Category: Ethics

Ethics

O, Dierbaar België.

Wij Belgen maken ons niet schuldig aan chauvinisme, hoewel we ongetwijfeld een paar geldige redenen hebben om trots te zijn op onze natie. Caesar omschreef ons niet voor niets als ‘de dappersten der Galliërs’. Maar ook vandaag mogen we fier zijn. Ik denk hierbij aan de talrijke, uit Belgische breinen ontsproten architecturale, artistieke, en culinaire creaties. Zo verschuilen er zich in onze lanen talloze parels van Art Nouveau, bewaren onze musea door Belgische surrealisten geschilderde meesterwerken en brouwen we bier waarvan elke hooligan gaat schuimbekken.

Wie heeft de saxofoon uitgevonden? Check. En de dynamo? Double check. En hoewel de geniepige Fransen trachten met de eer te gaan lopen, zijn French fries wel degelijk van Belgische makelij. Ann Demeulemeester moet zeker niet onderdoen aan Saint Laurent & co., en Zwitserse chocolade is het vergelijken niet waard met de lekkernijen van onze Marcolini. Toch verkoos deze laatste een Italiaans pseudoniem die zijn Belgische identiteit verhult. Alsof de nekken van Italianen nog niet dik genoeg zijn.

Cricket is geen Engelse sport – het waren Belgen die het introduceerden in het Verenigd Koninkrijk. Feministen wereldwijd mogen België bedanken voor de uitvinding van de contraceptiepil. En het was een Belg, een priester nog wel, die uitpluisde dat het universum ontstaan is na een Big Bang; Georges Lemaître was zijn naam. Dankzij de Belgische cartograaf Gerardus Mercator bestaan er nu een wereldkaart die rekening houdt met de sferische vorm van de aarde – zonder België, geen Google Maps. En zonder de Belgische informaticus Robert Cailliau, geen internet! Asfaltwegen en elektrische trams? Ook uitgevonden in ons Belgenland, net zoals de eerste handelsbeurs ter wereld. Tenenschimmelspray – ja, wij weer. Niet erg sexy, maar het bewijst zijn nut.

U ziet, de Belgische vindingrijkheid is onuitputtelijk. Wij Belgen zijn gewoon krakken! Toch noemen onze zuiderburen ons smalend “les petits Belges”, denken Amerikanen dat België een stad is in Duitsland, en laten onze verworvenheden weinig bellen rinkelen bij de rest van de wereldbevolking. Iedereen kent wél onze grote kindervriend, die in zijn luxueuze cel à la carte dineert en klaagt over het beperkte Netflixaanbod. En de stad Molenbeek, waar onze ambitieuze Syriëstrijders vandaan komen.

Onbevlekt is onze reputatie dus niet – en ons koningshuis doet erg zijn best om deze bevlektheid in ere te houden. Met een monarch die de drie landstalen niet machtig is, maar wél resultaatgericht zijn zaad kan verspreiden. Om dan 45 jaar te doen alsof zijn neus bloedt. Of diens sympathieke zoon die zijn nederige prinsenwoonst laat verbouwen met centen voor defensie, ondertussen BV’s zwanger maakt, en ook doet alsof zijn neus bloedt. De appel valt niet ver van de Belgische boom.

En uiteraard was ik hem niet vergeten, ik zou niet durven: onze mediageile vaccinheld die zijn befaamdheid gebruikt om de communistische partij te promoten. Een man van het volk, en de natte droom van Klaus Schwab! De economie heeft hij volledig verkloot, ok, maar lévens dat die man gered heeft. We zouden een Mount Rushmore moeten hebben om zijn muil uit te beitelen. Gemaskerd, weliswaar. Er is een pandemie aan de gang.

En waarom toch al die kritiek op onze zes regeringen, die nochtans piekfijn op elkaar zijn afgestemd en stuk voor stuk hun nut bewijzen? En die honderdduizenden noeste ambtenaren dan, die het beste van zichzelf geven om ons belastinggeld op een zo productief mogelijke manier te verkwisten, elke werkdag opnieuw, van negen uur tot stipt kwart voor vijf?

Mensen zijn zo ondankbaar.

Aan zij die niet trots zijn op dit dierbaar land, zeg ik: u bent blind, onwaarderend, en onwaardig hier te vertoeven! Verhuis dan naar andere contreien, dan maakt u tenminste plaats voor anderen die staan te trappelen om hier te mogen wonen. En nu laat ik u – ik ga frieten met samoeraisaus eten en kijken wie vandaag de polo van Marc Van Ranst heeft betaald op Het Journaal.

Ethics

The Paradoxical Saint.

In my never-ending research on the Shoah, undoubtably one of the most horrific crimes ever perpetrated against mankind, and a crime still denied by some creatures who have the audacity to call themselves human beings, I came across an essay, written by Olivia M. Espin. This Cuban American psychologist and expert in feminist therapy described the incredible life story of Edith Stein. Because I had already encountered this name several times but never dug deeper into her persona, I decided to read it. The destiny of this Jewish woman was exceptional: Apart from being a pioneer in the battle for women’s rights, she had innovative philosophical and theological views and became one of the most brilliant metaphysicians of her time.

She willingly converted to Christianity and even chose to lead the cloistered and restricted life of a Carmelite nun, a choice that, at first, seems paradoxical for an academic with a liberated mind, but after careful analysis of her writings, turns out to having been the obvious path. She was deeply enamoured with Christian mysticism, but to the Nazis who arrested and deported her, she was just another Jew. Her existence, that was so fruitful on a scientific, spiritual, and social level, ended with her gruesome execution in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest murder machine in the Endlösung der Judenfrage. Four decades later, she was declared a martyr and a saint by the leader of the Catholic Church. Her life influenced the position of women in the Church and broader society, and her death in a hellish concentration camp changed the way many Christians regard the Holocaust and forced them to take responsibility for their treatment of the Jews throughout the centuries.

Edith was born in the year 1891, in Breslau, a German turned Polish city, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Her mother, Auguste Stein, was a devout Jewess who believed this was a sign God had outlined a special plan for her daughter. Two years after Edith’s birth, her father died of a sunstroke, compelling her mother to be the sole breadwinner of the family and to raise her seven children alone. Auguste took over the failing lumberyard of her late husband and turned it into a successful business. This convinced young Edith that the societal roles imposed upon women might inhibit the development of talents and skills that were then attributed to men.

The absence of her father thus resulted in her first feminist aspirations. It must, however, be said that Edith’s feminism should not be confounded with the western, men-despising, feminist ideology of today – just like her later philosophical reflections, it was essentialist at its core: she believed, as I do, that women have innate, biological characteristics that make them more likely than men to adapt roles that involve caring and empathy.

Growing up, Edith became what one could call the black sheep of her community: an unmarried student who was more interested in enriching her knowledge than raising a family, the latter being the obvious aim of young women at the beginning of the 20th century. Above that, to the disappointment of her mother, she called herself an atheist. Being far more attracted to libraries than to kitchens, she immersed herself in books. In 1911, only ten years after women were allowed to undertake academic studies, she gained admission to the University of Breslau and started studying psychology. Just like feminism, psychology in that era had a different form than it has today: It was practiced as the ‘philosophy of the mind’ rather than the objective analysis of the human psyche.

Dissatisfied by the information she accumulated, she started looking for truth elsewhere and began reading the work of Edmund Husserl, a German contemporary philosopher. Fascinated by his way of thinking, she travelled to Göttingen to study phenomenology under him. Phenomenology, according to Husserl, is the reflective study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. In other words, it is a philosophical method to explain our sensory perceptions and experiences as phenomena in the structures of the human mind, rather than objective realities. The goal is to obtain a description of the nature or the essence of a particular phenomenon.

In his last book, Beyond Order, the clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson illustrates the essence of phenomenology with the example of an envelope. According to non-relativists, an envelope is a piece of folded paper imprinted with ink molecules. To phenomenologists, an envelope is the carrier of a message that could bring joyful or tragic news, an object with the potential to alter the life course of the one who opens it. A pianoforte, then, is not merely a stringed, sound-producing object, it is a gateway to musical ecstasy for the virtuoso, or a source of frustration for the mediocre pianist. The premise of phenomenology is that reality consists of objects and events which will lead to one hundred realities in one hundred people’s eyes.

