sábado, 21 de junho de 2008

Life after life, again

Os estudos de Raymond Moody (Life after life, A vida depois da vida) vão sendo replicados, apesar de que a morte continua a ser um tabu e poucas pessoas, na comunidade médica ou civil, estão verdadeiramente interessadas em revelar os seus mistérios. Mas é possível que, enquanto não explorarmos a morte, não compreenderemos a vida.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7463606.stm

quarta-feira, 18 de junho de 2008

Nos interstícios da Existência

Que o mundo tem uma lógica é fácil de perceber.
Qual é essa lógica? Isso nunca alguém até hoje foi capaz de o dizer.

Cada vez descobrimos mais, cada vez mais se adensa o mistério.
É preciso humildade e coragem e um sentido de aventura,
para perscrutar os interstícios da Existência.

domingo, 8 de junho de 2008

Hubble em alta definição

Este é o mundo em que vivemos apesar de muito poucos de nós nos apercebermos que ele existe.

"O que é o homem perante o infinito? ... Como poderia a parte conhecer o todo?"
(Blaise Pascal, O Homem perante a natureza, mais citações aqui)

Desafiando o assombro de Pascal, o homem tem de facto tentado conhecer o infinito. Talvez continuemos infinitamente longe de o conseguir na totalidade, isso ninguém o poderá comprovar ao certo; certo é que a imagem de um Universo povoado por estrelas, galáxias, planetas e quasares, nos inspira, nos inunda de uma paz, de uma gratidão por termos nascido num Cosmos assim tão belo, nos convida a transcender os nossos limites e os nossos medos; o mundo que a ciência desvela é um mundo cheio de sentido, cheio de esplendor, cheio de mistério...

A página europeia do Hubble, além das muitas imagens, wallpapers, etc, apresenta agora mais de uma dezena de videos e pequenos filmes em alta definição (e também em definições normais). Vale a pena ver, só faltam as legendas!! Muitos dos videos não têm som, mas são muito belos, por exemplo este.

A lista dos pequenos filmes pode encontrar-se aqui, a partir do 6º episódio já se encontram filmes em alta definição, escolhi a versão HD 1080p (screen). No entanto esta versão é bastante exigente, ou se tem um bom PC ou então uma placa gráfica com aceleração de alta definição.

No meu caso tenho um pc fraquinho, e uso uma Ati Radeon 2400pro para acelerar o vídeo, tenho de renomear o ficheiro da extensão mp4 para avi e uso a última versão do Media Palyer Classic - HomeCinema para vizualizar os ficheiros com recurso a descodificação por hardware.

Os vídeos são fantásticos. Já agora, promovendo a divulgação de material livre de copyright, aqui está um filme de animação também disponível em alta definição e criado inteiramente através de software gratuíto: Big Buck Bunny (para crianças, não tem diálogo).

quinta-feira, 5 de junho de 2008

Gostas mais do doce ou salgado?

gostas mais do doce ou salgado? Preferirias ser Rei ou Mendigo, Deus ou Amante sedento?

Friedrich Holderlin no seu livro, Hyperion, afirma que

"O HOMEM É UM DEUS QUANDO SONHA E UM MENDIGO QUANDO RACIOCINA."

É um pouco como quando conhecemos alguém tão profundamente que nesse mundo, da intimidade sem palavras, parece que não há distinção entre eu e o outro, mas apenas continuidade. Somos o mesmo em dois corpos, somos um. Mas quando pensamos, quando reflectimos sobre ele, vem novamente a distinção, fomos como que expulsos do Paraíso, agora há o tu e o eu, agora somos dois onde antes havia apenas um.

Havendo um não há necessidade de linguagem ou aprendizagem, esta cumplicidade, interioridade, não exige qualquer conhecimento, apenas uma alma que não seja pequena e fechada.

Mas será que nos contentamos com isso? Não será essa cumplicidade apenas um prelúdio, um convite, a uma fusão ainda maior?

Nesse livro / poema o Holderlin queixa-se:

"Oh meu Belarmin, nestas alturas permaneço frequentemente. Mas um momento de reflexão atira-me para baixo. Ai, o homem é um Deus quando sonha, mas um pedinte quando pensa."

