Mais de 20 mil visualizações

Este mês, em pouco menos de dois anos, foi ultrapassada a marca das 20 mil visualizações do documentário "A Última Religião" no Youtube. São números modestos e nada virais. Ainda assim, deixam-me muito satisfeito. Obrigado.

Must read interview with Adam Curtis in The Economist:

          The Economist: Who’s going to answer those questions?

Mr Curtis: I think it’s going to come out of religion, I really do. I think there’s going to be a resurgence of religion. It’s very difficult to talk about this because you just get shot down, but there are parts of Islam which are trying to deal with this.

The Economist: Isn’t religion an organised panic about death? 

Mr Curtis: No. I’m not religious but I don’t share the liberal dislike of religion because I think its fundamental point is to reassure us in the face of our own death. That’s what religion does, it gives you a sense that you’re part of something that’s moving onwards. It reassures people. Death is frightening and for a generation who believe that they are alone and were liberated by that idea and had a really good time, to be alone in the face of death is very frightening. So I have a funny feeling that religion might come back.

"Can we be religious without God?"

Alain de Botton on religion and some ideas that Auguste Comte pioneered:

"For me, and I think for many other people as well, the issue of religion actually goes way beyond belief in the supernatural, and yet a lot of the debate around religion started by people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins reduces to familiar questions: Does God exist or not? Do angels exist or not? Is it stupid to believe in angels? 

While I understand the kind of emotional resonance around that, I think the real issue is why did people get drawn to religion? Why did we invent religions? What need did they serve? And also what are the aspects around religious life that may be disconnected from belief that nevertheless have great validity and resonance for people outside of faith today?  

Religions are not just a set of claims about the supernatural; they are also machines for living. They aim to guide you from birth to death and to teach you a whole range of things: to create a community, to create codes of behavior, to generate aesthetic experiences. And all of this seems to me incredibly important and, frankly, much more interesting than the question of whether Jesus was or wasn’t the son of God." 

Continue reading.

"A tale of profound beliefs" - Article on the website "mART"

(Still from "The Last Religion", by Hugo Pinto)

"It is a tale of profound beliefs — in science and reason, but also in love and selflessness. It is a tale of memories — true memories; kept alive by a few in Brazil. And it is a tale of a heritage — precious; endangered.

The Last Religion (2015), directed by Macau-based journalist Hugo Pinto, is a documentary about Positivism in Brazil. Positivism is a line of thought founded by French philosopher Auguste Comte in the 19th century.

“Auguste Comte believed humanity evolved in three phases,” Mr Pinto tells mART. The first is “a theological phase, in which societies are dominated by myths, by supernatural beliefs, like a deity, a superior being;” the second was “a speculative” phase, dominated by “a certain speculative philosophy,” marked by “a lot of questions, but few answers”; and the third was “the Positivist phase, in which all knowledge is acquired through science,” “demonstrable knowledge”.

As a voice tells us at the beginning of the documentary, “the problem of humans is fundamentally the religion”. But when Comte talks about religion, “he’s referring to the harmony among all people”. “There’s only one religion: the Religion of Humanity. Or Positivism. It’s the same thing,” the voice says."

Continue reading.

Brazil, the non-existent place

It was the first question that pointed me in the direction of what would become the documentary “The Last Religion”: why is Brazil the country where Auguste Comte’s influence is most visible and the only country in the world where temples of the Religion of Humanity were built from scratch to the purpose of honouring the French philosopher’s dream?

It is no mystery that Brazil has been for a very long time a fertile ground where religions and beliefs of all sorts have thrived.

But there’s something broader (and hazier) about the allure with which Brazil has fascinated so many people across centuries, one after the other enticed by the endless promises and the hope of a vast New World.

Nowadays, however, with rampant crime, inequality and lasting economic and political crisis, Brazil seems more inclined to scare people away.

But the bleakness is not a Brazilian exclusive. These days, the whole world seems incapable of confronting the future with the slightest optimism. The tomorrows that sing gave way to the yesterdays when all our troubles seemed so far away.

The rise of authoritarianism all across the Americas, Europe and Asia brought back memories of times that many thought closed in History books.

One is reminded of Stefan Zweig and “The World of Yesterday”, the beautiful memories of the Austrian writer, completed one day before he and his wife both committed suicide holding hands in Petrópolis, the German-colonized town on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where the couple was seeking refuge from the Nazi persecution.

But long before hope turned into despair, and visions became delusions, ideas were all that mattered. Thoughts of salvation, fortune or glory animated the Portuguese missionaries, privateers and soldiers. To each his own utopia.

In the 19th century, late Qing Dynasty, a Chinese reformer, Kang Youwei, entertained the idea of establishing a new China in Brazil.

