Jewish anthropology, the human being is wholly saved or wholly condemned. We resurrect with a spiritual body that is the image of our physical body and composed of everything that the physical body has done well. We cannot do good without the body, without the head that thinks and projects, the heart that feels, and the hands that do work; therefore, the spiritual body is the glorification of our thinking head, our loving heart, and our working hands.

If the soul is immortal, if it is not biodegradable, then hell is eternal torture; however, if the soul is mortal, as biblical anthropology affirms, hell is eternal death, because eternal life is not contrary to eternal torture, but eternal death. Some Catholic theologians go so far as to say that hell is a nothingness, not a postmodern nihilistic nothing however, but something like an analgesic that would spare us the suffering of not having lived the life that God had reserved for us; it will be a nothingness, but a nothingness that hurts like fire. I find this position little different from the classical Catholic one: nothingness cannot hurt, and if it hurts, then it is not nothing, but eternal suffering.  

In Jewish anthropology, man does not have a mortal body and an immortal soul; man is all mortal if he is outside the Grace of God and all immortal if he is with God. Jesus tells us not to fear those who can only kill the body and can do nothing to the soul. What we should fear is the One who can kill both the body and the soul, (Matthew 10:28).

Hell, understood as eternal death, preserves both the goodness of God and the freedom of man. But what is eternal death? It is to return to the nothingness from which everything was created. He freely goes back to nothingness who answers "Nothing" to the 3 fundamental questions that every human being asks himself when he reaches the age of self-awareness: Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is the meaning of my life?

As stated above, the spiritualist worldview manifests itself in sub-worldviews, such as Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Puritanism, and what I call disintegrated schizophrenic dualism. Let us see what each of these mini worldviews is.

Gnosticism and Docetism
It is an ideology that predates Christianity that infiltrated Christianity when it first emerged. Fundamentally, Gnosticism repeats the Greek idea that what is human in us is our soul which is eternal and of divine origin, while the physical body, the prison of the soul, and its habitat, everything that surrounds it, the cosmos, that is, the world, were created not by God but by a demiurge, an imperfect spirit.

The final and definitive liberation only comes with death, but until this occurs, we can obtain a relative freedom through the acquisition of "gnosis", or knowledge, to be able to overpower the body and its base instincts and desires. Since Christianity is liberation from sin, and Gnosticism is liberation from ignorance, some Gnostics have assimilated Christianity, just as some Christians have allowed themselves to be carried away by Gnosticism. However, there is a radical difference between the two. Christianity is public, it is for everyone and not just for an occult elite of initiates, while Gnosticism is private and elitist, it is only for a few enlightened ones.

Docetism, a legitimate child of Gnosticism, comes from the Greek word "dokesis," meaning appearance. In the first and second centuries A.D., the Docetists claimed that Jesus Christ only appeared to be human. They considered the material world, including the human body, as to be so evil and corrupt that God, who is all good, could not have taken a true human body and human nature. Jesus' human nature is therefore feigned.

The Gnostic antagonism between the spiritual and material worlds led the Docetists to deny that Jesus was a true man. The Docetists had no problem with Jesus' divinity, they just did not believe in his true humanity. If Jesus' humanity is an illusion, then his passion and death on the cross with the suffering that this involved were also an illusion, they did not really happen.

The Christianity of Alexandria, which abandoned the Church with the council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D. later called Coptic, as well as that of Ethiopia, are Monophysite Docetists, believing only in the divine nature of Christ. It is no coincidence that Docetism arose in Egypt, precisely where years before Christianity Gnosticism had emerged. When I was in Ethiopia, I remember hearing a Coptic Christian hymn in which it said that Jesus did not suffer on the cross, he was content and happy.

Manichaeism
It was a very ancient religion of the Fertile Crescent, which disappeared with the rise of the great religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What we know of Manichaeism is presented to us by some who were Manichaeans before they were Christians, such as St. Augustine (430 A.D.). Mani (277 A.D.), the founder, belonged to a Judeo-Christian group before founding his own religion. He felt he was the heir of the great prophets Buddha, Jesus, Zarathustra, and Mohammed, and sought to make a synthesis of their teachings. He proclaimed himself an apostle of Jesus, because of all the religions, he found himself closest to Christianity.

Manichaeism is a form of Christian Gnosticism, so dualistic that the very word Manichaeism has historically become synonymous with absolute dualism. In the world there are two forces that oppose each other: light/good and darkness/evil. The soul, of course, belongs to light and the body to darkness, so the goal of human life is for light to prevail over darkness. Mani advised his faithful to lead an ascetic life, not to kill any living thing, not to eat meat, not to drink alcohol, and to live a celibate life.