Five years later, Edith graduated summa cum laude with her thesis on the phenomenon of empathy, in which she suggested that empathy is a way of feeling oneself (sich einfühlen) into the experiences of the other person, rather than merely understanding the other person. By imagining the feelings of someone else, we come to a greater understanding of ourselves. Impressed with her achievement, Husserl hired her as his assistant – an uncommon position for a woman in that era.

After almost two years of tolerating the irritability and temper of her mentor, she was ready for her next step and asked Husserl to write a recommendation letter to apply for a faculty position in another university. He first declined, believing women should not have such ambitions. Eventually, he did change his mind and wrote a praising letter, but the male faculty members of the university did not want to collaborate with a woman, and in the atmosphere of the upcoming Nazi regime, certainly not a Jewish woman. Her thesis returned unread, which sparked Edith’s protest: she wrote a letter to the Ministry of Science, Art, and Education. A few months later, the minister himself ruled that “belonging to the female sex may not be seen as any hindrance to obtaining habilitation”. This feminist act of protest against sexism in academic circles obviously has had beneficial consequences for female graduates in Germany, up until the present day.

It was in this period of her life that Edith started to doubt her self-professed atheism. Husserl, himself a Jew, had converted to Lutheranism, as well as many other German-Jewish intellectuals at the end of the century. He said to his students:

“See my New Testament? It is always on my desk, but I never open it. I know once I open it and read it, I shall have to give up philosophy.”

His conversion was clearly not fueled by fear of persecution, but by conviction and true belief in Christ, which he achieved after a long period of meditation and self-reflection. (Many Jews, however, saw conversion to Christianity as what the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine called his “ticket of admission to European culture”. Another famous convert was the romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn, whose mesmerising music would later be banned by the Nazi regime. When Richard Strauss was asked to write new music for a theatrical production of William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, he answered that he could not improve Mendelssohn’s compositions). Max Scheler and Adolf Reinach, both important phenomenologists and teachers of Edith, also became Lutherans.

Intrigued by this voluntary collective conversion, called “the conversionary impulse” by historian Alan Levenson, Edith started reassessing her spiritual views, but it was her discovery of the autobiography of Teresa of Avila, not coincidentally a woman, that finally triggered her own conversion. Teresa was a Spanish mystic who revived Catholicism when Protestantism threatened to bring it down in the 16th century, and the reformer of the Carmelite Order for women, which was founded by Christians on Mount Carmel in Israel in the 12th century.

On the first of January 1922, Edith was baptised, unaware of the fact that Teresa von Avila was born into a family of conversos, and was of Jewish descent, just like her! Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, Associate Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and the past President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, says about Teresa that “no female author of similar status exists within the Jewish spiritual canon”.

After some unsuccessful attempts to finding an academic position, because she was a woman and because she had a Jewish name, Edith started teaching German literature at St. Magdalena College. In this Catholic girl’s high school in Speyer, she started writing about women’s education and issues. Her writings reveal her rebellion against the Nazi policies concerning women, but also against the ban on the ordination of women in the Catholic Church. Roman law and Judaism, she believed, lied at the core of the sexism she encountered in the Church – in synagogues, women were and still are segregated from men, while in life, they do not have the same religious responsibilities. In Jewish orthodoxy, a woman’s task is to raise a family, not to write commentaries on the Holy Script, and even if she did, she would not be taken seriously.

But just like Orthodox Judaism does not allow women to become rabbis, the Catholic Church, until today, does not allow women to become priests, arguing that the latter are imitators of Christ and should therefore be male. Christ himself would certainly disagree with this discrimination – his most intelligent and loyal follower, Mary from Magdala, was a woman – an unmarried one! Edith indeed wrote that she made the distinction between “the attitude expressed in dogma, in canon law, and by the hierarchy of the Church and that taken by Our Lord Himself”.

Despite this undeniably sexist rule, women in monasteries have, since Medieval times, been given the chance to develop their intellect and talents without enduring the hardship of being a wife and a mother.

This resulted in magnificent contributions in science and art. I think about Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 1179), the Benedictine abbess who was a true homo universalis and the founder of scientific natural history in Germany. Another abbess, Herrad von Landsberg (1130 – 1195) wrote the scientific pictorial compendium ‘Hortus deliciarum’ (the Garden of Delights). Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718 – 1799) was the first female mathematician to write several calculus textbooks – Pope Benedict XIV was so impressed he appointed her to the faculty at the University of Bologna. Maria Dalle Donne (1778 – 1842) was the first female doctor in medicine. The nun Lucy Agnes Carter (b. 1875) was the first woman to be awarded a PhD by the University of Glasgow, for a thesis on mitosis of the yellow fever mosquito. Sister Hillary Ross, a contemporary of Stein, was a microbiologist who established the first laboratory in Carville, … the list goes on. For Edith too, the context of monastic life, with the absence of a family to take care of and the daily routine of spiritual contemplation en meditation, represented a fertile ground for the growth of her intellect and inspiration.

1933 was the year Adolf Hitler was elected Reich Chancellor. It was also the year that Edith’s mother took her final breath, at the same moment Edith took her vows as a nun of the Carmelite order. Soon after, her sister Rosa Stein also converted and joined her. The rest of the Stein family, who planned to flee and do everything in their power to escape persecution by the Nazis, did not understanding the decisions of the two sisters: Living in a monastery under their Jewish names put both of them in great danger of being found by the Gestapo – a danger of which Edith was very aware. In ‘The Road to Carmel’, she wrote:

“Now on a sudden, it was luminously clear to me that once again God’s hand lay heavy on his people, and the destiny of this people was my own”.

That same year, Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State who would later become Pope Pius XII, signed the most controversial treaty in the history of the Catholic Church: The Reichskonkordat guaranteed the rights of the Church in Germany, on the condition that clergy would never interfere in political matters. Some historians say this deal legitimised Hitler’s dictatorship, while others say that the Vatican had no choice than to surrender to the Nazi regime, fearing that disobedience would lead to the murder of thousands of priests and nuns. As Harriette Sherwood, former Jerusalem correspondent of the Guardian, wrote:

“Critics of Pius XII have accused him of remaining silent during the Holocaust, never publicly condemning the persecution and genocide of Jews and others. His defenders say that he quietly encouraged convents and other Catholic institutions to hide thousands of Jews, and that public criticism of the Nazis would have risked the lives of priests and nuns”.

Was Pius XII a covert anti-Semite who knew about the horrors of the camps but stood aside and did nothing, or was his silence calculated to fuel the behind-the-scenes efforts of the Church to save Jews? In his book “Three Popes and the Jews”, the Israeli diplomat and historian Pinchas Lapide estimated that the Pope was instrumental in saving between 700 000 and 860 000 lives. In fact, the chief rabbi of Rome, Emilio Zolli, was so impressed with the efforts of the Pope on behalf of the Jews, that he later became a Catholic.

Clergy indeed saved Jews all over Europe. They did this through lobbying of Axis officials, providing Jews with false documents, and hiding them in churches, monasteries, convents, schools, and among families. In Belgium, the country I call home, Jean-Baptiste Janssens, the Superior General of the Jesuits, Dom Bruno, a Benedictine monk, and no less than 48 nuns were honoured as Righteous among the Nations by the state of Israel. Although she was not a nun, I would like to mention that in Poland, my own Catholic great-grandmother took in a Jewish girl, died her dark hair blonde so she would have a more Polish Catholic appearance, and pretended to be her mother, thereby risking her life and that of her own daughter, my grandmother.

Edith too deemed that praying alone was not sufficient and decided it was time for action. Her plan was to convince the Vatican to openly criticise and condemn Nazism and anti-Semitism. She requested an audience with Pope Pius XI and was then invited to participate in a semi-private audience with others. Thinking she wouldn’t be able to elaborately explain her points of view, she refused and instead wrote the Pope a personal letter:

“Everything that has happened and that is going on every day is down to a government that calls itself “Christian”. Not just Jews, but thousands of Catholic faithful in Germany, and I believe, throughout the world, have been waiting for Christs’ Church to speak out against this abuse, in the name of Christ, for weeks now. Isn’t the idolatry of race and State power, which the radio hammers into the minds of the population on a daily basis, open heresy? Isn’t this war of extermination against Jewish blood a violation of our Saviour, of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of the Apostles? Is it not in complete contrast to the behaviour of our Lord the Redeemer, who even prayed for his persecutors on the cross?”

To her great disappointment, he replied with his spiritual blessing, without addressing the content of her writing.