The project was briefly manifested in "Da Tongshu" ("大同書"), "The Book of Great Unity", and it would never be more than that: a mere idea, albeit part of a bigger plan.

In “Ta t´ung shu: the one-world philosophy of K`ang Yu-wei” (1), Lawrence G. Thompson notes:

“Ta T’ung shu does not quite fit into the pattern of the Western Utopias, whether of the type exemplified by Plato's Republic, by More’s Utopia or by Butler's Erewhon. Perhaps the essential difference is in the spirit of completely realistic planning which motivates the Chinese work. Granting the visionary quality of the whole scheme, it is nevertheless logically developed from the world as it is, and offers solutions to human problems which may in truth be otherwise insoluble. It is a 'utopia', therefore, only in   the sense in which a serious treatise, dealing with universal human problems and social problems in particular, and conceived on a grand scale, may be called Utopian.”

The same (apparently) “completely realistic planning” can also be found in the story of Fordlândia, the town founded in 1928 by Henry Ford, the American mogul that revolutionized industry with mass production and “who has turned the workingman into a human machine”, as one of Philip Roth’s characters puts it.

Deep in the Amazon jungle, the richest man in the United States hoped to create a typical American town where his workers could dedicate undisturbed to the extraction of rubber, the precious raw material needed for making tires and other car parts.

The enterprise would not end well. (2) In his review of “Fordlandia - The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City”, by Greg Grandin, The New York Times critic Ben Macintyre summarized how the dream irreversibly plummeted: “(…) (T)his outpost of modern capitalism was to be ‘an example of his particular American dream, of how Ford-style capitalism — high wages, humane benefits and moral improvement — could bring prosperity to a benighted land’. That blueprint may have worked in Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Mich. It most emphatically did not work in the jungle. Instead of a miniature but improved North American city, what Ford created was a broiling, pestilential hellhole of disease, vice and violence, closer to Dodge City than peaceable Dearborn.”

In his review, Ben Macintyre also recalls another American seduced by Brazil, Theodore Roosevelt, who imagined in the Amazon the possibility of creating “populous manufacturing communities” served by the great river, only to return “from his Amazon expedition of 1914 declaring the jungle to be ‘sinister and evil’”.

Macintyre also mentions Nelson Rockefeller, who similarly “thought the 4,000 miles of the Amazon might be cut into canals”, and Elizabeth Nietzsche, “the sister of the philosopher, plunged into the jungles of Paraguay in 1886 intent on creating her own vegetarian Aryan republic, spurred on by the anti-Semitic effusions of Richard Wagner.”

While we’re at it, another character pops up: Brian Sweeney "Fitzcarraldo" Fitzgerald, the hero of Werner Herzog’s movie “Fitzcarraldo”, a rubber entrepreneur in the Amazon Basin in Peru, where he dreamt of building an opera house, probably inspired by The Amazon Theatre, in Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.

This opera house was inaugurated at the end of 1896, the time of the rubber boom. The theatre is featured in “Fitzcarraldo”, right at the memorable beginning of the film.

But perhaps the most ambitious were the positivists the erected the Temple of Humanity in Rio de Janeiro, the first religious building in the world constructed between 1891 and 1897 to house the cult of the Religion of Humanity.

Today, closed to the public because of a large crack in the ceiling, the Rio’s temple serves reluctantly as a metaphor for Comte’s dream and its decay.

But since ideas really have a life of their own, we can travel south to Porto Alegre, where we find the Chapel of Humanity, the only religious building left that was made from scratch for that purpose still open to the public every Sundays.

There you’ll still get a glimpse of the same hope that animated all those non-existent places. There, utopia has a place, which is another way of saying that it doesn’t exist. But when did it ever exist?

*****

(1) https://archive.org/stream/ServingThePeopleWithDialectics/TaTungShuTheOne-worldPhilosophy_djvu.txt

(2) What’s left today of this utopia that ended in ruins is described here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/world/americas/deep-in-brazils-amazon-exploring-the-ruins-of-fords-fantasyland.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

(3) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/books/review/Macintyre-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzcarraldo

A conversation about the documentary "The Last Religion"

You can read the interview by Olaf Simons here: http://positivists.org/blog/archives/6599

Artigo do NYT sobre a Igreja Positivista do Brasil

(© Nadira Shira / The New York Times)

Nearly in Ruins: The Church Where Sages Dreamed of a Modern Brazil

RIO DE JANEIRO — Neighbors from surrounding apartment buildings toss empty beer bottles through a gaping hole in the roof of the once-majestic church. Pigeons roam the cavernous nave, their excrement piling up on the floor. A watchman guards treasures from the thieves who prey on the city’s derelict buildings.

