quinta-feira, 31 de dezembro de 2015

2016

Jesus nos dê forças e fé pra atravessarmos a tempestade.

Nossa Senhora nos encha a vida de amor, a despeito de todo resto.

Que nós sejamos merecedores.

Amém
Saravá

segunda-feira, 21 de dezembro de 2015

Yeshua

O Amor de Jesus é o amor que te faz melhor. que te faz avançar. que é pleno, sempre e além.

Jesus é o deus do planeta terra. É o verbo, o logos, que se fez carne pra redimir essa humanidade.

Jesus é a promessa do infinito em Deus-Pai. de uma vida cada vez mais plena, dentro da eternidade.

Ao homem só há um objetivo nesta vida. Só um. Seguir Jesus. Amá-lo. Imitá-lo. É só isso.

Obrigado, meu pai, por receber este filho pecador com amor tão aberto e tolerante. Por você eu me torno uma pessoa melhor a cada dia. E o teu amor eu carregarei comigo como um exemplo inigualável de fé, humildade e dedicação. Que Deus seja louvado na tua graça plena. Obrigado.

PTbrás



domingo, 20 de dezembro de 2015

UK and USA tv shows

Assim é que se faz um programa de auditório. com gente de verdade. alma, coração, humanidade, espontaneidade, talento. 

Danielle Bradbery - bonito é pouco. 







Hey, you



sexta-feira, 18 de dezembro de 2015

O caos já é um caminho sem volta

Falei e repito. A única solução para o caos em que o brasil mergulha é uma intervenção militar. Ou melhor, era. Deixaram o governo revolucionário respirar. ele manobrou o stf, a câmara, o senado, o tse, e manobrará a massa ignara com o desenvolvimentismo suicida do novo titular da fazendinha feliz. De lambuja, os comunolatinos se infiltraram nas forças armadas e, a julgar pelas últimas declarações dos altos oficiais, a transformaram numa força de apoio da revolução comunista que esmaga o país neste exato instante (e alguns imbecis ainda se recusam a acreditar nisso). E agora, patetas, vamos apelar pra quem?! 


Itub


Ibov



pois é (x2)...

DOL



pois é.....

segunda-feira, 14 de dezembro de 2015

O milagre de Terrence Malick




Luz, som e movimento.

A vida é um mistério insondável em Deus, do qual o homem é chamado a participar. No microcosmo da família, o milagre da criação é reencenado. O amor entre homem e mulher faz nascer uma nova vida. No amor, nessa grande força que permeia o universo, tudo se sustenta.

A árvore da genealogia humana, para crescer forte e produzir bons frutos, precisa de um pai zeloso que encarne a lei e explicite a ordem; de uma mãe que empenhe amor, afeto, doçura, sem as quais a vida seca; de filhos respeitosos e obedientes.

Quando a boa vida em família é o cultivo da obra e do milagre de Deus, o mistério se traduz em graça, as coisas se enchem de significação, e o homem se torna co-criador do universo..


Um  filme que carrega uma mensagem profunda. com poucos diálogos, fortes atuações e imagens lindamente espetaculares. não se pode exigir mais. é obra capaz de justificar uma vida inteira.

sábado, 12 de dezembro de 2015

They are real


A black guy.

A girl.

A space mythology.

The good and evil eternal opposition. 

The light and the dark side.


O poder da imaginação na construção da personalidade e no impulso à ação.
O poder estruturante das histórias que contam do núcleo da realidade.

quinta-feira, 10 de dezembro de 2015

Aristóteles - Ética a Nicômaco - Livro I

(...) Vemos agora que o argumento, tornando por um atalho diferente, chegou ao mesmo ponto. Mas procuremos expressar isto com mais clareza ainda. Já que, evidentemente, os fins são vários e nós escolhemos alguns dentre eles (como a riqueza, as flautas e os instrumentos em geral), segue-se que nem todos os fins são absolutos; mas o sumo bem é claramente algo de absoluto. Portanto, se só existe um fim absoluto, será o que estamos procurando; e, se existe mais de um, o mais absoluto de todos será o que buscamos. 

Ora, nós chamamos aquilo que merece ser buscado por si mesmo mais absoluto do que aquilo que merece ser buscado com vistas em outra coisa, e aquilo que nunca é desejável no interesse de outra coisa mais absoluto do que as coisas desejáveis tanto em si mesmas como no interesse de uma terceira; por isso chamamos de absoluto e incondicional aquilo que é sempre desejável em si mesmo e nunca no interesse de outra coisa. 

Ora, esse é o conceito que preeminentemente fazemos da felicidade. É ela procurada sempre por si mesma e nunca com vistas em outra coisa, ao passo que à honra, ao prazer, à razão e a todas as virtudes nós de fato escolhemos por si mesmos (pois, ainda que nada resultasse daí, continuaríamos a escolher cada um deles); mas também os escolhemos no interesse da felicidade, pensando que a posse deles nos tornará felizes. A felicidade, todavia, ninguém a escolhe tendo em vista algum destes, nem, em geral, qualquer coisa que não seja ela própria. 

Considerado sob o ângulo da auto-suficiência, o raciocínio parece chegar ao mesmo resultado, porque o bem absoluto é considerado como auto-suficiente. Ora, por auto-suficiente não entendemos aquilo que é suficiente para um homem só, para aquele que leva uma vida solitária, mas também para os pais, os filhos, a esposa, e em geral para os amigos e concidadãos, visto que o homem nasceu para a cidadania. Mas é necessário traçar aqui um limite, porque, se estendermos os nossos requisitos aos antepassados, aos descendentes e aos amigos dos amigos, teremos uma série infinita. 