Puritanism
Historically, Puritanism was a 16th and 17th century movement that sought to "cleanse" the Church of England from the remnants of Catholicism.

It was not entirely successful in England, but in the New World of America, the movement flourished and became a way of life, very evident even in their way of dressing.

Today’s modern usage of the word puritan has nothing to do with its historical root, but more to do with a negative view of sex and the pleasure associated with it. Sex was restricted to marriage, which in this sense was seen as a remedy for concupiscence, and as a means for procreation. It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion, as St. Paul said (1 Corinthians 7:8-9).

The excessive value placed on virginity, especially that of female physical virginity, that is, an intact hymen, has led to the declaration that Mary was a virgin before, during, and after childbirth. I can understand that she was a virgin before childbirth and after childbirth, and I accept and believe that she was, but I do not see why she has to be a virgin during childbirth, something that is unnatural and unnecessary which I can only understand in the context of a negative view of sex and an extrapolated valuation of physical virginity at the expense of motherhood.

Virginity has no value in itself, but is oriented towards motherhood, whether it is a physical motherhood of a woman who is the mother of a baby, whom she nurtures and nourishes to make it an authentic human being, or of a woman who puts marriage aside to be the mother of more children in a spiritual and educational sense, like Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Virginity understood in this way has nothing to do with whether or not the hymen is ruptured, because it is a human value for both men and women.

Disintegrated Schizophrenic Dualism
In this sub-worldview, we find many intellectuals and men of science, arts, politics, high finance who are, at the same time, profoundly Christian, that is, they do not follow the materialistic worldview that is dominant in these circles.  

These skilled professionals in their field – scientists, doctors, university professors, politicians, and journalists – in failing to reconcile their faith with science, made within themselves a gentlemen's agreement, that is, they have placed these two dimensions in separate rooms of the same house that is their mind. These are closed rooms that do not communicate with each other, that is, they live simultaneously in their minds a dualism and a mental and existential schizophrenia.

They are at the same time men of science and men of faith; however, since they have not found the formula to reconcile the two, and since they somehow think they are irreconcilable, they live the two dimensions separately, as if it were a modern state where religion does not meddle in politics and politics does not meddle in religion. To such State-Church separation, give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's.

By way of example, such scientists and professionals during the week are evolutionists, that is, they believe in the theory of the evolution of the species, and on Sunday, the Lord's Day, they are creationists, that is, they believe in the book of Genesis as if it were a history book; as long as they never put the two positions in dialogue, there is no problem.

What happens inside these scientists and good professionals in their field is what happens in society in general: science lives with its back turned on religion and considers it the stuff of ignorance, while defensive religion takes refuge in its churches and demonizes science.

Conclusion: The materialist worldview ignores the spiritual dimension of human life, just as the spiritualist worldview demonizes the corporeal dimension. Truth requires that the two dimensions integrate and harmonize: no spirit without matter, no matter without spirit. 

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Self-Consciousness

But when he came to himself, he said, “How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father...” Luke 15:17-18

The moment the prodigal son asked his father for his share of the inheritance, he was dazzled by the prospect of the pleasures that awaited him, and while those pleasures lasted, he was out of his mind. Often, pleasure makes people unrealistic and unconscious, while pain has the power to bring them back to reality, as happened with this young man.

From Unconsciousness to Consciousness
Before the "Big Bang”, which occurred about 15 billion years ago, all the matter of the cosmos existed in the form of an invisible subatomic particle that was extremely dense and hot, which eventually exploded, giving rise to the expanding universe. As temperatures started to cool down, the atoms that make up matter began to cluster into increasingly complex molecules, which came together to form membranes that gave rise to primitive cells.

All forms of life on Earth—viruses, microbes, bacteria, plants, animals, and humans—share common elements, since they all come from a common trunk. The cell is the simplest form of life; the first organisms formed on Earth were unicellular, like the amoeba, which still survives today in the contaminated waters of Africa. The transition from single-celled organisms to more complex life forms composed of multiple cells took about 3 billion years.

Since life comes from a common trunk, we can conclude that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis, meaning that the process of development of an individual of the human species, from conception to adulthood, recapitulates or synthesizes the history of life on this planet. Our organism in its adult state is composed of about 37 trillion cells; but at the moment of our conception, when half a cell from our father joins half a cell from our mother, we too started off as single-celled organisms

What happens at the level an individual reflects what happens at a global level; life that began with a single cell has diversified into many species of living beings over billions of years of evolution. In similar way, from the moment of our conception until we are fully formed independent beings still inside our mothers, the evolution of species is recapitulated.