The neoclassical Positivist Church of Brazil, with its soaring columns and a cryptic sign above its entrance proclaiming, “The Living Are Forever and Increasingly Governed by the Dead,” was long a captivating sight on Benjamin Constant Street near the old city center.

These days, the crumbling, graffiti-taggedchurch, whose freethinking founders helped modern Brazil rise from the ashes ofan empire, is just another emblem of how Rio de Janeiro neglects its past,allowing grandeur to fall into ruin.

Entrevista no jornal Ponto Final

(abrir as imagens noutro separador para poderem ser ampliadas)

Entrevista ao Ponto Final.

"A Última Religião" na Agência Lusa

Notícia da Agência Lusa (05/09/2015)

Documentário português retrata 'A Última Religião' no Brasil

(Na foto: Hugo Pinto / © Luísa Sequeira)

Um jornalista português retratou em documentário as origens, o culto e a minoria seguidora da "Última Religião" - a da Humanidade -, com marca em símbolos nacionais do Brasil onde figura, aliás, um último reduto.

Documentário de estreia do jornalista português Hugo Pinto, de 35 anos, radicado em Macau, versa sobre Religião da Humanidade, sem Deus e dos Homens, concebida pelo filósofo francês Auguste Comte, no século XIX, que tem o único "templo" de portas abertas na cidade brasileira de Porto Alegre.

"O tema congrega quase todas as minhas áreas de interesse: a filosofia, a religião, a ciência e a História. Depois, sempre me fascinou o interesse que Auguste Comte tinha em criar uma ciência da organização da sociedade e a forma como pensou todos os seus elementos estruturantes", explicou Hugo Pinto.

O documentário foi filmado no Brasil, onde esteve aproximadamente um mês para conhecer a influência de uma religião, em cujos princípios Hugo Pinto vê atualidade: "Há ideias que fazem sentido, que se mantêm muito oportunas, como o altruísmo, um termo que o próprio cunhou".

A doutrina positivista de Comte influenciou inclusive a própria História do Brasil, onde tem hoje o último bastião. "Estiveram na Proclamação da República e até desenharam a bandeira nacional, no entanto, poucos conhecem a importância histórica dos positivistas", ignorando, por exemplo, que "a 'Ordem e Progresso' é um lema do positivismo".

"A doutrina, em voga na ala militar, cujo movimento levou à proclamação da República, teve em Miguel Lemos e em Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, dois intelectuais que foram estudar para Paris, então centro do mundo, os grandes promotores das ideias positivistas", importadas, portanto, pelas elites para um Brasil carente de reformas e ávido de mudança.

"Quando regressaram, primeiro criaram o apostolado positivista, mais tarde, a igreja positivista do Brasil, e esse foi o grande centro difusor. Imprimiram centenas de panfletos, explicando as ideias e abordando diversos temas, como a importância da laicidade, do respeito pelas populações indígenas, (...), das leis trabalhistas. Todas estas são conquistas que reclamam como grandes legados deixados pelos positivistas", observa.

Um dos aspetos que o surpreendeu foi o facto de ideais como a laicidade terem penetrado num país maioritariamente católico que tem, aliás, o Cristo Redentor como um dos principais símbolos. "Foi outro dos motivos pelos quais esta história me fascinou, porque é, de facto, um terreno imensamente fértil para as religiões, até para a da Humanidade".

Comte "acreditava que o mundo só poderia ser explicado pela ciência e que a Fé seria substituída pela Razão", rejeitava um Deus sobrenatural, mas reconhecia na religião "um papel importante de união em torno de uma ideia comum e uma ordem moral contra a anarquia do egoísmo".

Contudo, ressalva Hugo Pinto, o filósofo francês imaginou que pelo mundo fora seriam erigidos Templos da Humanidade, mas isso só aconteceu no Brasil e em duas cidades: Rio de Janeiro e Porto Alegre. Hoje, apenas os pilares de um se encontram de pé, frequentado por poucas dezenas de "fiéis".

"A Última Religião" dá a conhecer "as ideias e as pessoas que, hoje, ainda defendem e acreditam num mundo mais dominado pelo conhecimento e pelo altruísmo como formas de combater dois dos maiores problemas à escala global: o fundamentalismo religioso e os horizontes fechados do capitalismo", disse.

Hugo Pinto prepara-se agora para lançar a produção independente, que contou com a realizadora portuguesa Luísa Sequeira, no circuito dos festivais, sem esconder a natural preferência por salas do Brasil, Europa e Ásia.

Questionado se acabou por se render à doutrina, o jornalista responde: "Comte diz que todos somos positivistas, mas em graus diferentes".