Perhaps the passion for the Bible of the new fascist and Nazi far-right movements is not a coincidence. The book considered the greatest religious literary monument of all time is today contested politically by the parties that are reemerging from the caves of intransigence and violence. And I confess my discomfort at seeing this publication of the Bible, used more as a poisoned weapon than as medicine for the soul, raised high, like a banner by the hands of the new dictators in power: from Trump to a Bolsonaro who came to want to impose the Bible as the only textbook in schools.
It is true that the Bible contains the most sublime and the lowest of human passions because it is, in reality, a vision of heaven and hell that we all carry within us. They are the photograph of the complexity of the human being, half god and half demon. What happens is that in the resurgence of new fascisms, almost always with religious overtones, what is interesting about the Bible is only the photograph it makes of the God of revenge, of massacres, of ancestral fears of eternal damnation.
Hence, even in the modern movements of the evangelical and Pentecostal churches that so attract the new dictators, they end up presenting the faithful as the avenging God instead of the merciful one, not the one who blesses the peaceful and those who suffer persecution. It is the religion of violence against the God of forgiveness and solidarity, the God of wars more than the God of peace.
I believe that the Bible is the best compendium that exists of the complexity of the Homo sapiens with its most varied drives and contradictions. The book that best portrays us and that most lends itself to becoming either a warrior manual or the sublimity of the manual of forgiveness and peace.
Therefore, while it gives me chills to see the Bible raised high like a trophy in the hands of old and new dictators, it creates a certain tenderness in me to see it in the hands of the most humble people, those most affected by the misfortunes of life. , those who run in search of a respite of peace and consolation for their personal or family dramas.
Perhaps for this reason, while it makes me visibly uneasy to see the Bible in the hands of the new dictators in power who incite wars and practice the religion of an eye for an eye, I feel a certain tenderness when I see it in the hands of simple, humble people who he barely knows how to read. Just two examples experienced personally here in Brazil. The first was that of a working woman who came down from the tough Turano favela, in the Río Comprido neighborhood, in Rio. I was walking with my dog when I saw that woman sitting on a rock reading the Bible. He was probably waiting for a van to go to work, probably to clean a house.
I didn’t dare ask him what part of the Bible he was reading, but I realized it was the Book of Psalms. We greet each other only with our eyes. I noticed that the hands that held the already worn copy were hands that bore the marks of hard work. The scene produced tenderness in me and not a little reflection.
Here in the small and cheerful fishing town of Saquarema, famous for its world surfing championships, while having a café con leche and a cheese bread in a bar, I noticed an open copy of the Bible on the bar. When I asked the owner why her small bar opened so late, she told me that they had a daughter with a serious handicap and that they had to wait for someone to take care of her while they worked.
I began to look at the open copy of the Bible and asked him if he liked it. She answered me something that has not yet been erased from my memory years later: “It helps me not to despair.” The truth is that that bar and the God of the Bible of that mother who suffered the pain of her sick daughter forever, was not, like that of the worker in the Rio favela, that of the new dictators on duty. , that of the Trumps and Bolsonaros or the God of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco who kept Spain away from the world for 50 years, mired in poverty and who seems to threaten to resurrect again.
Meanwhile, for the first time in history, a new spirituality is emerging without gods and even less without those of the gods of the dictators. For the first time, a movement is emerging that attempts to reconcile faith and hope with modern science. It is that new and creative dialogue between science and faith in something that redeems us from our fears, from our modern depressions and psychic anguish. Even in the famous American universities, things as simple and profound at the same time as gratitude, friendship, hope, compassion towards those who suffer and true friendship are studied through personal experiences as new realities, even religious and liberating.
The novelty of our time, so complex and in full existential evolution, is that it is precisely science and not the old sorcerers who are discovering the close ties that exist, as an antidote to the existential despair that stalks us, not the divine virtues of ancient times. , but the true human ones, the ones that the healing force of nature offers us, the one that consoles more than it punishes, the one that in the end reconciles us with the best that exists in our complex human labyrinth that we love so much. deify him, they have ended up dehumanizing him.
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