Religion and Politics Conflict
First of all, good morning to everyone present, my name is Juan Manuel and I really hope that you are enjoying the present day. I would like to start my speech talking a bit about the concepts of politics and religion, in order to be all on the same page. According to The Britannica dictionary, “it is activities that relate to influencing the actions and policies of a government or getting and keeping power in a government”. Through history we have watched a big number of ways on how men do politics, and by that, achieving their ambitions. One particular example of this is the use of religion. According to the Collins dictionary, religion is the “belief in, worship of, or obedience to a supernatural power or powers considered to be divine or to have control of human destiny”. If we see both definitions we can see that the 2 substantially contain the idea of organizing the faith of the human kind just as Heron Perez said “Since the origins of history, religion and politics have been the poles that have organized power and have given purpose to the history of human coexistence”. But although having these common ideas, there has always existed an ideological conflict between these 2, being more notorious as humanity was getting near to the contemporary thinking that involves us nowadays. But exactly, what really is this conflict about? Is it a problem nowadays?, There is some psychological explanation for this? Will it eventually end? All these questions will be answered, so let's proceed.
First we have to understand that religion plays a vital role not only in the spiritual aspect of an individual but as Paul Tilch said:” Is understood as the direction of the spirit towards the unconditioned, culture as the direction of the spirit towards the conditioned forms, and the relation between both is that culture is a form of expression of religion and the latter is the substance, or meaning, of culture”. At this point I invite you to do a little exercise of introspection, and reflect about how religion has affected your capacity of judgment. For those who already have an answer, you can see that in fact you are very influenced by religious thoughts, for example Christianity. This happens because our culture was influenced in a big way by christianism, as we can see that a great number of our public holidays are from this religion.
Now let's explore more into the actual conflict. Throughout centuries human kind has been led by theocratic governments or monarchies, in which the governors were supposedly chosen by God to rule over a country, and in some cases they were a remnant of this God as passed in many medieval reigns. In these cases the words church and state were almost synonyms. It was not until a number of intellectual and armed revolutions overthrew the monarchies, to create states not based entirely on the devotion of a god but to ideals such as fraternity, being the most famous case the French revolution. Acknowledging that religion puts a special emphasis on the remainder of traditions or the “ good customs”, we can put it in a more conservative position, and against progressive postures that each time are more present between us, the new generations of youngsters, and here lies the actual problem, when religion tries to do politics. We have plenty of evidence on how this in a way or another has affected not only our generation but past ones, but one I would like to talk about is the support of the church on the dictatorship of Rafael Videla. This not only made the dictatorship longer but it justified the violation of an uncountable number of human rights, and the disappearance of thousands of innocent Argentinians, and to the surprise of someone's our actual pope Francisco was supporting this.
For my last point I would like to pick up the matter in actuality. We have lived the result of a process of globalization of information thanks to the introduction of the internet, that has brought the facility of reaching and exchanging information. The range of this has given us a universe of information that the past generations would dream of, but with this a curious phenomenon occurred, an increase in the number of atheists. Some researchers point that with the arrival of the era of information it has appeared an inclination of system 2( Logical thinking) in comparison to system 1 (associative or intuitive thinking) of the dual process theory stated by William James. This could also be possible by the influence of famous writers of the past such as Nietzsche,Schopenhauer, and Saramago, and the popular historical revisionism of events of the accounts of sacred books such as the bible.
In conclusion, we have talked about a substantial level of the conflict between politics and religion, giving them definition and explanation in actuality.We have watched how these 2 superpowers of the human organization have behaved on different occasions, and the conflict nowadays. Sadly we cannot tell if this conflict will or even could reach an end, because bening both politics and religion features so present in the culture we would be pulling up one of our essence as humans, but knowing more about the conflict gives us a wider view of our species as humans. Nothing more to add, thank you very much.
By Juan M. Henríquez, Step 10