In 1938, Edith’s superiors decided Germany had become too dangerous, and sent her to the Carmelite Convent in the Dutch city Echt. Two years later, Dutch priests started preaching against the Nazi regime during mass. The Nazis, who had invaded the Netherlands in 1940, offered a bargain: if the Church remained silent about the deportation, they would not deport converted Jews. The Lutheran Church accepted this bargain, but the bishops of the Catholic Church refused. On Sunday, the 26th of July 1940, priests in all Dutch Catholic churches read a statement fiercely condemning the deportation and treatment of the Jews.

Outraged by this event, the Nazis retaliated. On Sunday, the 2nd of August 1942, as the Carmelite Sisters of Echt gathered for meditation, the doorbell rang. Members of the Schutzstaffel, the back-uniformed elite corps of the Nazi Party, demanded Edith Stein to exit the building within 10 minutes. At the moment of her arrest, the convent was surrounded with neighbours who loudly voiced their opposition. They saw Edith taking Rosa’s hand and saying:

“Rosa, come, let us go, for our people”.

In an article published in Time in 1987, David Brand remarks: “In those words rests the very paradox of Sister Teresa: Were her people Jews or Catholics?”. Edith herself did not seem to regard her views as paradoxical: Judaism and Christianity, to her, were not opposing, but complementing religions. How could it not be, if Jesus himself was a devout Jew who claimed not one letter of the Torah should be changed?

The two nuns were then pushed in a van and taken to Westerbork, a building complex that was initially constructed by the Dutch government to shelter Jewish refugees fleeing the enemy. Now, it was used by the enemy as a transit camp where thousands of Jews were awaiting their final transport to their merciless killing. They were assigned to barrack 36, where Edith wrote to her Mother Superior in what would be her last letter, asking for their identity cards, warm underwear, a toothbrush, a rosary, and her breviary.

A few days later, like millions of other Jews, Edith and Rosa Stein suffocated in a gas chamber in the concentration camp of Auschwitz.

The few days before Edith was murdered would spiritually be the most glorious days of her life. After the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, survivors of the camp testified that Edith had taken care of the children like an angel. She had washed them, combed their hair, and tried to find food for them. She had comforted people in agony, and astonishingly, had not seemed to be in agony herself. There is indeed a psychological benefit in taking care of others: it takes away the focus on the self. She did not surrender to her fate in fear and weakness, but rather, accepted it as an opportunity to helping others, in dignity and strength. The darkness of her fate was conquered by the fire of her love.

Those who have read the New Testimony cannot help but notice the striking resemblance between the life endings of Edith Stein and Yeshua Immanuel ben Yossef: Like him, she anticipated her arrest, she did not revolt against those who deported her, she remained silent, and she did not attempt to escape, even though she was offered help by a journalist who managed to contact her in the transit camp.

Christianity teaches that suffering is inevitable, and that each one of us has his own cross to carry in life. But the good news is, that our suffering needn’t be arbitrary and useless – we can choose to make it meaningful. In other words, if we live and suffer for a greater good, our pain becomes redemptive, for others and ultimately ourselves. Like Albert Einstein, the genius physicist who believed the most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical, said:

“Only a life lived in the service of others is worth living.”

Sister Teresia Benedicta a Cruce believed that, by imitating the man she believed to be the Messiah, she could carry the cross God had chosen her. She wrote:

“The science of the cross can only be obtained when you personally experience the Cross thoroughly.”

The story of Edith Stein, however, does not end here. In 1987, Pope John Paul II, whom I consider the most admirable Church leader in the history of Catholicism because of his decisive role in the fall of European communism, his great efforts to reconcile Christians and Jews, and the spiritual depth of his literary oeuvre, esteemed that Edith’s murder was a direct consequence of the rebellion of Dutch priests, and should therefore be beatified as a martyr. Later, a very sick girl suddenly healed after her family had prayed to Edith, which is considered a miracle and led to her canonisation – decisions that did not go down well with the Jewish community. If she died because she was Jewish, how could she be a Christian martyr and a saint?

Edith was indeed murdered because she was a Jewess, and she would not have been murdered if she was a Christian by birth. But her attitude towards the horror of the Shoah and the deeds she committed in her last days were inspired by her faith in Christ and were so extraordinary they attained the level of what Christians would call sacred.

May Edith Stein, who made the world a better place for women, for philosophers, and for victims of terror, who inspired others with her kindness and her vision, who shone her light on the darkest event in modern history, after her fantastic intellectual and spiritual journey on Earth, rest in peace, by the hand of God, whom she loved so much.

“Living the concealed life and still experience the glory of the light. Being peaceful and nevertheless full of warmth.” – E.S.

Ethics Religion The Holy Land

Murdered Messiah.

On the 15th of November 2017, the Saudi minister of culture purchased a painting for the impressive sum of 475.4 million dollars at Christy’s auction gallery, New York, rendering it the most expensive chef d’oeuvre sold in the history of art. Its creator was the 15th century homo universalis Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, who entitled it ‘Salvator Mundi’. The masterpiece indeed represents the Saviour of the World, dressed in an anachronistic blue Renaissance dress, holding a crystal orb in his left hand and observerving the spectator with a hypnotic gaze that is so emblematic of Da Vinci’s portraits.

The protagonist of the painting, often referred to as the male Mona Lisa, is of course Jesus Christ, arguably the most famous human of all times, and hence not in need of an introduction. Nearly every inhabitant of every continent on this planet has heard about the Nazarene who stirred up the Promised Land with his groundbreaking ideas that were met with amazement by some and disbelief by others, and who was crucified for proclaiming a message that was apparently too inconvenient for the commanders of his execution.

Not only is this Jewish man the reason that today, 2.4 billion people call themselves Christian, whether they identify as Roman-Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, Anglican, Pentecostal, Evangelical, Presbyterian, or Apostolic, his birthday was also accepted as the universal time standard by the entire world, including Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and atheists.

Everyone is familiar with the story of Jesus’ life, but we all have different answers to the question who he really was. Innumerable books have been written by people – academics, mystics, theologists, popes, atheists, jews, gentiles – who searched for answers to this question.

Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher from Jewish descent who was rejected by his community and mocked by the rabbis of his days, called Jesus ‘the Greatest Philospher’. Another great thinker, Carl Jung, called him ‘the Ultimate Hero’. Friedrich Nietzsche, often portrayed as an anti-Christian provocateur, thought Christ was the embodiment of the lack of resentment, possessing the innermost light, and being utterly powerful, for only a powerful person can eradicate sin and guilt with self-sacrifice.

What is certain, is that Jesus was, and still remains, a polarizing figure. He was immensely admired by thousands of his followers, but also utterly despised by those who felt threatened by him. He had friends who would kill for him, but also enemies who wanted to kill him. Pivotal figures in history tended to trigger radically opposed emotions: they were simultaneously adored and detested. Christianity is the largest, but sadly, also the most mocked religion in the world.

Equally indisputable is Jesus’ Jewish identity. His mother Mary was a Jew, as were all his disciples and followers during his life, and all the people who spread his message in the first two centuries after his death. Some of those first Christian Jews, who still practiced Judaism but believed Jesus was their Saviour, were delivered to the Romans by other Jews, and brutally executed for their conviction. These Christian Jews were true martyrs: innocent people who were murdered for refusing to deny their faith, without having murdered others.

Antisemites who argue that Jews killed Christ, should be reminded of the fact that the first Christians were Jewish. They risked their lives spreading his message, and without their deep faith and bravery, Christianity would not exist today. Today, Jews who believe Jesus still exist – there are about one million of them and their number is growing. They call themselves Jews for Jesus in America, and One for Israel in Israel. Their founders, Moishe Rosen and Eitan Bar, argue Jesus is the fullfillment of all messianic prophecies and criteria in the Torah.

Apart from these Messianic Jews, Jesus is unknown and mostly rejected by his own people. To them, he is an outcast. Billions of others see him as the greatest spiritual leader to have walked the face of the Earth, for whom museums have been filled with thousands of magnificent paintings and sculptures, about whom hundreds of movies have been made, for whom majestic cathedrals, churches, monasteries, hospitals, and universities have been built all over the world throughout millenia.

Jesus’ disciples and others called him ‘rabbi’ or ‘rabbuni’, meaning ‘our teacher’. Little did they know the words and deeds of their teacher would radically change the course of history. And yet some historians say Jesus wasn’t more than – a rabbi. Others claim he was one of the many self-proclaimed prophets of the time, allegedly performing miracles. Jesus did prophesize events like the destruction of the Second Temple and even his own death and resurrection. Foretelling the future, however, was certainly not the essence of his existence, nor were the many miracles he performed. Some theologians bagatellize these miracles, arguing many others accomplished similar healings and other supernatural acts before him.