From birth to adulthood, we relive human evolution that, five million years ago, began to diverge from the primates, our closest ancestors. Just as a baby first learns to walk and then to talk, humanity has also evolved to the point of self-consciousness. In the context of evolution, for Karl Marx, Man is the moment when Nature becomes aware of itself.

Self-consciousness is the capacity for introspection; it is to turn inward, recognizing oneself as a different and separate individual from the environment and other individuals. Self-consciousness is the subdivision or duplication of the individual who becomes at the same time both the subject and the object of his own thoughts.

Cogito ergo sum, said Descartes, but it can also be said senso ergo sum: I feel joy or sadness, pleasure or pain, therefore I exist. Self-consciousness is the meaning I attribute to my day-to-day experiences in the overall context of what my life is for me.

Someone once said that we are awake when we sleep, and asleep when we are awake. We become aware of who we really are during sleep, in dreams. Dreams reveal our true identity, because no matter how many characters appear in them, they are merely parts of ourselves.

Freud and all of psychology thereafter placed great importance on dreams, as they hold one of the keys to our true identity. When we are awake, we wear masks that not only veil our identity from others but also from ourselves. In fact, the word person means just that: mask, characters we portray during the day.

Being Alive is Not the Same as Living
A life that is not self-reflective is not worth living. Socrates (469 BC)

At around the age of 7, children become aware of themselves, that they exist, that they are alive, but at the same time, they also become aware of their finitude, that they will not always exist, that one day they will cease to exist as they do now. It is death that gives meaning to life; or rather, it is the existence of death that drives us to seek meaning in life.

In this sense, being alive is not the same as living. Animals are alive, but since they do not know that they will cease to exist one day, they end up not knowing that they exist, that they are alive; since they do not know they are alive, they do not live. They do not live because they do not have much power and control over their own lives; they blindly obey their instincts, thus functioning as automatons.

Only human beings really live because they understand that, between the present of their lives and a sure death, they have the time and energy to shape what they desire from their existence.

To Be Conscious Is to Turn Off the Autopilot
Often, I lock my car with the remote control, and after walking away a short distance, I ask myself if I had really locked it; if I am not sure, I walk back to the car and check. Like this, we all do things automatically without thinking—things we do routinely without being conscious of them at the moment of doing them.

More often than we care to admit, we have the autopilot on: our behavior is reactive, much like that of animals; a given stimulus is followed by a given response, predicted and predictable. When we behave as if we are on autopilot, we lack awareness; we are not in ourselves but outside of ourselves.

What we say or do is not the result of a proactive decision after assessing the reality or situation, but of a more or less instinctive, pre-determined, repetitive, and routine reaction. Something akin to a reflex, like when I involuntarily pull my hand away from a hot surface to avoid getting burned.

• To be aware means to realize everything that is happening inside and outside of oneself.
• To be aware means to be installed in the present, in the here and now.
• To be aware means to have the soul where the body is.
• To be aware means to self-observe.
• To be aware is to be fully present in each of one’s thought, sensation, emotion, and action.

Prayer is an Exercise of Self-Awareness
When the prodigal son came to himself, he returned to the Father; while he was far from the Father, he was also far from himself; while he was outside of his Father’s home, he was also outside of himself; while he was dissociated, divorced, with his back to God, he was also dissociated, divorced, and with his back to himself.

Deus interior intimo meo, said St. Augustine, God is nearer to us than our innermost being, therefore prayer is not only an encounter with God but also an encounter with oneself; it is not only a dialogue with God but also a dialogue with oneself. Prayer is first and foremost an exercise of self-consciousness.

Those who pray know themselves better than those who do not pray. If God, as St. Augustine says, is beyond our innermost being, beyond ourselves, we cannot reach God without first passing through ourselves; we cannot know God without first knowing ourselves better.

Conclusion - In moving from an unconscious existence to a profound self- awareness, we realize that to live is not just to exist; it is to shape our destiny, becoming the conscious author of our own story.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Materialistic Worldview

The materialistic view of reality is opposed to the spiritualistic view that reigned throughout Middle Ages, part of Ancient Times, and which still exists today. Both have historical roots, but they are not linked to a single period in history, like the Medieval or the Renaissance worldview, nor to a particular culture, like the Western or the Chinese. Both the spiritualistic and materialistic worldviews are past and contemporary, transversal to many cultures.