Ora, não será precisamente isso que sentimos mesmo com aqueles que amamos profundamente? Num momento somos um, mas no outro já estamos afastados novamente. Afastados por quezílias, desejos mal entendidos ou mal pronunciados, enfim, é a incomprensão, a cegueira que nos afasta. Do mesmo modo, olhamos para as estrelas à noite e sentimo-nos num mundo infinito e perfeito, mas quantos de nós se lembram delas durante o dia, e se sabem e sentem, vogando nesta frágil esfera, rodando pelo meio do espaço cósmico?

Pode ser que o Amante, olhando a sua Amada, a compreenda profundamente. Mas isso não chega para a conhecer. É como se nos contentássemos tanto por receber o convite que nos esquecemos de ir à Festa!! Conhecer a Amada é também conhecer a sua história, as suas predisposições, os seus medos, as suas virtudes, as suas derrotas. É um trabalho infinito, e nessa aplicação de tempo e energia, vamos construindo pontes que vão tornando essa Unidade inicial em algo mais profundo, mais Verdadeiro, mais Pleno!

Por isso, ser mendigo é necessário, é complementar de ser "Deus" (neste sentido de se sentir Uno e Pleno). É no jogo, na dialéctica, entre ser Mendigo e ser Deus, entre Saber tudo e ignorar-se tudo, entre tudo ter e tudo procurar, entre usar o para-lá-do-espírito e a mente, que vamos viajando neste mistério Cósmico à procura de tudo, incluindo a de desvendar a nossa própria essência.

Resumindo: os mendigos, esses pensadores eternamente arredados dos objectos que reflectem cada vez melhor, vão à lua, desvendam a composição de estrelas e planetas, mergulham em buracos negros, contemplam galáxias, os mistérios do clima, as civilizações passadas, a história do planeta, viajam nos Oceanos e conhecem biliões de espécies, seres e histórias... o seu olhar abarca biliões de anos, a sua viagem é infinita e infinitamente bela: esse é o milagre do homo sapiens - usou a mente como asas que lhe permitiram contemplar muito mais do que a sua própria vida, não tem asas mas voa muito mais alto do que os outros seres vivos. Ao contrário de outros animais, não tem de ter a visão centrada em si próprio, o seu olhar pode abarcar muito mais. É claro que isso ainda é muito pouco e talvez daqui a biliões de anos nós pareçamos também limitados como os macacos nos parecem hoje a nós. Mas tanto nós como esses seres superiores, seremos eternos mendigos, porque teremos sede e fome desse Encontro com tudo, e estaremos a caminho...

Mas por outro lado, há ainda um outro lado de nós, de Deuses, que por sua vez, já têm tudo, são Plenos, não precisam de nada e todo o mundo está para eles aberto, no seu Mistério, de par em par. Estão em todo o lado, são tudo!!

Estes dois lados não se devem opor, eles são como o lado esquerdo e direito da mesma face. Estar a caminho e chegar, na verdade, são dois momentos da mesma dança, do mesmo Êxtase...

O desapego leva ao Encontro do que está para lá da forma, e vice-versa; quem vê a partir do limitado verá um pedinte, afastado de tudo, quem vê a partir do infinito verá Deus, celebrando tudo; reconhecer ambas as faces como caminhos uma para e na outra é parte do despertar.

quarta-feira, 4 de junho de 2008

Dinheiro, meu rico dinheirinho...

É curioso como o animal supostamente mais inteligente do planeta (é ele próprio que o considera) passa a maior parte do seu tempo a pensar em dinheiro...

terça-feira, 3 de junho de 2008

Um outro olhar sobre a religião, por Bertrand Russell

A religiosidade, ou seja, a conexão íntima e invisível ao Real, não é o que está em causa neste texto, mas sim o dogma, a superstição, a (falsa) autoridade, a ignorância, o medo, que criaram e alimentaram, ao longo dos milénios, aquilo que hoje conhecemos por religião (como organização social e não a "religiosidade" da busca individual pelo sentido da própria vida). É verdade: Cristo não era cristão nem Buda era budista!! Tentemos nós também evitar todas as defesas e olhar para tudo com olhos de ver, sem pré-concepções ou ensinamentos de outros... Assumir a ignorância é o primeiro passo para estar receptivo. Estamos "condenados" a ser mestres de nós próprios...

Eu acrescentaria mais uma vantagem da religião: tal como a paixão cega também a religião conduz à sua própria superação, ou seja, a maior vantagem da religião é conduzir à desilusão... mas isto, em ambos os casos, só para aqueles que as viverem intensamente e integralmente...


Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?
by Bertrand Russell

"My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.

The word religion is used nowadays in a very loose sense. Some people, under the influence of extreme Protestantism, employ the word to denote any serious personal convictions as to morals or the nature of the universe. This use of the word is quite unhistorical. Religion is primarily a social phenomenon. Churches may owe their origin to teachers with strong individual convictions, but these teachers have seldom had much influence upon the churches that they have founded, whereas churches have had enormous influence upon the communities in which they flourished. To take the case that is of most interest to members of Western civilization: the teaching of Christ, as it appears in the Gospels, has had extraordinarily little to do with the ethics of Christians. The most important thing about Christianity, from a social and historical point of view, is not Christ but the church, and if we are to judge of Christianity as a social force we must not go to the Gospels for our material. Christ taught that you should give your goods to the poor, that you should not fight, that you should not go to church, and that you should not punish adultery. Neither Catholics nor Protestants have shown any strong desire to follow His teaching in any of these respects. Some of the Franciscans, it is true, attempted to teach the doctrine of apostolic poverty, but the Pope condemned them, and their doctrine was declared heretical. Or, again, consider such a text as "Judge not, that ye be not judged," and ask yourself what influence such a text has had upon the Inquisition and the Ku Klux Klan.

What is true of Christianity is equally true of Buddhism. The Buddha was amiable and enlightened; on his deathbed he laughed at his disciples for supposing that he was immortal. But the Buddhist priesthood -- as it exists, for example, in Tibet -- has been obscurantist, tyrannous, and cruel in the highest degree.

There is nothing accidental about this difference between a church and its founder. As soon as absolute truth is supposed to be contained in the sayings of a certain man, there is a body of experts to interpret his sayings, and these experts infallibly acquire power, since they hold the key to truth. Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage. They are, however, in one respect worse than any other privileged caste, since it is their business to expound an unchanging truth, revealed once for all in utter perfection, so that they become necessarily opponents of all intellectual and moral progress. The church opposed Galileo and Darwin; in our own day it opposes Freud. In the days of its greatest power it went further in its opposition to the intellectual life. Pope Gregory the Great wrote to a certain bishop a letter beginning: "A report has reached us which we cannot mention without a blush, that thou expoundest grammar to certain friends." The bishop was compelled by pontifical authority to desist from this wicked labor, and Latinity did not recover until the Renaissance. It is not only intellectually but also morally that religion is pernicious. I mean by this that it teaches ethical codes which are not conducive to human happiness. When, a few years ago, a plebiscite was taken in Germany as to whether the deposed royal houses should still be allowed to enjoy their private property, the churches in Germany officially stated that it would be contrary to the teaching of Christianity to deprive them of it. The churches, as everyone knows, opposed the abolition of slavery as long as they dared, and with a few well-advertised exceptions they oppose at the present day every movement toward economic justice. The Pope has officially condemned Socialism.

Christianity and Sex
The worst feature of the Christian religion, however, is its attitude toward sex -- an attitude so morbid and so unnatural that it can be understood only when taken in relation to the sickness of the civilized world at the time the Roman Empire was decaying. We sometimes hear talk to the effect that Christianity improved the status of women. This is one of the grossest perversions of history that it is possible to make. Women cannot enjoy a tolerable position in society where it is considered of the utmost importance that they should not infringe a very rigid moral code. Monks have always regarded Woman primarily as the temptress; they have thought of her mainly as the inspirer of impure lusts. The teaching of the church has been, and still is, that virginity is best, but that for those who find this impossible marriage is permissible. "It is better to marry than to burn," as St. Paul puts it. By making marriage indissoluble, and by stamping out all knowledge of the ars amandi, the church did what it could to secure that the only form of sex which it permitted should involve very little pleasure and a great deal of pain. The opposition to birth control has, in fact, the same motive: if a woman has a child a year until she dies worn out, it is not to be supposed that she will derive much pleasure from her married life; therefore birth control must be discouraged.

The conception of Sin which is bound up with Christian ethics is one that does an extraordinary amount of harm, since it affords people an outlet for their sadism which they believe to be legitimate, and even noble. Take, for example, the question of the prevention of syphilis. It is known that, by precautions taken in advance, the danger of contracting this disease can be made negligible. Christians, however, object to the dissemination of knowledge of this fact, since they hold it good that sinners should be punished. They hold this so good that they are even willing that punishment should extend to the wives and children of sinners. There are in the world at the present moment many thousands of children suffering from congenital syphilis who would never have been born but for the desire of Christians to see sinners punished. I cannot understand how doctrines leading us to this fiendish cruelty can be considered to have any good effects upon morals.