No other biblical story, however, mentions a prophet who brought the deceased back to life and who even conquered his own death. These miracles are absolutely singular and make Jesus unique. The Pentateuchal prophets have split seas, cured people from leprosy, extracted water from rocks, and struck entire armies blind, but none of them defeated the grave. Another distinctive aspect of Jesus is that he performed miracles not by invoking the name of God, but through his own authority.

Perhaps Jesus was a skilled orator with political ambitions, who had to be removed because he became a threat to the establishment. This, however, would imply he desired status and power – intentions he never showed or expressed. Those hungry for power surround themselves with powerful friends, while Jesus frequented individuals who were deemed poor or sinful, like fishermen, tax collectors, and adulterous women. Jesus also did not indulge in earthly riches; he often slept outside, under the naked sky. He did not assemble an army to wage war, and he never suggested conspiring against the Roman authority.

“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” – Mark 12:7

That sentence right there, is the separation of Church and state, fifteen centuries before the birth of John Locke. Perhaps Jesus’ purpose did not lie in conquering lands, but in minds. Was his intention to create a new religion? He certainly did criticize the religious authorities, calling out the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees:

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the Kingdom of Hevane in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, not will you let those enter who are trying to.” – Matthew 23:13

However, another of his statements clarifies he did not repudiate the Torah:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law of the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. Until heaven and earth pass away, not a yud, not a dot, will pass from the Law untill all is accomplished.” – Matthew 5:17-18

By underlining the importance of even the smallest strokes of the Hebrew alphabet, Jesus made clear his intention was not to rebel against the Mosaic law. The Hebrew letter ‘yud’, resembling the Latin letter ‘i,’ indeed looks like a tiny stroke, floating above the other letters, as if it conveyed a transcendental symbolism. The most fundamental Jewish concepts start with a yud: Yehudim (Jews), the Holy Land (Yisrael), the Holy City (Yerushalaim), and obviously, the most important word, uttered by God Himself to Moses, through a burning bush: Yahweh, His sacred name meaning ‘I am that I am’.

Given this pattern, it would be plausible that the name of the Saviour the Yehudim were waiting for, would also begin with this important letter. Which is the case: Jesus is the Latinization of the Hebrew name Yeshua.

A closer look at the etymology of Yeshua reveals that it means ‘Yah (God) is Salvation’. The messianic character of Yeshua’s name raises the inevitable question: was he the long-awaited Messiah? Was his the anointed one, highly anticipated by his people, oppressed under Roman rule?

When reading the Bible, I was surprised to find out that even the name of the prophet who predicted specific details about the coming of the Messiah, begins with a yud: Yesayah. He said:

”Behold, a young maiden shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” – Yesayah 7:14

Seven hundred years later, his prophecy seemed fulfilled: a young woman named Moriah gave birth to a boy she called Yeshua Immanuel. (Moriah, according to the New Testimony, was a virgin. Jewish theologues find this theologically disputable, as the Hebrew word עַלמָה (almah) means young maiden, not virgin. However, one must keep in mind young maidens, meaning girls who had a marriable age, were supposed to be chaste.
The Annunction story, in which the archangel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear the Son of God, confirms this miracle:

“Mary said to the angel: How can this be, since I am a virgin? The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy, he will be called the son of God.”

Jesus never ostentatiously proclaimed to be the Messiah, but identified as such indirectly, in front of a limited number of people. In a Nazarean synagogue, he read out loud the following verses out of the scroll of prophet Yesaiah:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering the sight of the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour”. And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” – Luke 4:18-21.

Being born out of a virgin mother is another thing of Jesus’ uniqueness. Whether he was a mortal, a divinely inspired man, the son of God, or God Himself can be endlessly debated, but why he was among us could not be expressed more clearly than the verses above do. They contain the essence of Jesus’ mission for humanity: to help and heal people, which is exactly what his actions reflected, but more importantly, to convey a message of good news.

God is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. The story of humanity begins and ends with God, who is Good. In the beginning, something good happened: God the Creator gave us life. In the end, something good will happen, too: God the Saviour who will save us. That is the message of the ‘gospel’, the old English translation of the the Greek εὐαγγέλιον, meaning ‘good news’!

This good news was received with great enthusiasm. Thousands of his contemporaries, Jews and non-Jews alike, travelled lenghty distances in perilous circumstances to come listen to the public speeches of the man they believed to be the Messiah. His charismatic personality and the revolutionary character of his message made him known far beyond the borders of Israel.

However, not all members of his community embraced this message. Many called him a false prophet and ascribed Jesus’ supernatural powers to the Devil.

“But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, “it is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons.” – Matthew 12:24

Incensed by his actions and ideas, they even attempted stoning him on several occasions. Paricularly infuriating was Jesus’ concept of God. He described a God who was forgiving rather than vindictive, a God who was a caring father (he referred to God as his אבא, abba, which means father) endlessly compassionate towards our suffering, rather than an unrelenting judge punishing us for every breach of His law (Jesus himself broke the sabbath several times!), a God who loved all humans equally without exception, including goyim. God was no longer an entity on which humans could bestow their fallacies and shortcomings, a jealous God who demanded adoration, obedience, and bloody sacrifices, but a Being whose Love for His creation was so infinite, it could hardly be grasped by the limited human brain.

He claimed that in the world to come, the first shall be the last, and the last the first. Here on Earth, he taught, the words coming out of our mouths are far more important than the foods we put in it. He called out the hypocrisy of those who rigorously applied the religious rules while being deceitful and dishonest towards others. Praying to God in public for everyone to see, is not piety but vanity – instead, he suggested, lock yourself up in a room and establish a private relationship with your Creator. That relationship is more important than any other relationship you have, even the one with your family. Don’t judge too soon, for you will be judged with the measures you use so judge others. Don’t lie, it is the truth that will set you free. And before throwing accusations or stones at someone, you better make sure you are free of sin.

“Hypocrite! First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” – Matthew 7:5

His most mind-boggling message, however, was related to love:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” – Matthew 5:43-44

It is easy to love your own family, your neighbours, and your friends, but try loving your enemy! The latter suggestion inspired great future leaders like Martin Luther King, who said:

“Love has within it a redemptive power, that eventually transforms individuals (…) Keep loving people, even though they are mistreating you. By the power of your love, they will breakdown under the load. Love builds up and is creative. Hate tears down and is destructive. That is why Jesus said: love your enemies.”

This concept was difficult to accept for a people who were violently oppressed by the Romans and awaited the coming of a Messiah who would revolt against them and relieve them from this oppression. In their minds, the Messiah would be a mighty military leader, saving the Jews from their enemies, not a man who told them to pray for them!

The Messiah they expected was a political Messiah who would fight, be victorious, and rule over an earthly Jewish kingdom, not a spiritual Saviour who would tell them the Kingdom of God is within, and they should pray for those who persecute you. Which is exactly what he did during his agony on the cross:

“Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” – Luke 23:34

It is noteworthy that despite being hailed as the King of the Jews by his followers, Jesus never emphasized his Jewish identity, nor did he advocate for the conversion of non-Jews to Judaism. He offered his help and healing to all who sought it, regardless of their background. Even Gentiles were not excluded, much to the chagrin of the Pharisees who regarded them as inferior and impure. The word ‘pharisee’ comes from the Hebrew ‘Perushim’, the separated ones – those who avoid contact with goyim at all costs, making them the embodiment of the classical psychological us – versus – them theory.

It was those Pharisaic ecclesiastics who made a deal with Judas Iscariot (note that even Judas’ name, יהודה, starts with a yud!), who agreed to betray Jesus with a kiss for thirty pieces of silver – as predicted by Jesus during the Last Supper.

“When Jesus had said this, he was troubled in spirit and testified, ‘Very truly I tell you, one of you is going to betray me.” – John 13:21.

The Pharisees brought Jesus to the Romans and asked them to crucify him for blasphemy and claiming to be the Messiah. Despite Jesus’ awareness of the outcomes of everything he said and did during his ministry – he predicted his betrayal, arrestation, and crucifixion during the Last Supper – he did not try to flee. When confronted with the accusations and questions of the Jewish Counsel, King Herod, and Pontius Pilates, who all wanted him to perform miracles on command, he did nothing and remained almost entirely silent.

In charge with the ultimate decision over Yeshua’s life or death was the latter, who was the Roman governor of Judea at the time. He washed his hands with water in front of the crowd, saying the innocent man’s blood would not be on his hands. The crowd responded:

“His blood shall be on us and our children!” – Matthew 27:25.

Pilate’s decision to authorize Jesus’ execution should be understood within the political and social context of the time. His primary concern was maintaining order and stability in the province of Judea, prone to unrest and rebellion. The Jewish chief priests viewed Jesus as a threat to their authority and sought his execution on charges of crimes he did not commit: blasphemy and claiming to be a king. The latter offense could be seen as challenging Roman rule.

Pilate likely saw Jesus as a potential instigator of unrest but also recognized that Jesus’ claims did not pose a direct threat to Roman authority. However, faced with pressure from the Pharisees and the threat of a potential riot, Pilate chose to appease the Jewish leaders and maintain order by authorizing Jesus’s crucifixion.

His decision was a politically expedient compromise to preserve his own position, not a reflection of Jesus’ actual guilt or innocence. But it was Jesus’ own people who betrayed him, turned him in, and insisted he should be murdered. Pontius Pilatus indeed washed his hands in innocence, but the Pharisees did the same thing by handing Yeshua over to the goyim to crucify him and rid themselves of the responsibility of the crime they demanded but did not execute themselves.

In the 33rd year of his life, on a Friday at 9 o’ clock in the morning, Yeshua was nailed to the cross on Golgotha, a rocky hill outside the city walls of Jerusalem, on which he suffered an excruciatingly painful death, exhaling his last breath at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. (I can’t help but notice the abundance of 3’s – even 9 is a multiplication of 3 – and associate it with the Holy Trinity, the most mysterious concept in Christianity.) Only his mother Mary, his close compagnon Mary Magdalene, a few other women, and his youngest disciple John, were courageous enough to show their faces at the execution on Golgotha. The rest of the disciples were hiding, terrified of undergoing the same fate.

Jesus’ dead body was taken from the cross and layed in the arms of his weeping mother – a scene that was carved into stone by thousands of sculptures. A replica of Michelangelo’s pieta adorned the hall of the Catholic school I was raised in. I remember staring at Mary’s face and imagining how she must have felt when she saw all the blood and wounds on the tortured body of her son. The prophet Isaiah prophesized Jesus’ execution among two criminals and burial in the tomb of a wealthy man:

“He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth.” – Isaiah 53:9

On the third day, which marked the beginning of the Jewish week, it was a woman who discovered Jesus’ tomb empty. Christine Pedotti, author of the book ‘Jesus, the man who loved women’ posits that this detail lends credence to the authenticity of Jesus’ biography, suggesting that since women were not held in as high esteem as men during that time, it would be unlikely for the Gospel authors to attribute such a significant event to a woman.

Jesus’ treatment of women was revolutionary: he regarded them as equal human beings capable of engaging in meaningful conversations, rather than relegating them to domestic roles such as cooking and cleaning. The first person to see the ressurected Jesus was Mary Magdalene. He later appeared to all of his disciples, and a crowd of 500 people. Jesus had performed his greatest miracle: he stood up from the dead.

I still cannot grasp how my religion teachers in high school failed to explain the deeper meaning of the cross and the gigantic philosophical, moral, and spiritual value of Jesus’ life. Luckily, entire libraries have been filled with books of brilliant thinkers, like Erich Fromm, who tackled the subject of Christ from a psycho-analytical viewpoint, Emmet Fox, who explained the hidden meanings of every recorded sermon in the New Testimony, and the contemporary psychologist and author Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, who explained his views of Christ in his Biblical Series.

The life of Christ is a mindblowing metaphor of the human condition. Every moment of his life, every figure he encounters, every aspect of his existence, reflects something that occurs in all of our lives. You, like Christ, have a mission to fulfill on Earth. That mission is the cross you must carry. Your path will be strewn with obstacles and problems, that will inevitably result in suffering. In that sense, Yeshua’s story is universal and eternal: it has not only happened before, but it is happening right now, and will always happen. What happened to him, will metaphorically happen to all of us.

Just like the Sanhedrin despised Christ for speaking a truth they didn’t understand, some people in your life will despise you, too. Just like Judas betrayed Christ, some alleged friends will betray you, with the same proverbial kiss. Just like Peter and nearly all the other disciples abandoned Christ when he was crucified, some will abandon you, when you most need them. But just like Mary Magdalene, his mother, and his beloved disciple John always loved Christ and never left his side, some will love you unconditionally, and follow you every step of the way. Their love makes your life worth living.

Just like Yeshua chased away the Devil in the desert, you must conquer your own demons, acknowledge your dark side, face your suffering, heal your pain, and through this all, strive to become a better version of yourself. That is your ultimate purpose, the very reason you exist.

You can also choose not to better yourself – you are a being with free will. But if you do, and if you manage to get through the difficult times with faith in God, or Love, or Goodness, or Righteousness, or whatever it is you believe in, you will be transformed, and you will have become your own Messiah.

The old you will die, and the new You will resurrect.

The true meaning of Jesus’ life, whether one believes he was a rabbi, a politician, an instigator of unrest, a spiritual master, the Messiah, or the Word of God incarnated, is the promise he gave us. Anyone who follows him as the Truth, the Way, and the Life, will be saved.

I want to finish this essay with a brilliant comment I read somewhere on the internet:

He had no servants, yet they called Him Master.
He had no degree, yet they called Him Teacher.
He had no medicines, yet they called Him Healer.
He had no army, yet kings feared Him.
He won no military battles, yet He conquered the world.
He did not live in a castle, yet they called Him Lord.
He ruled no nations, yet they called Him King.
He committed no crime, yet they crucified Him.

Ethics Philosophy

The Futile Quest for Happiness.

Post author By Xela
Post date July 12, 2021
1,111 Comments on The Futile Quest for Happiness.

The suffering of man has many faces. The silent genocides of Christians in the Middle East. African tribes murdering each other. North Koreans being tortured by their own government in re-education camps. Emaciated Indians dying from starvation. Prisoners in all countries harboring bitter remorse for their crimes. Even the privileged of this world do not escape suffering. Children, born with a disability. Victims of car accidents, living limbless in a wheelchair. Elders, facing loneliness. Rich or poor, young or old, white or black – everyone suffers, and even those who have never experienced traumatic events will one day be confronted with the loss of loved ones and notice the ravages of time on their bodies. The flower does not realise that it is withering, but the human being does.

Ludwig Van Beethoven, arguably the greatest musical revolutionary of all time, saw the initial tinnitus he struggled with gradually degenerate into absolute deafness and realised that one day, he would no longer hear his own compositions. His frustration made him flirt with suicide. The Post-Impressionist master Vincent Van Gogh dreamed of founding an artistic brotherhood that would transform the art world but died unappreciated, poor and depressed. As her excruciating nerve pain worsened, the paintings of Frieda Kahlo expressed more sadness and grief. Everyone goes through their personal hell.

Hell is not some secret, far-away Kingdom of Darkness where sinners burn in eternal flames. It is right here on Earth, and it is called war, sorrow, agony, disease, wrath, malice, chaos. To the existentialist thinker Jean-Paul Sartre, hell means ‘the others’: “L’enfer, c’est les autres”. Interaction with others is inevitable, but others do not always behave the way we want them to. Their tongues lisp harsh words that linger in our minds for years to come, and they do things that we rather bury in the catacombs of our subconscious. And the more intelligent we are, the more aware we become of the dark side of human nature. It is not a big surprise that geniuses often become misanthropic.

However, labeling others as the sole source of our own suffering insinuates that we ourselves are perfect, which is proof of a great lack of self-reflection. Our words and actions have hurt others as well. Sometimes, we would pay a fortune to turn back the clock, to undo the actions we took, to unspeak the words we spoke. One thing is certain: man suffers and makes his fellow man suffer.

“Homo homini lupus est”, said the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus. The Romans did not shy away from some cruelty towards their fellowmen. Prisoners of war served as slaves or gladiators who had to fight their family members in collossea. Millenia later, Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, confirmed Plautus’ statement in his book ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’: “Men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”

Man is not only a wolf with men, but also, and above all, with his fellow earthlings, the animals. We are the greatest cause of their indescribable suffering, a suffering of a magnitude that most people do not understand. We put them in tiny cages, stuff them with hormones, stomp them to the slaughterhouse, brutally slaughter them, and eat them, every single day. 60 billion (!) innocent farm animals per year have a miserable existence from the day of their birth, unaware that the day of their death has already been set. Elephants, sharks, monkeys, bears, crocodiles, and numerous other species are massively massacred for their teeth, flesh, skin, fins, and legs. In the Hell of the animals, we are the Devil. We call our victims ‘beasts’, but the real beasts are us. Man’s suffering does not make him more empathetic towards creatures he considers inferior.

Thus, the greatest source of suffering in the world is man’s conscious cruelty. The cruelty of wild carnivores is unconscious and instinctive, aimed at survival; however, homo sapiens sapiens is the only creature on Earth that makes deadly weapons, dumps toxic filth into rivers, cuts down forests, invents virus-creating food systems, builds expensive spacecrafts to reach Mars while millions of people have no fresh drinking water, and tells lies… because he can, and because he deliberately wants to. The existence of Evil is the price man pays for his free will.

Man suffers, and yet he is cruel – we feel passion but no compassion. As long as we are unable to recognise our own suffering in the suffering of others, be it humans, animals, or the planet, as long as we lack compassion, suffering will be an absolute certainty, a premise of life, an axiom of the human condition. Feeling another’s pain without experiencing it yourself is the prerequisite to reducing our pain. Compassion is the antithesis of egoism and the conditio sine qua non for our spiritual and moral growth. It is the golden key to the door to inner peace. But he who does not find the key cannot open the door.

A person who did find this key is Mr. Eddie Jakubowicz, who shared his touching biography with the world on his 100th birthday and won the “Happiest Man on Earth” award for it. Eddie knows what suffering means. As a German of Jewish descent, he always felt “German first, German second, and Jewish at home”. In 1938, Eddie, his parents, and his little sister were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Months later they were put on a train to Auschwitz, the largest extermination camp of occupied Europe. During this ride, they managed to escape through the train floor. They fled to Belgium, where they lived in hiding in a cellar. In 1943 they were arrested again and taken back to Auschwitz. His entire family was gassed in what he calls his “Hell on Earth,” but Eddie survived.

Every day of the two subsequent years, Eddie witnessed the ultimate embodiment of Evil. Every moment, he saw and feared death. What the nazis did to the prisoners was so atrocious that some still don’t believe him when he describes it. In 1945, in anticipation of the advancing Allies, the camp guards staged a death march to clear the camp and destroy evidence. During this march, Eddie miraculously managed to escape into the wilderness.

After the end of the war, he struggled with intense grief, despair, and anger. One day, however, he made the heroic decision not to wallow in misery, but to be the kindest man he could possibly be, with every person he encountered. Then he met Flore, the love of his life, and proposed. Today they have been married for more than 70 years. When he talks about their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren with his disarming smile, I see gratitude in his eyes. And that gratitude is a choice that makes him happy.

Today, Eddie calls himself the happiest man on Earth. He did what Aleksander Solszenycin and Elie Wiesel talked about: everything can be taken from us, except for one thing: the freedom to choose our attitude in any situation, to choose our response to any event. Do not let the evil of others corrupt your soul. Only then are you a victim! Eddie has turned the tables: his love for the world has conquered the hatred of the nazis.

The world is not divided into those who oppress and those who are oppressed. This simplistic view, imposed by cultural Marxist academics, might be politically correct but is not correct, as it de-emphasises the infathomable complexity of the human psyche. We are all aggressors and victims of each other, we all have a nazi and a camp inmate in us. Victor Frankl, a psychologist who also survived Auschwitz, wrote in his book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ that he could discern evil in some prisoners – some capos displayed more sadism than the nazis themselves – and goodness in some guards.

Yes, others hurt us, but to accuse ‘les autres’ as the sole cause of our malheur is to ignore the nazi in ourselves! According to clinical psychologist and intellectual giant Jordan B. Peterson, there is only one lesson the Holocaust should have taught us: The nazi is you. If you had lived at that time as a German under Hitler, you would have been an active participant in the horror, or at least a silent spectator, because everyone was. That you would have been a hero risking his life to save Jews is statistically highly unlikely. A statement that makes you rather uncomfortable – you know he is right, but you hate to admit that you probably would have been as cowardly as the rest, and you wouldn’t have done anything. Inaction is also a sin, and millions of Europeans were collectively guilty of it, less than a century ago.

Carl Jung, student of Sigmund Freud, called the dark side in each of us our “shadow,” and Adolf Hitler the embodiment of the shadow of the German people. The Shoah is then the symbol of the collective shadow of humanity, of the demons that hide in everyone. “I’m not a devil!”, many would cry out – but the dead animal on their plate thought otherwise.

A shadow is something that is cast behind you and that you are not aware of. But it is there, and it follows you everywhere. The awareness of the existence of our shadow is the catalyst of the moral and spiritual metamorphosis that our soul desires and can only be brought about through profound introspection. Don’t waste time trying to change others. Find your own darkness, acknowledge it, and then change yourself: thát is the real purpose of existence. It is the most arduous challenge in the world, but if you succeed, your surroundings will be blinded by your brilliant light and cannot do otherwise than evolve with you.

Do not chase happiness but instead, strive to transform and improve the self. The pursuit of happiness is senseless. Happiness is not the goal of life, but a by-product of the search for meaning and virtue and goodness. Because only a life that signified something, to us and to others, was worth living.

I end my reflection on suffering and happiness with a quote from a letter Beethoven wrote to his brothers some time before his death: “It is my wish that your life will be better and more carefree than the one I have had. Recommend virtue to your children, only that brings happiness, not money, I speak from experience. It was virtue that kept me going in misery, besides my art I owe it that I did not end my life with suicide. Farewell, and love each other”.

Ethics Fine Arts Philosophy

The Truth about Beauty.

Being surrounded by beauty in my habitat is indispensable to me. The sunlit room I wake up in, the antique art books that fill my shelves, the pearly white amaryllis that blooms near the window, the view of the neo-Roman church I see when sipping my morning macchiato, the wing piano on which I practice arpeggios and the arpeggios I practice on my wing piano, up until the golden pen I sign letters with – all these expressions of beauty contribute to my happiness. Beauty is important to me, and therefore abundant in my world. Even the sleek design of my toilet brush receives compliments from visitors. Life is just too short for unappealing toilet brushes, and if you must engage in activities as primitive as discharging your excrements, you might as well have an aesthetical experience.

My love for beautiful things stems not from materialism, but rather from a profound appreciation of the aesthetical. I do not buy beautiful things for the sake of possessing them but for contemplating and appreciating them, which gives me serenity and joy. The opposite is true, as well: spending time in an environment that lacks beauty makes me feel miserable. And as befits an aesthete worthy of her name, I detest ugliness, in all its forms.

And so does Immanuel Kant, the first philosopher to have written a systematic work about aesthetics, the philosophy of beauty and art, man’s ultimate expression of beauty. He and other great thinkers like Baumgarten, Locke, and the contemporary Sir Roger Scruton, have reflected upon what beauty means, why we are the only creatures on the planet consciously craving and creating it, and how it can be meaningful in the human existence. They all seemed to agree on the fact that the perception of beauty triggers emotions that are a prerequisite to our mental wellbeing.

So, in trying to define beauty, one could say it is something we perceive to be harmonious and well juxtaposed, whether it is colours and lines in photography, shapes in abstract paintings, notes in music, phrases in poems, or bricks in architecture. But most of all, beauty is something we feel – the Greek word αἰσθητικός (aesthetikos) means sentient, feeling. Try listening to Mendelssohn’s Spring Song played by Daniel Barenboim and not feel overwhelmingly joyous. Or listening to David Fray play Franz Schubert’s third moment musicale for piano, which triggers a variety of emotions in me: careful joy impregnated with a sense of patience and a slight melancholy. It is so beautiful that I hold my breath not to miss one single note, composed by the man who called himself the saddest man on earth. Schubert is proof that not only joy, but also sadness can be the creator of a beauty so great, words become insufficient to describe it. Nothing concrete happens to make us feel that joy or sadness, and yet those abstract, ephemerous notes make us feel real emotions in all their intensity. The beauty of art lies in its capacity to frame human emotions, and in identifying with them, we get a deep insight in the human condition and recognise ourselves.

Beauty is indeed a metaphysical trait of a physical object, a feeling. But not everyone feels the same when looking at or listening to the same thing. Our eyes and ears indeed all judge differently – I might think Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia is a horrendous building, while others perceive it as the epitome of architectural beauty. We westerners tend to find slender people attractive, while inhabitants of other continents admire curvier figures. And quite incomprehensibly, not everyone appreciates the genius of Mozart, some find more excitement in jumping up and down to the frightening screeches of heavy metal singers. Beauty is clearly a relative concept, dependent on the preferences of the individual who is molded by his époque, environment, and culture. Beauty, we have been taught, is to be found in the eye of the beholder.

Cultural relativists go even further in this line of thinking, and say that everything humans create is equally beautiful, that the naïve, chaotic scribbles of a child are as beautiful as the masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or that Ludwig van Beethoven’s sublime oeuvre is on the same level as the tastelessness and vulgarity of twerking strippers on MTV, rapping with two-syllable words about sex and money, blasphemously identifying as artists. In as much as this modernist definition of beauty might be popular and politically correct, it certainly is not satisfactory. If anything can be judged beautiful by anyone, nothing is ugly, and the word beauty becomes void and meaningless.

The vision that all beauty is taste-dependent, is also disputed by the observation that some features are judged as beautiful by everyone, regardless of their surroundings. Several academic studies indicate that all the infants involved in the research had a strong visual attraction to certain facial characteristics, like big eyes, a small nose, full female cheeks, a square male jawline, and facial symmetry. Infants have not yet been programmed by societal influence, suggesting that the role biology plays in our response to beauty might be bigger than we think. If certain facial features are universally appraised as attractive, perhaps there is a beauty that transcends subjective perception, and that is undeniably, intuitively beautiful to everyone it confronts. Like a symmetrical face, but also a peach golden afternoon sky, a majestic waterfall, or a tree, this wonderfully complex, fruit-bearing, oxygen-producing structure with an abundance of leaves in a billion shades of green, growing from earth to heaven in Fibonacci sequences. This is the Absolute Beauty discussed by the aesthetes: the beauty that contains absolute, mathematical truth.

We did not invent mathematical laws, but discovered them in nature, the cradle of beauty and truth, and therefore our greatest source of inspiration, creatively and scientifically. The fairness and wisdom are there, waiting to be unraveled by humanity. Ugliness and ignorance, on the other hand, are an anomaly, a deviation from the natural standard, a work in progress. In distinguishing the beauty from the ugliness, we recognise the truths among the falsehoods, and in understanding that the truth is superior to the falsehoods, we can extend our judgments of the rational to the moral sphere, and determine what is right and what is wrong. To be good, we must first know what is good. This, then, must be the most complete definition of beauty:

Beauty contains Truth that leads to Goodness.

Aristotle understood this link and underlined the importance of teaching children to play an instrument, as that would also educate them ethically, and virtuosity would lead to greater virtue.The interconnection of those three elements makes me believe that Earth and humans are supposed to be beautiful, wise, and good, and that they are the ultimate ideals man should strive to attain in his eternal, bittersweet pursuit of happiness.

Ethics

Chère Madame Bardot.

Vous êtes mon idole, mon héroine, ma déesse, mon âme soeur, mon grand exemple, et votre beauté extérieure en est la raison la moins importante. C’est votre intelligence émotionnelle, votre idéalisme, votre grande éthique, votre persévérance infatigable, votre compréhension claire du monde, et votre courage de confronter son ignorance que j’admire.

En tant que végétalienne et activiste des droits des animaux, je participais régulièrement à des manifestations de Gaia, Bite Back et Animal Rights avant la crise sanitaire. Lors des récents confinements, mon activisme s’est traduit d’une manière différente. J’ai écrit un livre qui traite de l’impact désastreux de la consommation de viande et de produits animales sur trois aspects: notre santé, le climat, et le bien-être animal, le dernier étant ma principale motivation pour écrire ce livre.

J’explique comment les animaux sont élevés, dans quelle conditions ils sont obligés de vivre, et comment ils existent simplement pour satisfaire l’égoïste gourmandise humaine et à quel point ils en souffrent. Le sort des espèces animales les plus consommées est discuté en détail: les vaches, les cochons, les poules, les chiens, les crustacés et les poissons. Le livre aborde également l’hypocrisie des apologistes religieux qui veulent croire que leur dieu imaginaire justifie la Shoah des animaux. Et bien sûr, je arle de la fantastique Fondation de Brigitte Bardot.

L’agriculture animale est la dernière forme d’esclavage – du moins, dans l’ouest – et il est grand temps d’abolir cette horrible industrie et ses pratiques nauséabondes. La gauche se bat bruyamment pour les droits de femmes et des immigrants, mais le silence des politiciens sur la souffrance animale est étourdissante – vous le savez mieux que quiconque. J’espère qu’un jour, ce monde carniste se réveillera et verra que les choix alimentaires qui n’impliquent pas de cruauté sont également bien meilleurs pour notre santé et la planète.

Ceux qui continuent à manger des animaux non seulement détruisent la vie de ces animaux, mais apportent du chagrin et de la frustration à ceux qui passent leur vie à lutter contre leur cruauté, nonchalance et ignorance.

C’est pourquoi je vous remercie, du fond du cœur, pour toutes les années que vous vous êtes battue pour les animaux opprimés, et pour toutes les larmes qui les ont accompagnées. J’espère tellement que le jour où les animaux récolteront les fruits de votre lutte et seront enfin, enfin heureux, n’est plus très loin.

Sincèrement,
Xela

Ethics

Meat Eaters Are Not Cruel.

Post author By Xela
Post date March 22, 2021
1,626 Comments on Meat Eaters Are Not Cruel.

Chicken wings, lamb chops, a big juicy steak – I used to salivate at the mere thought of my next meaty meal. I proudly identified as a carnivore, and told my friends I didn’t understand how some people could enjoy life without meat. But one day, a visual on the internet became my catalyst for change and brought to the surface what I already knew but had buried into the catacombs of my subconsciousness: the direct link between my chili con carne and the immeasurable suffering of an innocent being that would give me nothing but kindness if it were near me. And since that moment, my body has been incapable of digesting suffering. I no longer saw pork on my plate – I saw a frightened pig. Where I used to see vitello tonnato, I now saw a crying calf and a suffocating tuna.

With time, I learned that refusing to slaughter someone for dinner contributes to many ethical causes: not eating animals saves other humans from being exploited (like the 70 million children who sometimes lose fingers or limbs when cutting carcasses in meat-packing plants), and dramatically diminishes the pollution of our planet. Our body becomes less susceptible to a whole array of diseases when we ditch animal protein. But my major motivation to stop eating animals has always been their well-being. The faulty anthropocentric view that animals live for us, to serve us, needs to be replaced with the ecocentric view that animals live with us, and exist for their own reasons that have nothing to do with servitude. We have no right to use, exploit, or harm them for our benefit, and this basic tenet of the vegan philosophy is simply not applicable in the setting of animal agriculture.

Wherever animals are bred and slaughtered massively, cruelty is involved. It is impossible to cut 30 chicken throats per minute or hang conscious cows on one leg without the occurrence of panic, struggle, agony, and horror. It is also impossible to check if every animal is properly sedated. Humane slaughter is an excuse that meat-eaters, including my former self, use to soothe their mind – but it is a myth. There is nothing humane about anally electrocuting a being that desires to live. Or taking away a newborn calf from its stressed mother to tap off the milk he needs to grow. Or ripping off the testicles of piglets without sedation. Or shredding baby chickens alive with macerators. And there is also nothing necessary about it. We might love the taste of animal flesh, but we don’t need it.

The human species is superior to other animals in many ways – animals can’t compose operas, paint impressionist masterpieces, build cathedrals, write essays, calculate the distance to the moon, or split atoms. But what truly distinguishes us from them, is not our intellect or our skills, but the capacity to acting morally and transcending the need for instant gratification through instinctive behaviour. Although humans assign wildly different definitions to the concepts of right and wrong – we are very much aware there is a difference. Depending on our degree of detachment from our impulses, our actions are the result of a certain level of free will. We don’t eat them because we have to, but because we want to. And it’s not because we can kill them, that we should.

Instinctively, we don’t even want to. Give 10 children an apple and a rabbit, and notify me if one of them wants to kill the rabbit and play with the apple. Adults would likely prefer not to kill it, either, but after decades of being desensitised to violence by their parents, teachers, and society, and the subsequent disconnection of the sausage on their plate from the animal it belonged to, they don’t mind paying someone else to kill that animal for them. Behind the thick brick walls of a slaughterhouse far away from the city, and far away from their sight.

Everyone claims they love animals, but no one wants to stop eating them. We all want to halt climate change, but only a few are willing to change what’s on their plate. People want to ditch plastic straws to save the fish, but who wants to ditch eating fish to save the fish? Only vegans do – that tiny percentage of often ridiculed idealists others get upset with for bringing out the cognitive dissonance, rather than getting upset with themselves for causing it with their own words and deeds.

No matter from which perspective you look at it, killing animals is screwed up, and no longer justifiable. The human Dark Ages ended five centuries ago, and it is time we turn the page of the animal Dark Ages. Entrepreneurs, among which some of the most powerful people in the world, now believe the transition to plant-based nutrition is an absolute necessity, and massively invest in plant proteins and lab-grown meats.

The supermarket racks are bursting with lactose-free, sugar-free, oil-free, pesticide-free, hormone-free, E-number-free foods, and hopefully one day in the not-too-distant future, the label ‘100% cruelty-free’ can be added to all of them. Because cruelty doesn’t belong in the western world, where people have already established human rights, women’s rights, child rights, gay rights, and every other imaginable right except animal rights. The most important right animals have, is the right to their own pursuit of happiness, and the prerequisite for that is existence without cruelty.

I don’t believe meat-eaters are cruel – I surely wasn’t. I do believe they are indirectly, often unknowingly, and more than often unwillingly participating in the cruelty inflicted upon animals, and that they are slower to realise the major consequences of their food choices on every aspect of their lives.

And, if you still eat animals, I truly hope this essay has inspired you to be less slow.

Ethics

Cancel Censorship.

As much as I would sometimes enjoy silencing certain individuals for the things they say, I am against the very act of silencing, or ‘cancelling’, as it is called nowadays, anyone. I deem it better to criticise them, albeit without mincing my words. A truly democratic society should provide a platform for all opinions – not just opinions that are substantiated or making sense. The free expression of all views should be allowed at all times, however idiotic they may be. As an illustration of Voltaire’s beliefs, Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote:

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.

Instead of respectfully disapproving each other’s views and engaging in civilised debate or simply ignoring the views we dislike, woke people cancel people they disagree with. Cancelling means annulling individuals from public exposure for an opinion or action deemed politically incorrect, bigotted, or offensive.

For example, J.K. Rowling, the author of the iconic Harry Potter books, was cancelled because she tweeted that women should be called ‘women’ and not ‘people with wombs’, heroically claiming that biological rather than psychological factors are the only valid criterium for determining a person’s gender.

Contrary to women, men do not have wombs, she thinks. For the acknowledgement of this objective fact, which has also been acknowledged by all scientists who have walked the globe since the discovery of the womb, she received severe backlash and a flood of death threats from disgruntled SJW’s who are so tolerant they threaten to murder you. Thousands of outraged, disappointed fans worldwide have stored away Rowling’s books in a dusty corner of their attic after hearing her transphobic hate speech.

Rowling is now the enemy of the LGBTQIA – community and activists worldwide. Afting labelling the former President of the United States a misogynist, much to the delight of her current critics, she is now getting a taste of her own bitter medicine – or should I say, magic potion? The fact the murderous protagonist of her latest book is a transgender, didn’t help.

There are barely any non-white characters in the Harry Potter stories, and the main characters themselves are white and heterosexual. Could it be that Rowling is not only mysogynistic and transphobic, but also racist and sexist? The woke brigade, often pronoucing these four adjectives in one single breath, would certainly agree.

What’s the point of engaging in debates you might lose if you can just destroy the person’s career and reputation by pulling the appropriate -ist card? Silencing people is so much easier than letting their inconvenient truths confront you with the demons you’re desperately trying to avoid.

It is time to stop sacrificing the truth on the totalitarian altar of political correctness.

Ethics Identity Politics

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being.

Post author By Xela
Post date February 19, 2021
23 Comments on The Unbearable Whiteness of Being.

How does one demolish the issue of racism? First of all, by not talking about it. You’re not white, black, red or yellow. You’re a human being. The level of pigmentation of your skin doesn’t matter, and constantly reaffirming your skin colour only sharpens the divide.

That’s what Morgan Freeman thinks. This black actor is tired about the endless debates surrounding race – and so are thousands of his black countrymen who don’t wish to dwell in black victimhood and who are happy to take responsiblity for their own fate instead of incessantly inflicting blame and guilt on others who happen to have a different skin colour.

Unsurpringly, five school principles in New York, the western capital of radical leftism, disagree. They have sent a letter to all Caucasian parents, asking them to reflect on their ‘white identity’, implying that being white is inherently problematic. Included in the letter was a list of seven identities:

1. White supremacist: white person (WP) who values and preserves white supremacy
2. White voyeurism: WP who consumes black culture without the ‘burden of blackness’
3. White privilege: WP who sometimes critiques white supremacy
4. White benefit: WP who sometimes is solidary with people of colour (POC), but not in public
5. White confessional: WP who speaks out against white supremacy, but only to be validated by POC
6. White critical: WP who calls out other white people
7. White traitor: WP who tells ‘the truth’ at whatever cost
8. White abolishionist: WP who actively dismantles ‘whiteness’

Note that ‘white person’ means someone who IDENTIFIES with whiteness. This includes all people of colour who openly claim they do not feel oppressed, like Morgan Freeman and every non-liberal person of colour in America.

So what exactly are those schools trying to teach their students? That all white people are racists? Well, … yes. Our white supremacist society with its deeply engrained institutional discrimination brainwashes white people from the day they’re born into thinking they’re superior. All eventually end up into one of the seven identities. Belonging to category nr. 1 is the worst, and striving to be nr. 7 is the goal. So there is still hope for all you crackers out there: you are ALL oppressors, but there are levels of oppressors, and vertical mobility is an option.

One does not need to be a brilliant psychologist to predict the effect of discriminatory teachings like these. Children will be given a free pass to intimidate, bully and demonise their classmates for their skin colour. Last time I checked, that was called racism.

Instead of truly uniting the country, as he said he would, the new American president fully supports the teaching of critical race theory in schools. This sets a dangerous precedent for the future of one of the least racist countries in the world – in no other dominantly white country did a black man become commander in chief, and in no other dominantly white country did masses of white people roam the streets to chant “Black Lives Matter” together. In America, any person of any colour can become successful. That’s why there are so many succesful black lawyers, doctors, writers, artists, sportsmen, and politicians live there and don’t plan moving out. Those people are not more privileged than others – they had a dream and worked hard enough to make it come true.

Black liberals need to see through the identity politics of the radical left and realise that, once again, they are being used as slaves for a bunch of wealthy, power-hungry politicians who need their votes. Let’s not forget it was the Democrat party who enabled the racist South. And it is the Democrat party perpetuating that racism today, while hypocritically pretending to fight it.

Ethics

You Are Not a Lion.

If humans aren’t meant to eat meat, why do animals eat other animals? A question I often get asked. Although the question is bizarre (just replace the word humans by the word butterflies or koalas, and you’ll see why), this would be my answer:

Animals that eat other animals are carnivores that don’t have another choice than to follow their instinct – unlike free-willed humans. The lion instinctively hunts zebras to survive. It can’t peel bananas, nor can its digestive system process them.

As animal activist Gary Yourofsky once explained to a cliché-spewing i24 reporter who taught she pushed him into a corner with the predictable human-lion analogy: “I notice you have clothes on, and that you have a cell phone and a computer. It is unfair to pick one thing that lions do that you want to mimic, when you don’t want to mimic anything else they do. When lions walk up and greet each other, they sniff each other’s ass. When I came in this room, you did not kneel down and sniff my ass. Lions sometimes kill their young when they’re runts. If human beings killed their baby because they didn’t want him, we would arrest them and charge them with murder. Could you go to a courtroom and say “Hey but, your honour, lions kill their babies”?

The point is clear: you’re not a lion. You’re a herbivore – albeit a self-denying one. Our physiology, anatomy and even psychology clearly demonstrate this. There is no child in the world that would not be traumatised by the sight of slaughter. Unlike the lion, eating animal protein makes you ill. Sciencists have associated it with digestive and reproductive cancers, dementia, MS, and multiple other pathologies. If a species is carnivorous, all members are, without exception. There are no vegan lions, but there are millions of vegan, thriving humans.

If you are interested in more proofs that humans shoudn’t eat like lions, and aren’t afraid to have your deeply engrained beliefs challenged, I recommend watching ‘What The Health’ and ‘The Game Changers’, both oh which are available on Netflix.