They are more typical of one time than another, as well as more clinging to one specific culture than another. They are worldviews in the broadest sense of the term, since they are more comprehensive in both historical time and cultural space. Historically, the Middle Ages was all spiritualistic, while from the Renaissance onward, throughout the Modern and Contemporary Ages, they are more materialistic.

Whether it takes on a theoretical character, in the form of philosophy such as atheism or agnosticism, or a practical character, in the form of capitalist consumerism, self-gratification and the absence of values, materialism is today the philosophy of life or the worldview that governs most people. It clearly governs the world of politics, economics, and health, because money has always been a religion in itself, beyond the world of science, universities, the media, and culture in general.

I once asked someone if he was religious; offended, he replied, "How can I be religious? I'm a scientist." Being materialistic, agnostic, or atheistic, is fashionable nowadays, while being religious is out of fashion and connotes ignorance. Therefore, even the few who are religious, do not present themselves as such in order not to lose friends, jobs, or social position.

To the materialists, who live without meaning since matter does not give meaning to life, one can apply that famous phrase of the Dalai Lama: "They live as if they never had to die, and they die as if they had never lived." In fact, Karl Marx, the ultimate exponent of dialectical and historical atheism, faced the question of death in the same cynical way by saying that death should not concern us, because as long as we exist, it will not exist; when it eventually becomes a reality, we will no longer exist.

In other words, death should not be a cause for concern because we will never coexist with it. The fact is, however, no matter how much we hide it in society, it will show up, when first we lose our parents and our aunts and uncles, then our older siblings…

The Medieval society lived reconciled with death, in harmony with it, and in a quasi-friendship, even going so far as to give it a feminine form, dress it in white, and invite it to a circle dance and play chess to see if one could beat, deceive, or distract it. Contrastingly, the modern and contemporary society is afraid of death, afraid that it will take everything away because death is eternal, so they repress the thought of death, in the same manner the Victorian Puritan society repressed sex.

From Animism to Atheism
From animism to materialism there is a gradual materialization of matter and symbiosis with Man, the thinking being that analyzes and relates to it. In the beginning, everything had a soul, even the most material matter had a soul. In a materialistic world like today's, it is hard for us to think that this was the case in the past; however, without going any further, we all experienced a stage of animism in our childhood when we got hurt by something, we would hit, blame, and call that thing bad, as if it were a living entity.

At the adult level, superstition is a remnant of animism, that is, when one grants spiritual value or power to something that is purely material, such as a key or a horseshoe, this is animism, today called superstition.

Knowing certain material realities, knowing how it works and for what purpose, robbed them of their souls, so they became inanimate and returned to being just matter. However, it was not possible to know certain realities scientifically, or they were not easy to know, or it was not possible to completely know and master them. To these realities they were given the name gods and thus was born the god of war, the goddess of love, the god of time, the god of wine, the god of the sea, etc., and consequently polytheism came into being.

For the sake of simplification or in order to unite various peoples and avoid the quarrels of "my god is greater than your god", which could instigate holy wars or other disputes, man intuited that God must be one Lord and creator of everything and everyone. Thus, monotheism emerged in its absolute form, in Judaism and Islam, and in its trinitarian form, in Christianity.

Finally, when scientific progress allowed man to dominate most realities, he decided to kill God (psychoanalytic concept) in order to put himself in God’s place as superman (Nietzsche). In this dialectic of stealing the soul from the known, man ended up stealing the soul of God himself, affirming as Feuerbach did, that it was not God who created man in his image and likeness, but on the contrary, it was man who created God in his own image and likeness.

As the result, the dialectical or philosophical materialism emerged, then the historical materialism and the communist revolution with Karl Marx, and the atheistic psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. Nietzsche declared "God is dead, long live the superman" and after God's burial, came Nietzsche's own nihilism followed by Sartre's Nausea about the banality and emptiness of existence.

Materialistic Ideology
This worldview became prominent during the Enlightenment, but it is as old as Democritus (370 B.C.). The materialistic worldview asserts that there is no spirit, no god, no soul. Nothing that cannot be known through the five senses and reason.

Nothing exists beyond nature that has causal influence or acts on nature itself. There is, therefore, no higher being that created nature and exerts any power over it. There is only material nature and nothing beyond it. Life on Earth arose by itself, when all the right conditions to support life came together by chance, from natural substances, by natural selection for natural purposes.

