All the dangers of a misunderstood sense of the sacred spread in the heart of society. Many Orthodox have never read a gospel and often disown the fundamentals of the Christian value system. However, they prefer to rely on the alleged miracles attributed to the images of the saints and refuse scientific progress, on which, instead, the Church itself (and not a little) is betting.
Religion is for man the perception of an absolutely other. And so far everything is fine, because the search for this other is an anthropological need. But there are decidedly dangerous consequences: many experiences of the sacred lead to the irrational and generate questionable behavior.
Every religion is inseparable from the believer. Religion develops an explanation of human destiny and leads to a behavior that through myths, rites and symbols actualizes the experience of the sacred and of destiny, an experience which, according to believers, is universal and must apply to everyone.
In fact, the belief is not an abstraction of the spirit, but a perceptible material reality, which sometimes manifests itself even in a bizarre and not without excesses way. To the point that there is often much more tolerance in agnostics than in believers, especially Catholic-Christians (but of course the same goes for all the great monotheistic religions) who do not admit any other God to me.
We often listen to people apparently of normal ingenuity to thank saints and madonnas for grace received. Ignorant who speak of a religion of which they actually know little or nothing, believers who have not even opened the New Testament and know nothing about Saint Nicholas or Saint Gheorghe.
How many people operated on breast or lung cancer have thanked God by neglecting the doctors and science who had done the true miracle, provided that we can speak of miracles in these cases?
Finding faith for overcoming a cancer in the womb and discovering a medical God, neglecting the fact that before medical progress, all women affected by this disease died inevitably even if they had prayed to all the saints and gods.
Men should be thanked for progress, not the rosary. Fleming, for example, is the father of penicillin and think of Pasteur. Polio was eradicated thanks to Sabin who donated the results of his discoveries to the world scientific community. It is impossible to quote any saint theologian who can do the same.
The question will have to be definitively clarified one day: can we heal statistically thanks to medical science or can we just pray to thank the Almighty? Will disabling or deadly genetic diseases heal with genetic engineering or prayers to our Father? Will a 3d printer reproduce our ventricle or Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, Madonna?
Mind you: believing and praying is not bad. Rather. But the boundary between religion and superstition is often blurred. Therefore, there is no progress if there are delusional minds that attribute to their faith a pre-eminent value even on purely bodily issues and debase scientific progress but also faith itself, which is thus reduced to a cordon of saints, to the saint who remembers the patroness of the village. Not to mention widespread and disrespectful behavior: for example, those who bless the parishioners in the ancestral need for protection…. during the epidemic.
This is to demonstrate how backward the mentality of many has been compared to the times in which they had to live: they read, write, think (?), Talk, move (car, train, bus, plane ...), use sophisticated appliances and technologies but in spite of everything, their moral and spiritual baggage has not shifted one iota of what could already be found at the time of the Crusades.
Sweating saints and crying madonnas cannot heal anyone. Scientific achievements, on the contrary, are an obvious fact. The hope is that quantum computers will soon be able to process the subjective evolution of cancer in order to identify its personalized treatment. Underpaid men in moldy laboratories do much more than self-styled baroned holy men; however believers prefer to see the hand of God everywhere, lull themselves into the illusions that the minds and hands of doctors are guided by God.
written by Corina Abdulahm Negura
