Adonis Diaries

Does it make any sense to you when scholars and proselytizer  disseminate the notion of promoting a culture of life?  You quickly realize that in order to defining and describing this “culture” people revert to describing the culture of death:  It is as if mankind is best qualified to automatically transpose the opposite meaning of a culture, comprehend it, and retaining the opposite notion.  If culture of life has no meaning then, culture of death is not supposed to extending any meaning either.  Life itself is an abstract notion and only the dying of living creatures gives grounds to extrapolate into what life could mean.

If you tell me you are actually promoting the  “culture of living”, I might jump to the misplaced notion that you want to start on the historic philosophical debate from the sophists, to the Stoics, to Socrates, to Platon, to Aristotle… of whether we need to enjoy life as it comes and handed down to us, or struggling, or sacrificing our earthly graced life for the glorification of another abstract God, or….  Obviously, you didn’t mean that when you imagined a culture for living:  You had never had any patience for philosophical debating, arguing, or reading these kinds of stuff.

Most probably you mean talking about “culture for the living”, regardless of why we are living or how we were created and what happens after death.  All you want is to witness, while still alive, for all kinds of wars and physical violence to end and for negotiation, communication, and diplomacy be the only remedy for settling mankind unlimited enmities with one another.

The trouble is that all discussions or proposals for initiating culture of life or of living begin by enumerating religious initial precepts for preserving life and then lambasting the practical applications of the sacerdotal castes of turning original religious preaching into the ideology of physically fighting those not members of the same religious caste such as “war of the just”, “small jihad”….

Let us not flee forward and lie to ourselves and to others that there are ways of turning the tide around, that religions can be counted on for rectifying what is harmful to mankind.  All religions, once organized and structured, ended up either enticing to wars, planning for wars, or implicitly backing wars of the power-to-be in the name of their “GOD”.  More people died from wars among same religions or sects than among different religions; the “civil wars” among the sects of the same religion are started by labeling the other sects as “heretics”, a label far worse than treason, homosexual, “barbaric”, or pagan…

If you want to disseminate culture for the living then, first principle is to abolish all privileges enjoyed by the sacerdotal caste members that any common citizen does not enjoy.  The clergy must pay tax, work for a living, and be judged when uttering political speeches denigrating other citizens, denying equal human rights, hijacking freedom of opinion, and encouraging the spirit of physical wars and violence.  If religious beliefs are guaranteed, politically organizing religious members to supporting religious earthly interests is not within a belief religious system to be guaranteed.

The complete separation of State affairs and religion is the cornerstone principle for establishing a sustainable culture of life, of living, or for the living.  Any religion that do politics as an organization, finance political campaigns, or drum up support as an organization should be banned as a legitimate religion; in this case, the guarantee for religious belief does not apply to the politically organized religion.  Speaking in the name of an abstract concept such as God is the most dangerous trend that promotes conflicts among people.  Why should an elected official be consecrated in the name of God:  It is the citizens who brought him into office of responsibilities.

Consequently, all culture in art, music, theater…must banish focusing on abstract notions that divide instead of investigating and promoting the spirit of eliminating tendencies of physical and psychological violence.  Promoting programs for eradicating famine in the world is culture for the living.  The UN organization was planing to reducing by half the number of people dying of famine and malnutrition; instead of 750 million famished people in 1996 we are witnessing this number climb to one billion due to policies of open market for the multinational agribusinesses. The rural peasants are flocking to cities because prices of their harvest cannot compete with multinational enterprises.  Culture for the living is teaching, and maintaining programs on how to staying in rural areas and not delivering products from far away.

Elder people are dying in isolation in cities and their body discovered weeks later in state of putrefaction.  Culture for the living is for a community to knowing each member in its area, tending to their needs, and keeping a record and a schedule for visiting regularly the living who are down physically and psychologically.