The supernatural or spiritual is a chimera, it does not exist, it is not observable. If something has no explanation, it is not because it is supernatural, but simply because the human being does not know everything yet; In the future, science may be able to explain it. So, it was and has been in the past: realities that were once seen as gods, today they are completely explainable.

The spiritual world is therefore an illusion (an infantile consolation, as Freud calls it). There is no higher being, we are mere complexes of matter, and when we die, we cease to exist, and the simple elements that make up our body will return to their simplicity as our body disintegrates. Since there is no intrinsic meaning to the universe, people have to create values for themselves. There is no right or wrong, except what society dictates, for purposes of survival and tranquility.

Many do not even create values to guide their lives by, because it is difficult to establish ethics without religion. Materialists are fortunate that more than 90% of humanity believes in the existence of a higher being, the foundation and guarantor of the social structure we have; otherwise, 1% of humanity could not have more wealth than the remaining 99%, as is the case today.

If human beings did not believe in life beyond death, the ultimate foundation of ethics, there would be no army or police powerful enough to contain human anger against injustice.  Napoleon Bonaparte was right when he said that religion is what makes the poor not kill the rich.

If what happens after death is the same for the just and the unjust, then it is difficult to distinguish justice from injustice if both have the same end: nothingness. That is why most materialists drown their sorrows in consumerism. Life is bread and circus, as the Romans said, Tempus fugit, Carpe diem, time escapes us, let us seize the day, or "Die Martha, die with a filled belly ".

The processes of evolution or change are essentially random, they have no predefined objective, because there is no intelligent design, as religious believers believe. Randomness reigns: dinosaurs were not predestined to disappear, if that meteorite that destroyed their habitat had not fallen, they might still be alive today, and humans would never have emerged. Beyond randomness, what exists is a natural selection governed by the law of the fittest or whatever adapts best to the circumstances of an ever-changing environment.

It is this and only this that determines why some living beings survive and others perish. Materialists believe that this unconscious, undirected "selection" process, together with random genetic fluctuations (i.e., mutations), are the keys that explain the origin of the world and the living things as we know them today, ourselves included.

Since there is no intelligent design nor any goal that nature has to fulfill, intelligence itself and what we call spiritual are the result of complex natural and material processes that are possible to know and explain. We do not need God to explain anything in the physical-chemical nature. There is nothing in the universe that is personal, everything is impersonal. The human person is another chimera created by spiritualists, there is nothing in the human person beyond complicated physical-chemical processes.

"Scientific" Analysis of Materialism, Atheism or Agnosticism
It is true that we can neither prove the existence of God nor his non-existence, so both theism and atheism or agnosticism are beliefs. That is, one is faith the other is anti-faith, but both involve faith.

Atheists or agnostics like to pose as scientists, friends of science, rational and enlightened. Science is logical-deductive, like mathematics, or intuitive, like Einstein's theory of relativity.

Atheism or agnosticism is not logical – It makes no sense that human beings are, as Karl Marx says, the moment when nature gained thought or self-consciousness, only to realize our misery, that is, that we come from nothing like everything else and will return to nothing along with the flea, the louse, and the bedbug.

If we gained self-consciousness for this, merely to know that we are the only living beings aware of our misery, we would be better off not being aware like the rest of the living beings. It is like knowing the day and circumstances of our death: I do not think there is a single person who is interested in that information.

Unlike the rest of living things, the awareness that we exist for a while and then cease to exist, instead of being a greatness of evolution is rather like going from a horse to a donkey. Where is the greatness of being aware of our own misery, with no solution to remedy it?

Unlike the rest of the living beings that, living in symbiosis with nature, have no freedom, autonomy or independence from it, human beings have their life in their own hands, they have a certain freedom to do with it as they want. Why this freedom, if no matter what we do, the end will be the same for everyone? On the other hand, having freedom is also taking a risk, in the sense that I can make bad choices and turn my life into hell, something that other living beings cannot do.

In life, living beings are happy, they do not need to work, or to study, or to suffer. We, human beings, can be happy or unhappy in life, but even those who are happy always have relative happiness, because the thought that one day we will cease to exist poisons any joy or pleasure, turning it into sadness and depression.

Atheism or agnosticism is not deductive – If the universe was not expanding, if it were static and not dynamic and constantly changing, like the waters of Heraclitus' river, if it had always been the same, if there had been no changes, no evolution, no revolution, we could deduce that it had always existed, that the universe was the god of itself.