Examinaremos esta questão, porém, em outro lugar. por ora definimos a auto-suficiência como sendo aquilo que, em si mesmo, torna a vida desejável e carente de nada. E como tal entendemos a felicidade, considerando-a, além disso, a mais desejável de todas as coisas, sem contá-la como um bem entre outros. Se assim fizéssemos, é evidente que ela se tornaria mais desejável pela adição do menor bem que fosse, pois o que é acrescentado se torna um excesso de bens, e dos bens é sempre o maior o mais desejável. A felicidade* é, portanto, algo absoluto e auto-suficiente, sendo também a finalidade da ação. 

Mas dizer que a felicidade é o sumo bem talvez pareça uma banalidade, e falta ainda explicar mais claramente o que ela seja. Tal explicação não ofereceria grande dificuldade se pudéssemos determinar primeiro a função do homem. Pois, assim como para um flautista, um escultor ou um pintor, e em geral para todas as coisas que têm uma função ou atividade, considera-se que o bem e o "bem feito" residem na função, o mesmo ocorreria com o homem se ele tivesse uma função. 

Dar-se-á o caso, então, de que o carpinteiro e o curtidor tenham certas funções e atividades, e o homem não tenha nenhuma? Terá ele nascido sem função? Ou, assim como o olho, a mão, o pé e em geral cada parte do corpo têm evidentemente uma função própria, poderemos assentar que o homem, do mesmo modo, tem uma função à parte de todas essas? Qual poderá ser ela? 

A vida parece ser comum até às próprias plantas, mas agora estamos procurando o que é peculiar ao homem. Excluamos, portanto, a vida de nutrição e crescimento. A seguir há uma vida de percepção, mas essa também parece ser comum ao cavalo, ao boi e a todos os animais. Resta, pois, a vida ativa do elemento que tem um princípio racional; desta, uma parte tem tal princípio no sentido de ser-lhe obediente, e a outra no sentido de possuí-lo e de exercer o pensamento. E, como a ''vida do elemento racional" também tem dois significados, devemos esclarecer aqui que nos referimos a vida no sentido de atividade; pois esta parece ser a acepção mais própria do termo. 

Ora, se a função do homem é uma atividade da alma que segue ou que implica um princípio racional, e se dizemos que "um tal-e-tal" e "um bom tal-e-tal" têm uma função que é a mesma em espécie (por exemplo, um tocador de lira e um bom tocador de lira, e assim em todos os casos, sem maiores discriminações, sendo acrescentada ao nome da função a eminência com respeito à bondade — pois a função de um tocador de lira é tocar lira, e a de um bom tocador de lira é fazê-lo bem); se realmente assim é [e afirmamos ser a função do homem uma certa espécie de vida, e esta vida uma atividade ou ações da alma que implicam um princípio racional; e acrescentamos que a função de um bom homem é uma boa e nobre realização das mesmas; e se qualquer ação é bem realizada quando está de acordo com a excelência que lhe é própria; se realmente assim é], o bem do homem nos aparece como uma atividade da alma em consonância com a virtude, e, se há mais de uma virtude, com a melhor e mais completa. (...)
___________________

* Felicidade, para Aristóteles, identificada como eudaimonía, consiste na auto-realização da natureza humana que aproxima o homem do divino, finalidade para a qual o estagirita edifica toda sua Ética.

segunda-feira, 7 de dezembro de 2015

Marriage & the Family

Rabbi Lord Sacks*

I want to begin by telling the story of the most beautiful idea in the history of civilization: the idea of the love that brings new life into the world. There are of course many ways of telling the story, and this is just one. But to me it is a story of seven key moments, each of them surprising and unexpected. 

The first, according to a report in the press on October 20 of last year, took place in a lake in Scotland 385 million years ago. It was then, according to this new discovery, that two fish came together to perform the first instance of sexual reproduction known to science. Until then all life had propagated itself asexually, by cell division, budding, fragmentation or parthenogenesis, all of which are far simpler and more economical than the division of life into male and female, each with a different role in creating and sustaining life. 

When we consider, even in the animal kingdom, how much effort and energy the coming together of male and female takes, in terms of displays, courtship rituals, rivalries and violence, it is astonishing that sexual reproduction ever happened at all. Biologists are still not quite sure why it did. Some say to offer protection against parasites, or immunities against disease. Others say it’s simply that the meeting of opposites generates diversity. But one way or another, the fish in Scotland discovered something new and beautiful that’s been copied ever since by virtually all advanced forms of life. Life begins when male and female meet and embrace. 

The second unexpected development was the unique challenge posed to Homo sapiens by two factors: We stood upright, which constricted the female pelvis, and we had bigger brains—a 300% increase—which meant larger heads. The result was that human babies had to be born more prematurely than any other species, and so needed parental protection for much longer. This made parenting more demanding among humans than any other species, the work of two people rather than one. Hence, the very rare phenomenon among mammals of pair bonding (unlike other species where the male contribution tends to end with the act of impregnation). Among most primates, fathers don’t even recognise their children let alone care for them. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom motherhood is almost universal but fatherhood is rare. 

So what emerged along with the human person was the union of the biological mother and father to care for their child. Thus far nature, but then came culture, and the third surprise. 

It seems that among hunter-gatherers, pair bonding was the norm. Then came agriculture, and economic surplus, and cities and civilisation, and for the first time sharp inequalities began to emerge between rich and poor, powerful and powerless. The great ziggurats of Mesopotamia and pyramids of ancient Egypt, with their broad base and narrow top, were monumental statements in stone of a hierarchical society in which the few had power over the many. And the most obvious expression of power among alpha males whether human or primate, is to dominate access to fertile women and thus maximise the handing on of your genes to the next generation. Hence polygamy, which exists in 95% of mammal species and 75% of cultures known to anthropology. Polygamy is the ultimate expression of inequality because it means that many males never get the chance to have a wife and child. And sexual envy has been, throughout history, among animals as well as humans, a prime driver of violence. 

That is what makes the first chapter of Genesis so revolutionary with its statement that every human being, regardless of class, colour, culture or creed, is in the image and likeness of God himself. We know that in the ancient world it was rulers, kings, emperors and pharaohs who were held to be in the image of God. So what Genesis was saying was that we are all royalty. We each have equal dignity in the kingdom of faith under the sovereignty of God. From this it follows that we each have an equal right to form a marriage and have children, which is why, regardless of how we read the story of Adam and Eve— and there are differences between Jewish and Christian readings—the norm presupposed by that story is: one woman, one man. Or as the Bible itself says: “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.” 

Monogamy did not immediately become the norm, even within the world of the Bible. But many of its most famous stories, about the tension between Sarah and Hagar, or Leah and Rachel and their children, or David and Bathsheba, or Solomon’s many wives, are all critiques that point the way to monogamy. 

And there is a deep connection between monotheism and monogamy, just as there is, in the opposite direction, between idolatry and adultery. Monotheism and monogamy are about the all-embracing relationship between I and Thou, myself and one other, be it a human or the divine ‘Other’. 

What makes the emergence of monogamy unusual is that it is normally the case that the values of a society are those imposed on it by the ruling class. And the ruling class in any hierarchical society stands to gain from promiscuity and polygamy, both of which multiply the chances of my genes being handed on to the next generation. From monogamy the rich and powerful lose and the poor and powerless gain. So the return of monogamy goes against the normal grain of social change and was a real triumph for the equal dignity of all. Every bride and every groom are royalty; every home a palace when furnished with love. 

The fourth remarkable development was the way this transformed the moral life. We’ve all become familiar with the work of evolutionary biologists using computer simulations and the iterated prisoners’ dilemma to explain why reciprocal altruism exists among all social animals. We behave to others as we would wish them to behave to us, and we respond to them as they respond to us. As C.S. Lewis pointed out in his book The Abolition of Man, reciprocity is the Golden Rule shared by all the great civilizations. 

What was new and remarkable in the Hebrew Bible was the idea that love, not just fairness, is the driving principle of the moral life. Three loves. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your might.” “Love your neighbour as yourself.” And, repeated no less than 36 times in the Mosaic books, “Love the stranger because you know what it feels like to be a stranger.” Or to put it another way: Just as God created the natural world in love and forgiveness, so we are charged with creating the social world in love and forgiveness. And that love is a flame lit in marriage and the family. Morality is the love between husband and wife, parent and child, extended outward to the world. 

The fifth development shaped the entire structure of Jewish experience. In ancient Israel an originally secular form of agreement, called a covenant, was taken and transformed into a new way of thinking about the relationship between God and humanity, in the case of Noah, and between God and a people in the case of Abraham and later the Israelites at Mount Sinai. A covenant is like a marriage. It is a mutual pledge of loyalty and trust between two or more people, each respecting the dignity and integrity of the other, to work together to achieve together what neither can achieve alone. And there is one thing even God cannot achieve alone, which is to live within the human heart. That needs us. 

So the Hebrew word emunah—wrongly translated as ‘faith’—really means faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, steadfastness, not walking away even when the going gets tough, trusting the other and honouring the other’s trust in us. What covenant did, and we see this in almost all the prophets, was to understand the relationship between us and God in terms of the relationship between bride and groom, wife and husband. Love thus became not only the basis of morality but also of theology. In Judaism faith is a marriage. Rarely was this more beautifully stated than by Hosea when he said in the name of God: “I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will know the Lord.” Jewish men say those words every weekday morning as we wind the strap of our tefillin around our finger like a wedding ring. Each morning we renew our marriage with God. 

This led to a sixth and quite subtle idea that truth, beauty, goodness, and life itself, do not exist in any one person or entity but in the “between”, what Martin Buber called Das Zwischenmenschliche, the interpersonal, the counterpoint of speaking and listening, giving and receiving. Throughout the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic literature, the vehicle of truth is conversation. In revelation God speaks and asks us to listen. In prayer we speak and ask God to listen. There is never only one voice. In the Bible the prophets argue with God. In the Talmud rabbis argue with one another. In fact, I sometimes think the reason God chose the Jewish people was because He loves a good argument. Judaism is a conversation scored for many voices, never more passionately than in the Song of Songs, a duet between a woman and a man, the beloved and her lover, that Rabbi Akiva called the holy of holies of religious literature. 

The prophet Malachi calls the male priest the guardian of the law of truth. The book of Proverbs says of the woman of worth that “the law of loving kindness is on her tongue”. It is that conversation between male and female voices—between truth and love, justice and mercy, law and forgiveness—that frames the spiritual life. In biblical times each Jew had to give a half shekel to the Temple to remind us that we are only half. There are some cultures that teach that we are nothing. There are others that teach that we are everything. The Jewish view is that we are half and we need to open ourselves to another if we are to become whole. 

All this led to the seventh outcome, that in Judaism the home and the family became the central setting of the life of faith. In the only verse in the Hebrew Bible to explain why God chose Abraham, He says: “I have known him so that he will instruct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just.” Abraham was chosen not to rule an empire, command an army, perform miracles or deliver prophecies, but simply to be a parent. In one of the most famous lines in Judaism, which we say every day and night, Moses commands, “You shall teach these things repeatedly to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house or when you walk on the way, when you lie down and when you rise up.” Parents are to be educators, education is the conversation between the generations, and the first school is the home. 

So Jews became an intensely family oriented people, and it was this that saved us from tragedy. After the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70, Jews were scattered throughout the world, everywhere a minority, everywhere without rights, suffering some of the worst persecutions ever known by a people and yet Jews survived because they never lost three things: their sense of family, their sense of community and their faith. 

And they were renewed every week especially on Shabbat, the day of rest when we give our marriages and families what they most need and are most starved of in the contemporary world, namely time. I once produced a television documentary for the BBC on the state of family life in Britain, and I took the person who was then Britain’s leading expert on child care, Penelope Leach, to a Jewish primary school on a Friday morning. 

There she saw the children enacting in advance what they would see that evening around the family table. There were the five year old mother and father blessing the five year old children with the five year old grandparents looking on. She was fascinated by this whole institution, and she asked the children what they most enjoyed about the Sabbath. One five-year-old boy turned to her and said, “It’s the only night of the week when daddy doesn’t have to rush off”. As we walked away from the school when the filming was over she turned to me and said, “Chief Rabbi, that Sabbath of yours is saving their parents’ marriages.” 

So that is one way of telling the story, a Jewish way, beginning with the birth of sexual reproduction, then the unique demands of human parenting, then the eventual triumph of monogamy as a fundamental statement of human equality, followed by the way marriage shaped our vision of the moral and religious life as based on love and covenant and faithfulness, even to the point of thinking of truth as a conversation between lover and beloved. Marriage and the family are where faith finds its home and where the Divine Presence lives in the love between husband and wife, parent and child. What then has changed? Here’s one way of putting it. I wrote a book a few years ago about religion and science and I summarised the difference between them in two sentences. “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.” And that’s a way of thinking about culture also. Does it put things together or does it take things apart? 

What made the traditional family remarkable, a work of high religious art, is what it brought together: sexual drive, physical desire, friendship, companionship, emotional kinship and love, the begetting of children and their protection and care, their early education and induction into an identity and a history. Seldom has any institution woven together so many different drives and desires, roles and responsibilities. It made sense of the world and gave it a human face, the face of love. 

For a whole variety of reasons, some to do with medical developments like birth control, in vitro fertilisation and other genetic interventions, some to do with moral change like the idea that we are free to do whatever we like so long as it does not harm others, some to do with a transfer of responsibilities from the individual to the state, and other and more profound changes in the culture of the West, almost everything that marriage once brought together has now been split apart. Sex has been divorced from love, love from commitment, marriage from having children, and having children from responsibility for their care. The result is that in Britain in 2012, 47.5% of children were born outside marriage, expected to become a majority in 2016. Fewer people are marrying, those who are, are marrying later, and 42% of marriages end in divorce. Nor is cohabitation a substitute for marriage. The average length of cohabitation in Britain and the United States is less than two years. 

The result is a sharp increase among young people of eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, stress related syndromes, depression and actual and attempted suicides. The collapse of marriage has created a new form of poverty concentrated among single parent families, and of these, the main burden is born by women, who in 2011 headed 92% of single parent households. In Britain today more than a million children will grow up with no contact whatsoever with their fathers. 

This is creating a divide within societies the like of which has not been seen since Disraeli spoke of “two nations” a century and a half ago. Those who are privileged to grow up in stable loving association with the two people who brought them into being will, on average, be healthier physically and emotionally. They will do better at school and at work. They will have more successful relationships, be happier, and live longer. And yes, there are many exceptions. But the injustice of it all cries out to heaven. It will go down in history as one of the tragic instances of what Friedrich Hayek called “the fatal conceit” that somehow we know better than the wisdom of the ages, and can defy the lessons of biology and history. No one surely wants to go back to the narrow prejudices of the past. 

This week, in Britain, a new film opens, telling the story of one of the great minds of the 20th century, Alan Turing, the Cambridge mathematician who laid the philosophical foundations of computing and artificial intelligence, and helped win the war by breaking the German naval code “Enigma”. After the war, Turing was arrested and tried for homosexual behaviour, underwent chemically induced castration, and died at the age of 41 by cyanide poisoning, thought by many to have committed suicide. That is a world to which we should never return. 

But our compassion for those who choose to live differently should not inhibit us from being advocates for the single most humanising institution in history. The family, man, woman, and child, is not one lifestyle choice among many. It is the best means we have yet discovered for nurturing future generations and enabling children to grow in a matrix of stability and love. It is where we learn the delicate choreography of relationship and how to handle the inevitable conflicts within any human group. It is where we first take the risk of giving and receiving love. It is where one generation passes on its values to the next, ensuring the continuity of a civilization. For any society, the family is the crucible of its future, and for the sake of our children’s future, we must be its defenders. 

Since this is a religious gathering, let me, if I may, end with a piece of biblical exegesis. The story of the first family, the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden, is not generally regarded as a success. Whether or not we believe in original sin, it did not end happily. After many years of studying the text I want to suggest a different reading. The story ends with three verses that seem to have no connection with one another. No sequence. No logic. In Genesis 3:19 God says to the man: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” Then in the next verse we read: “The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all life.” And in the next, “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” 

What is the connection here? Why did God telling the man that he was mortal lead him to give his wife a new name? And why did that act seem to change God’s attitude to both of them, so that He performed an act of tenderness, by making them clothes, almost as if He had partially forgiven them? Let me also add that the Hebrew word for “skin” is almost indistinguishable from the Hebrew word for “light”, so that Rabbi Meir, the great sage of the early 2nd century, read the text as saying that God made for them “garments of light”. What did he mean? 

If we read the text carefully, we see that until now the first man had given his wife a purely generic name. He called her ishah, woman. Recall what he said when he first saw her: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman for she was taken from man.” For him she was a type, not a person. He gave her a noun, not a name. What is more he defines her as a derivative of himself: something taken from man. She is not yet for him someone other, a person in her own right. She is merely a kind of reflection of himself. 

As long as the man thought he was immortal, he ultimately needed no one else. But now he knew he was mortal. He would one day die and return to dust. There was only one way in which something of him would live on after his death. That would be if he had a child. But he could not have a child on his own. For that he needed his wife. She alone could give birth. She alone could mitigate his mortality. And not because she was like him but precisely because she was unlike him. 

At that moment she ceased to be, for him, a type, and became a person in her own right. And a person has a proper name. That is what he gave her: the name Chavah, “Eve”, meaning, “giver of life”. At that moment, as they were about to leave Eden and face the world as we know it, a place of darkness, Adam gave his wife the first gift of love, a personal name. And at that moment, God responded to them both in love, and made them garments to clothe their nakedness, or as Rabbi Meir put it, “garments of light”. 

And so it has been ever since, that when a man and woman turn to one another in a bond of faithfulness, God robes them in garments of light, and we come as close as we will ever get to God himself, bringing new life into being, turning the prose of biology into the poetry of the human spirit, redeeming the darkness of the world by the radiance of love. 
______________________

*Sir Jonathan Sacks was formerly the Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth. This article is based on a speech he gave to the international colloquium “Humanum”, convened by Pope Francis on the topic of ‘The Complementarity of Man and Woman”, held November 17-19, 2014, in Vatican City. It has been reprinted with the kind permission of the Office of the Chief Rabbi. Additional information about Rabbi Sacks’ work and instructions on how to join his mailing list can be found on the website: www. rabbisacks.org

Bom artigo sobre relativismo cultural

The Myopia of Cultural Relativism*

Filip Mazurczak

When asked by an English reporter what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi reportedly quipped: “It would be a good idea.” Scholars doubt that this exchange took place. However, the popularity of the anecdote shows how widespread hatred of our civilization has become, including among our own culturally relativistic elites. Their self-loathing is frequently coupled with a glorification of the Far East and apologetics for Islam. In actuality, the West created the greatest civilization in world history, and it was only until after the Enlightenment that its decline began. A comparison with Oriental and Muslim societies reveals that it was only in the West where freedom, beauty, and the search for truth could flourish. 

For cultural relativists, 1789 serves as the demarcation line between barbarism and progress. In their misguided view, the West before the French Revolution was a dim, ignorant, superstitious place. True enlightenment only existed in India. The Romans and Greeks were cruel, the Church Fathers were misogynists, and the Middle Ages—the ‘Dark’ Ages—were an unredeemable embarrassment. The Renaissance was temporarily treated somewhat better, as it was incorrectly viewed as a turn towards secularization, but now it is more frequently presented as the age of corrupt Borgia popes and the time of the first encounter of Europeans with the rest of the world, a prelude to the latter’s oppression. It was only thanks to the Enlightenment and French Revolution that the West ‘discovered’ ideals such as liberty, equality, and brotherhood, which finally led to ‘progress’, the abolition of monarchy, secularization, and notions of equality that have recently led to the apex of human achievement: the legalization of abortion and homosexual ‘marriages’. 

Of course, the above description of the antiWestern historical narrative is somewhat of a caricature. However, this construct is more or less what most students in the West are taught about their civilization. They are indoctrinated to hate tradition, religion, and order, instead idealizing progress and emancipation and turning towards the East for guidance. 

These self-hating Westerners are right about one thing: 1789 indeed was a watershed moment in Western history, insofar as the French Revolution created the world’s first totalitarian regime. Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov wrote that the difference between Christ and Marx is that the former asked his disciples to give their own goods to the poor, while the latter asked his followers to take others’ by force and redistribute them equally. The same applied to the French Revolution, which attempted to enforce liberty, equality, and brotherhood by the guillotine. It was the period before the French Enlightenment that allowed the West to flourish. The interaction of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem created a civilization based on the quest for truth, beauty, actual equality, freedom, and rationality. The ancient Greek philosophers taught us how to search for truth, while the Romans gave us the basis for modern law and, applying reason, constructed cities, roads, and works of architecture. The greatest philosophical revolution in the West, however, occurred after the Edict of Milan in 313. 

It was Christians who built the first hospitals and poorhouses, founded the oldest universities, and created masterpieces of art. Above all, Judeo-Christian values made Western man see his neighbour as an equal—because, to quote St. Paul, “there is neither Greek nor Jew”. 

The French Revolution, and the French Enlightenment that preceded it, represents a hermeneutic rupture with the past, a point when Western thinkers detached themselves from Roman law, the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage, tradition, and the search for truth. In the 19th century, Comte replaced God with the cult of reason; Marx created the blueprint for what was to be a society without inequality (violently imposed, of course); Nietzsche convinced us that some are weak and therefore a burden to society; and Bentham rejected the notion that all men are endowed with equal dignity as “nonsense on stilts”. What followed was a series of true disasters: genocides, wars, concentration camps, and the Gulag. 

The main intellectual influencers of today’s West are the ideological descendants of Comte, Nietzsche, Bentham, and Marx—people such as Michel Foucault, Slavoj Žižek (who has written a panegyric about mass murderer Lenin), and Judith Butler. They postulate a world in which everything is relative, simultaneously elevating the homosexual agenda and abortion to religious dogma. Today’s post-modernists strictly reject the search for objective truth, especially if it does not fit their ideological agenda. 

For example, despite the fact that all scientific evidence shows that unborn children are, indeed, humans capable of feeling pain, that differences between the sexes are real, and that a child needs strong male and female role models for stable development, today’s ideologues champion the homosexual agenda and permissive abortion laws. They want to interfere directly in the democratic right to free worship. (In recent months in the United States, legislation intended to protect religious liberty in Indiana was lambasted by intellectual and political elites, while presidential candidate Hilary Clinton has said that Christianity must change its teaching on abortion.) In fact, many of these people no longer hide that they want to destroy the traditional family—an outcome that Marx and Engels prescribed in the Communist Manifesto. 

Meanwhile, the West has settled for mediocrity, even ugliness. It is difficult to read Petrarch or marvel at the perfection of Michelangelo’s sculptures without feeling awe and pride to be the recipient of such a rich inheritance. Today’s mass culture, however, strives for vulgarity. When Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote The Dehumanization of Art in 1925, he could hardly have predicted that in 1999 New York’s intellectual elites would venerate, as a symbol of religious freedom, a painting of the Virgin Mary covered with photographs of female genitalia from pornographic magazines and elephant feces. 

As mentioned before, the anti-Western school has instead turned to the Far East, especially India, for inspiration. While India is a top emerging economy, its culture makes huge inequalities unlikely to disappear no matter how robust its GDP growth. Whereas Christianity teaches that there is “neither Greek nor Jew”, Hinduism retains a caste system that consigns millions to destitution and neglect because of the families into which they were born. The abuse of women is commonplace in India and widows, considered “inauspicious”, are ostracized by their families and villages. 

It is traditional Western values—the very ones that young people are taught to hold in contempt by academia, the Guardian, and New York Times—that represent the only hope for the millions of hapless Indians suffering because of such (anti-progressive) cultural shackles. Missionaries from Europe and the Americas (Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity are the best-known example) continue to rescue countless Indians from filth, neglect and starvation. The Catholic Church in India also is a great advocate of widows’ rights. These moves are not motivated by proselytism: The faithful serve persons of all creeds, and although the Catholic Church is the largest charitable organization in India, only about 2% of the population are Christian. 

Further double standards abound—courtesy of the proponents of moral equivalence, no less. Western newspapers revel in stories of sexual misconduct by a tiny minority of Catholic priests, despite the Vatican’s adoption of a strict line against deviant clergymen. In contrast, the late Indian Sathya Sai Baba—a cult leader who claimed to be a deity and to possess miraculous powers (such as making Rolex watches ‘materialize’, a trick debunked by illusionists)—was accused of molesting dozens of underage boys from various continents. Indian courts refused to investigate, because as a ‘holy man’ he enjoyed impunity. Such license strongly contrasts with the Roman concept of equality before the law and the separation between Church and state dating back to Pope Gregory VII. 

Today’s cultural relativists have a similarly bizarre approach to the Muslim world, embracing Islam and rejecting Christianity. A peculiar symptom of this inversion is that in 2007, Columbia University invited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak, while one year later Sapienza University of Rome cancelled a planned lecture by Pope Benedict XVI to appease anti-clerical professors. The new dogma may be summarized by Barack Obama’s disdainful comments (putatively made in regard to the threat of ISIS) at his 2015 prayer breakfast: “Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” 

Certainly, Christians have committed crimes towards others. However, this fact comes with two important qualifiers that do not attach to all other religions. First, the right to kill innocents was never a part of Christianity, which has always preached love of one’s neighbour and forgiveness. Misdeeds by Christians resulted not out of the theology, but simply from the wretchedness of individuals. This is not the case in “the religion of peace”. 

Egyptian Jesuit Samir Khalil Samir has noted that Islam is based on three inequalities: between man and woman, freeman and slave, and Muslim and nonbeliever. When during a 2006 lecture in Regensburg Pope Benedict XVI quoted a Byzantine emperor who said that Islam is incompatible with reason, Muslims killed an Italian nun, a missionary in Somalia, in response. Conversely, when Christians are constantly insulted on Western late-night television, they turn the other cheek. 

Second, Christians—with extremely rare exceptions that are inevitable since their numbers exceed two billion—no longer commit violence in the name of their faith. Many Muslims, however, do. This distinction is not because more Christians live in developed countries and, as prevailing opinion holds, economic progress makes people less savage. Saudi Arabia, home to the two holiest cities in Islam, is a wealthy country that espouses Wahhabism, a particularly radical form of Islam, which crucifies apostates and subjects women to genital mutilation. Yet it typically receives a pass from the Left. 

It is indisputable that since 1789, and especially in recent decades, the West has been in a state of decay. If it ever wants to regain its former stature, it must embrace the fact that it was once great and acknowledge the unique source of its strength. This revival can only happen if a fundamental change is made in how history is taught in the West—and if an honest look—unhampered by cultural relativism or political correctness—is taken at the differences between cultures. 
______________________

*Filip Mazurczak is a translator and journalist whose work has appeared in the National Catholic Register, First Things, The Catholic Thing, and other publications. 

domingo, 6 de dezembro de 2015

Astrologia Mundial

Rio de Janeiro - a cidade mercuriana.


O ascendente em Gêmeos é a chave pra se entender esse povo de espírito vivaz, rápido de intelecto, extremamente comunicativo, insuperavelmente maleável. mas também inconstante, excessivamente fluido e superficial (e leviano, muitas vezes).

Na cidade, isso se cristaliza em malha urbana confusa, intrincada, acidentada. Também expressa o fato de o Rio ser o centro de mídia do país. O lugar onde as coisas reverberam e se propagam. Onde os artistas procuram seu palco.

Gêmeos rege mãos e braços. Daí que o símbolo mundialmente conhecido da cidade ser o Cristo de braços abertos. O Rio também é a capital do vôlei brasileiro. Se combinarmos com o Peixes do signo solar, que rege os pés, explicamos aquele estranho esporte tão cultuado nas praias cariocas, o futevôlei. 

Mercúrio dá o calor insuportável do verão. Júpiter, por Peixes, dá as águas e a benevolência.



Baratzil - Terra do Cruzeiro, símbolo cosmogônico do Cristo.



Raízes do Brasil

Bidu Sayão - a incomparável soprano brasileira



                                                             Bachiana nº5 - Cantilena


                                                        Puccini - O Mio Babbino Caro


                                                     Villa Lobos - Melodia Sentimental

Raízes do Brasil


01 - No 4 00:01
02 - No 5 18:16  (Bidu Sayão na voz da Cantilena)
03 - No 7 29:14
04 - No 9 55:52
05 - No 10 01:05:26

Raízes do Brasil


Tracklist
0:00 Abertura
6:20 Canto de Ossanha
10:35 Labareda 
16:45 Tristeza e Solidão
22:18 Canto do Caboclo de Pedra Preta
25:59 Canto de Xangô
31:53 Bocoché
35:01 Canto de Iemanjá
41:04 Variações Sobre Berimbau
47:09 Tempo de Amor (Samba do Veloso)
51:51 Lamento de Exu

First things first


Raízes do Brasil



O Brasil divide-se, magicamente (pela linha de evolução), da seguinte forma:

- o Norte é a terra da Jurema e da Encantaria;
- o Nordeste, fora a Bahia, é terra dos Boiadeiros;
- a Bahia, terra de Pretos-Velhos/Yorimá e baianos;
- o Sudeste, terra de Caboclos e Boiadeiros;
- a cidade do Rio de Janeiro, centro das Crianças/Yori e dos Marinheiros;
- o Centro-Oeste, predomínio de Caboclos e Boiadeiros;
- o Sul, terra de Caboclos e Boiadeiros.

De uma forma geral, o país apresenta predomínio de Sertanejos/Boiadeiros, excetuando-se os dois grandes centros de Crianças e Pretos-Velhos - cidade do Rio e Bahia.

Cada um seguindo sua linha evolutiva. Todos sob a égide maior de Jesus Cristo.

sábado, 5 de dezembro de 2015

Is the Bull Market Over? These Charts Say So


http://gainspainscapital.com/2015/12/04/5759/
Fonte: site Gains Pains & Capital

Americans Have Never Tried To Buy So Many Guns In November... Ever



Two things happened after the most recent widely publicized US mass shootings/domestic terrorism acts: i) Obama once again made a concerted effort to push for gun-control, and ii) gun sales soared to record highs for November most likely in response to i)  (...)

Fonte: site ZeroHedge

China duplicaría compras estratégicas de petróleo el próximo año

Enquanto os bocós da ptbrás e da pdvsa se afundam em dívidas, os comunistas chineses aproveitam e se entopem de óleo barato.

http://lta.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idLTAKBN0TN1EH20151204
Fonte: Reuters AL

sexta-feira, 4 de dezembro de 2015

F. Scott Fitzgerald


Meu pequeno romance norte-americano predileto. Narrativa de fácil fruição. Linguagem simples, direta, escorreita. A história bem amarrada de personagens marcantes (no grau positivo), que é a História dos dramas e contradições de uma época - os anos 20 (grau relativo), e que é, sobretudo, símbolo da falência dos ideais, do choque entre o universal e o contingente, da inadequação romântica (grau superlativo). No fim, o farol que pisca em verde não é promessa de um futuro alvissareiro ou signo de um ideal que se renova constantemente. é só um farol mesmo. 

Grande literatura, sem precisar recorrer a elaboradas meditações filosóficas (viu, Mann) ou a experimentalismos linguísticos (viu, Rosa).

terça-feira, 1 de dezembro de 2015

Jean Renoir - La règle du jeu


Se algum filme fosse um romance, este seria A Regra do Jogo, do gênio Jean Renoir. uma das películas melhor filmadas da história do cinema. um grande marco. o Cézanne da sétima arte.

Bagdad Cafe

puta filme bonito do caralho



David Lynch - the wizard








Por que atrás do tênue véu dessa ordinária vida existe todo um mundo. que vai pra cima, mas que vai pra baixo também. a existência é uma tensão entre-mundos.

The Master - an awesome fucking masterpiece



Lancaster Dodd:  If you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you? For you'd be the first person in the history of the world.

A far l'amore comincia tu


The italian searching for beauty and good life

segunda-feira, 30 de novembro de 2015

Do porquê a liberação do porte de armas ser importante

Leia Mais:http://sao-paulo.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,taxistas-agridem-passageiros-de-uber,10000003429
Assine o Estadão All Digital + Impresso todos os dias
Siga @Estadao no TwitterLeia Mais:http://sao-paulo.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,taxistaTaxistas agridem passageiros de Uber
Automóvel do aplicativo foi fechado por grupo que estava em dez táxis; vítimas tentaram acalmar os agressores e foram golpeadas (com uma chave de roda!)

http://sao-paulo.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,taxistas-agridem-passageiros-de-uber,10000003429
Fonte: jornal Estadão


num país de pilantras e bandidos por todos os lados. onde a polícia é insuficiente (quando não, corrupta) e a justiça uma incerteza, só andando armado.

um tiro pra cima e saiam todos correndo feito menininhas.


Assine o Estadão All Digital + Impresso todos os dias
Siga @Estadao no Twitter

Uma piada chamada Brasiiiiiillllllll



And God made the woman...

Dianna Agron - atriz e cantora norte-americana.  


Turkey's Trump Card: Erdogan Can Cut Russia's Syrian Supply Line By Closing Bosphorus


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-29/turkeys-trump-card-erdogan-can-cut-russias-syrian-supply-line-closing-bosphorus
Fonte: site ZeroHedge

sábado, 28 de novembro de 2015

Central Banks Will Not Be Able to Halt This Economic Collapse



http://gainspainscapital.com/2015/11/18/central-banks-nomic-collapse/
Fonte: site Gains Pains & Capitals

Meet The Man Who Funds ISIS: Bilal Erdogan, The Son Of Turkey's President

(...) As Sputnik transcribes, according to a press release from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lavrov pointed out that, "by shooting down a Russian plane on a counter-terrorist mission of the Russian Aerospace Force in Syria, and one that did not violate Turkey’s airspace, the Turkish government has in effect sided with ISIS."
It was in this context when Lavrov added that "Turkey’s actions appear premeditated, planned, and undertaken with a specific objective."
More importantly, Lavrov pointed to Turkey’s role in the propping up the terror network through the oil trade. Per the Russian statement:
"The Russian Minister reminded his counterpart about Turkey’s involvement in the ISIS’ illegal trade in oil, which is transported via the area where the Russian plane was shot down, and about the terrorist infrastructure, arms and munitions depots and control centers that are also located there."
(...)

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-25/meet-man-who-funds-isis-bilal-erdogan-son-turkeys-president
Fonte: site ZeroHedge

China Begins Military Colonization Of Africa With First Ever Overseas Army Base At Key Oil Chokepoint


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-27/china-begins-military-colonization-africa-first-ever-overseas-army-base-key-oil-chok
Fonte: site ZeroHedge

sexta-feira, 27 de novembro de 2015

O cinema como fenomenologia do amor

A obra-prima do russo Andrej Tarkosvky, The Mirror. Um filme que realiza a proeza artística de ser transcendental sendo intensamente autobiográfico.

A busca da reconciliação com o próprio passado. 
Um ato de amor, centrado na figura da mãe.

A sinceridade de propósito e o superior domínio da linguagem cinematográfica produzem uma narrativa que escapa ao sentimentalismo e à emoção simplória. Transportados ao reino da estética pura, testemunhamos o diretor em pleno exercício fenomenológico de si, que o gênio de Tarkovsky soube representar em imagens espetaculares, levando o cinema à fronteira do seu possível. É o poder curativo, catártico, da verdadeira obra de arte.




quinta-feira, 26 de novembro de 2015

A Lei de Síntese

Há de existir um princípio soberano que ordene os homens no esforço coordenado em direção a uma finalidade comum e maior de múltiplas finalidades parciais e menores. Que seja a normal de uma totalidade (expressão usada por Mário Ferreira). Esse princípio, que é primeiro, que é uma vitalidade, que é uma disposição de soberana Vontade do Ser Absoluto, que é um dos arihtmoi arkhai supremos (outra expressão colhida em Mário Ferreira), consubstancia-se, no campo da evolução dos seres, numa lei determinante do real a que se dá o nome de Lei de Síntese.

A lei de síntese é a lei da convergência em Deus.

É a lei que vincula todos os seres ao Ser Absoluto.

É a lei da relação vertical, pela qual uma vida menor busca incessantemente uma vida maior.

É a lei que consagra o fato de que nem a morte pode quebrar o vínculo entre Deus e suas criaturas, porque a vida em nós é co-eterna à vida de Deus.

A lei de síntese é a expressão do princípio que impulsiona os seres a realizar Deus.

É o que Mário Ferreira dos Santos*, esse gênio filosófico absurdo, associa com lei da década sagrada pitagórica, do “10”, nestas magistrais palavras:  “Todas as coisas integradas no Todo seguem a direção do Bem que lhes é transcendente, em direção à unidade transcendental, à Unidade que está acima de todas as coisas, que é a fonte, a origem e de todas as coisas, que é o Ser Supremo (…) a Lei das Leis, o Logos dos logoi”.

E que se resume, ao se completar, na suprema simplicidade última do Ser Absoluto, na lei do ser, que não é outra coisa que a lei do “1”.


(* Pitágoras e o tema do número. e  A Sabedoria das Leis Eternas).