It is not only in regard to sexual behaviour but also in regard to knowledge on sex subjects that the attitude of Christians is dangerous to human welfare. Every person who has taken the trouble to study the question in an unbiased spirit knows that the artificial ignorance on sex subjects which orthodox Christians attempt to enforce upon the young is extremely dangerous to mental and physical health, and causes in those who pick up their knowledge by the way of "improper" talk, as most children do, an attitude that sex is in itself indecent and ridiculous. I do not think there can be any defense for the view that knowledge is ever undesirable. I should not put barriers in the way of the acquisition of knowledge by anybody at any age. But in the particular case of sex knowledge there are much weightier arguments in its favor than in the case of most other knowledge. A person is much less likely to act wisely when he is ignorant than when he is instructed, and it is ridiculous to give young people a sense of sin because they have a natural curiosity about an important matter.

Every boy is interested in trains. Suppose we told him that an interest in trains is wicked; suppose we kept his eyes bandaged whenever he was in a train or on a railway station; suppose we never allowed the word "train" to be mentioned in his presence and preserved an impenetrable mystery as to the means by which he is transported from one place to another. The result would not be that he would cease to be interested in trains; on the contrary, he would become more interested than ever but would have a morbid sense of sin, because this interest had been represented to him as improper. Every boy of active intelligence could by this means be rendered in a greater or less degree neurasthenic. This is precisely what is done in the matter of sex; but, as sex is more interesting than trains, the results are worse. Almost every adult in a Christian community is more or less diseased nervously as a result of the taboo on sex knowledge when he or she was young. And the sense of sin which is thus artificially implanted is one of the causes of cruelty, timidity, and stupidity in later life. There is no rational ground of any sort or kind in keeping a child ignorant of anything that he may wish to know, whether on sex or on any other matter. And we shall never get a sane population until this fact is recognized in early education, which is impossible so long as the churches are able to control educational politics.
Leaving these comparatively detailed objections on one side, it is clear that the fundamental doctrines of Christianity demand a great deal of ethical perversion before they can be accepted. The world, we are told, was created by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt. But even if it were true, it would make no difference. If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man. The usual Christian argument is that the suffering in the world is a purification for sin and is therefore a good thing. This argument is, of course, only a rationalization of sadism; but in any case it is a very poor argument. I would invite any Christian to accompany me to the children's ward of a hospital, to watch the suffering that is there being endured, and then to persist in the assertion that those children are so morally abandoned as to deserve what they are suffering. In order to bring himself to say this, a man must destroy in himself all feelings of mercy and compassion. He must, in short, make himself as cruel as the God in whom he believes. No man who believes that all is for the best in this suffering world can keep his ethical values unimpaired, since he is always having to find excuses for pain and misery.

[...]

To this day conventional Christians think an adulterer more wicked than a politician who takes bribes, although the latter probably does a thousand times as much harm. The medieval conception of virtue, as one sees in their pictures, was of something wishy-washy, feeble, and sentimental. The most virtuous man was the man who retired from the world; the only men of action who were regarded as saints were those who wasted the lives and substance of their subjects in fighting the Turks, like St. Louis. The church would never regard a man as a saint because he reformed the finances, or the criminal law, or the judiciary. Such mere contributions to human welfare would be regarded as of no importance. I do not believe there is a single saint in the whole calendar whose saintship is due to work of public utility.

[...]

Sources of Intolerance
The intolerance that spread over the world with the advent of Christianity is one of the most curious features, due, I think, to the Jewish belief in righteousness and in the exclusive reality of the Jewish God. Why the Jews should have had these peculiarities I do not know. They seem to have developed during the captivity as a reaction against the attempt to absorb the Jews into alien populations. However that may be, the Jews, and more especially the prophets, invented emphasis upon personal righteousness and the idea that it is wicked to tolerate any religion except one. These two ideas have had an extraordinarily disastrous effect upon Occidental history. The church made much of the persecution of Christians by the Roman State before the time of Constantine. This persecution, however, was slight and intermittent and wholly political. At all times, from the age of Constantine to the end of the seventeenth century, Christians were far more fiercely persecuted by other Christians than they ever were by the Roman emperors. Before the rise of Christianity this persecuting attitude was unknown to the ancient world except among the Jews. If you read, for example, Herodotus, you find a bland and tolerant account of the habits of the foreign nations he visited. Sometimes, it is true, a peculiarly barbarous custom may shock him, but in general he is hospitable to foreign gods and foreign customs. He is not anxious to prove that people who call Zeus by some other name will suffer eternal punishment and ought to be put to death in order that their punishment may begin as soon as possible. This attitude has been reserved for Christians. It is true that the modern Christian is less robust, but that is not thanks to Christianity; it is thanks to the generations of freethinkers, who from the Renaissance to the present day, have made Christians ashamed of many of their traditional beliefs. It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians. Nobody nowadays believes that the world was created in 4004 BC; but not so very long ago skepticism on this point was thought an abominable crime. My great-great-grandfather, after observing the depth of the lava on the slopes of Etna, came to the conclusion that the world must be older than the orthodox supposed and published this opinion in a book. For this offense he was cut by the county and ostracized from society. Had he been a man in humbler circumstances, his punishment would doubtless have been more severe. It is no credit to the orthodox that they do not now believe all the absurdities that were believed 150 years ago. The gradual emasculation of the Christian doctrine has been effected in spite of the most vigorous resistance, and solely as the result of the onslaughts of freethinkers.

[...]

The church's conception of righteousness is socially undesirable in various ways -- first and foremost in its depriciation of intelligence and science. This defect is inherited from the Gospels. Christ tells us to become as little children, but little children cannot understand the differential calculus, or the principles of currency, or the modern methods of combating disease. To acquire such knowledge is no part of our duty, according to the church. The church no longer contends that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it did so in its palmy days; but the acquisition of knowledge, even though not sinful, is dangerous, since it may lead to a pride of intellect, and hence to a questioning of the Christian dogma. Take, for example, two men, one of whom has stamped out yellow fever throughout some large region in the tropics but has in the course of his labors had occasional relations with women to whom he was not married; while the other has been lazy and shiftless, begetting a child a year until his wife died of exhaustion and taking so little care of his children that half of them died from preventable causes, but never indulging in illicit sexual intercourse. Every good Christian must maintain that the second of these men is more virtuous than the first. Such an attitude is, of course, superstitious and totally contrary to reason. Yet something of this absurdity is inevitable so long as avoidance of sin is thought more important than positive merit, and so long as the importance of knowledge as a help to a useful life is not recognized.

[...]

Religion prevents our children from having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific co-operation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment. It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion."

O texto completo está aqui.

segunda-feira, 2 de junho de 2008

Os três passos da religião e o quarto passo da prenda

As religiões ajudam o homem a encontrar o sentido do mundo. Não o quê mas o porquê, não o facto mas o valor, a importância, o significado. Tudo isto é invisível e o caminho para lá chegar divide-se em três partes:

1) Ouvir - quando se está perdido procura-se um guia, um farol, daí o ênfase na obediência, na sensibilidade passiva;
2) Amar - quando se ouve, se está atento, a ordem/sugestão é: Ama;
3) Dissolver no êxtase - quando se ama encontra-se a Beleza do mundo, do outro, que está também em nós, perdem-se as fronteiras, e somos todos irmãos, com os homens, as pedras, os astros, os pinguins e ratazanas e gotas de água e grãos de areia. Tudo o que amarmos se vai revelar como belo e divino e parte do todo de que também somos parte.

4) Que eu saiba não existe quatro. Daí que, quando atingimos este estado, estamos livres para nos dedicar ao "exterior" ao "visível". Ou seja, à arte, à ciência, à técnica, à filosofia, ao convívio com tudo, à comunicação, a tudo o que acharmos que vale a dedicação da nossa atenção.

O último passo da religião conduz à integridade, o último passo da ciência conduz à verdade. A religião, ao conduzir à integridade, tira-nos as dúvidas sobre o nosso valor, completude, transcendência, incorruptibilidade; a ciência, ao conduzir a verdade, vai construindo peça a peça o puzzle que nos conduz à mais bela prenda do Além... a visão de Deus.

Enquanto que a religião fica no mundo do invisível, a ciência tenta passar para o visível a beleza eterna. É difícil ser-se bom cientista sem se ser profundamente religioso (isto não implica ser faccioso ou seja, aderir a uma forma específica de ver Deus).