This is what science once thought before the Hubble telescope, located far out in space, showed that galaxies are moving away from each other, which led us to deduce that the universe is expanding. The deductive Big Bang theory that states that galaxies are moving away from each other was formulated by the Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaître. According to him, the universe began with a big explosion; in this big explosion time/space and matter/energy were created.

In Nature, ignitions or explosions do not happen spontaneously. Everything happens on a cause/effect basis: there is no cause without effect, no effect without cause, there is no water without thirst, no thirst without water. Or, as the people say, "when the pot is made, the lid is made for it”. Furthermore, we do not observe in nature anything that creates itself; it is therefore more logical to deduce the existence of a creator than to deduce his non-existence.

If the universe did not always exist and then began to exist, then there was a "time" when it did not exist at all. And there will be a time when it will cease to exist. Only the Bible spoke of the end of the world, and the so-called scientists used to laugh at this idea and at Christians. Since he who laughs last, laughs the hardest, now we are the ones laughing. Faced with indisputable evidence, science had to concede that the world will cease to exist one day.

Atheists reacted to the Big Bang theory by coming up with their own Big Crunch theory, that is, that the universe would be expanding, as if it were a rubber band, until it could expand no further, then initiating the reverse process of contraction until it collapses on itself, with matter coming together all over again causing a new Big Bang. Thus, the universe would be a succession of Big Bangs and Big Crunches.

However, the second law of thermodynamics disproved this theory, because matter does not transform into energy without some loss. If this was not the case, it would be possible to make a machine that manufactures the energy it needs to keep itself going indefinitely. The sun will use up all its hydrogen and helium, just as the universe will use up all its energy until it disappears, and the little matter in this future universe will not have enough force of gravity to bind together. At that time, the universe will turn into a black hole.

Atheism or agnosticism is not intuitive – Intuition is the opposite of logic and deduction; if it was not for intuition, Einstein would never have arrived at the theory of relativity, for it is neither logical nor deduced from any observation. Intuition is both a qualitative and a quantitative leap. If I start from the observation of reality, I am catapulted by intuition to a reality that is neither observable nor experienceable, but that is related to what I observe and gives meaning to everything I observe.

In this sense, faith is an intuition; God is reached by intuition, but not only God: much of today's quantum physics, heir to the theory of relativity, is intuitive. Much of today's astronomy is intuitive, as we have no way yet of observing certain realities.

Atheism or agnosticism is inductive – Atheism or agnosticism is instigated; it is forced and supposes the repression of religious feeling, which is connatural to the human being and which we can observe in all times and in all places, and in most of the human beings who inhabit our planet today.

Theists have always made up more than 80% of the inhabitants of this planet in all eras, and in all cultures. To this day there have been many cultures and civilizations without science and technology, but there have never been any without religion.

Therefore, atheism or agnosticism is induced by fashion, by the consumer society, by communism, or by any ideology that seeks to remove all orientation from the human being; thus, disoriented and bewildered, he is much easier to manipulate and turn into an obsessive and neurotic consumer, which is very good for the economy since this makes the GDP grow but reduces the health of individuals. The healthier the economy, the sicker the individuals who feed it.

And for this, the religious feeling natural to the human being and present in all cultures of all times must be ignored at first, but since it always resurfaces, it must be repressed, hidden.

I maintain that there are no true atheists or agnostics, but rather polytheists, that is, they deny the existence of the one true God in order to pay homage, veneration, and worship to many small gods. Money would be the father of this pantheon, just as Zeus and Jupiter were the fathers of the Greek and Roman pantheons, respectively. Then there are gods who are the patrons of certain realities that the atheist or materialist relates to: power, beauty, pleasure, fame, entertainment such as football, etc.

What would a world governed by the materialistic worldview look like? It would be a world without music, without art, without poetry, without literature, without human rights, without ethics, an authentic barbarism, an authentic anarchy. What does the materialistic consumerist society leave for posterity?

Given that the reflection of religious feeling has left us almost all of the most beautiful monuments and works of humanity, the pyramids of Egypt, the Gothic cathedrals, the mosques, the Hindu temples, what could materialism leave us but the nausea of Sartre, the Soviet gulags, and the current Chinese concentration camps to brainwash the Uighur people?

Conclusion - Materialists claim that the human being is merely the point at which matter becomes self-aware. However, it makes little sense for matter to awaken only to realize it is matter. Self-awareness is a spiritual activity, suggesting that matter is oriented toward the spirit, not the other way around. Atheists and agnostics repress the innate religious feeling present in all ages and cultures, much like Puritans repressed sexuality.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC