Il fanatismo altruista

Il fanatismo altruista

The Gods of Cooperation and Competition – Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict BY Ara Norenzayan

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Argomenti: religione, morale, coesione sociale, competizione tra gruppi, conflitti.

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For all its virtues in binding strangers together, religious cooperation is born out of competition and conflict between groups. It is therefore expected that religious cooperation in turn fuels the very conflicts, real or imagined, that are perceived to threaten it. (This is the topic of the next chapter.) This dynamic helps us understand and resolve the seeming paradox that it is the handmaiden both of cooperation within the group and of conflict between groups.

Note:CIÒ CHE CI FA COMPETERE E CI FA CONFLIGGERE

groups that happen to have members who acquire traits favoring self-sacrifice and subordinate self-interest for group interests—that is, groups with stronger social solidarity—will tend to win out.

Note:SACRIFICIO DI SÈ

Religion returns to center stage, not as a theological explanation of purpose or order, but as itself a product of evolution that enables groups to function as adaptive units—at least to a degree.

Note:SLOAN WILSON

In an ambitious cross-cultural investigation spanning 33 nation-states, Michele Gelfand and her colleagues measured something related to social solidarity. They looked at the degree to which nations are “tight”—that is, do they have strict social norms that apply to many situations? How important is conformity to these norms? How much deviation from norms is tolerated and do people get punished for violating these norms?

Note:GELFAND: ALTRUISMO E GUERRA

they found that, all else being equal, conflict a hundred years ago increased the odds of strict norm-enforcement today. Tighter nations were also more religious—and that makes sense too if world religions are a group-mobilizing force.

Note:IL NUMERO DI GUERRE PREGRESSE PREVEDE LA RELIGIOSITÀ

as any observer of team sports fans can see, the “cooperate to compete” instinct is particularly strong among that segment of the population that likes war: young men.

Note:FANATICI E ALTRUISTI

Richard Sosis and his colleagues looked at this issue from a different angle..,. they found that the greater the participation in warfare, the more likely there are costly rites for males…. Sosis sees these painful rites as costly behaviors that signal group commitment. He points out that ritual scarification and violence create male solidarity, which keeps freeriding during warfare under control….

Note:SOSIS

Atran explains, seemingly irrational tendencies make for stronger groups that can outdo their more rational, self-interested rivals:

Note:RITI IRRAZIONALI

Seen in this light, it is not surprising that prosocial religions have been a major force shaping human history. When intergroup rivalries are strong, prosocial religious groups, with their Big Gods and loyalty practices that promote social solidarity, could have a competitive edge over rival groups.

Note:MONOTEISMO E STORIA

Building Moral Communities of Strangers

As Jonathan Haidt shows, much of morality is rooted in social intuitions in the service of gluing individuals together to form “sacred” communities.

Note:MORALITÀ E COESIONE

As Haidt recognizes, not all moral systems are religious, and not all religions are moral systems, but some religious systems—those that have prosocial consequences—have been moral systems throughout time.

Note:RELIGIONE E MORALE

They found that the stronger an individual expressed religious belief and reported high levels of religious participation, the more likely he or she condemned moral transgressions.

Note:QUENTIN ATKINSON

These findings complement results by Shariff and Rhemtulla discussed earlier, who found, all else being equal, lower crime rates in nations with stronger belief in hell than heaven.

Note:CRIMINE E RELIGIOSITÀ

Morality without God

This does not mean, of course, that religion is necessary for morality. No doubt core human moral instincts evolved long before religions spread in human groups.

Note:MORALITÁ E RELIGIONE

Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom have found that moral-like judgments can be found even in preverbal babies: by six months of age, they show a preference for an individual who helps and an aversion to an individual who obstructs someone else’s goal.

Note:BAMBINI

Even our primate cousins have vestiges of moral instincts. A long line of research by primatologist Frans de Waal and his colleagues shows capacities for emotional contagion, consolation, and grief in chimpanzees.

Note:MORALITÀ E SCIMMIE

We do not need religion to be moral beings. But moral communities of strangers may not have evolved as readily without religions with Big Gods.

Note:IL PROBLEMA DELLO STRANIERO

Intergroup Competition and Warfare

There is no shortage of evidence in the historical and ethnographic record showing that violent and nonviolent conflict has been endemic to human existence.18 In fact, one driver of large group size in cultural evolution is the intensity of between-group competition for resources and habitats. For example, in the 186 societies of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (discussed earlier), prevalence of conflict among societies, resource-rich environments, group size, and Big Gods all go together. In places with rich natural resources, there is more intergroup conflict, larger groups, and watchful gods.

Note:CON COSA SI CORRELA LA VIOLENZA UMANA

one possibility is that conflict over resources led to competition and political expansion of victorious groups, which in turn festered more conflict at the peripheries of these expanding empires. One argument is that these were precisely the antecedent conditions that gave rise to politically centralized states. As Charles Tilly puts it, war made states, and states made war.

Note:STATO E GUERRA

Peter Turchin, who has pioneered the scientific study of historical dynamics, emphasizes that the scaling up of social groups happened predominantly in frontiers of states and empires. He calculated that over 90 percent of preindustrial age mega-empires—defined as unified states covering greater than 1 million square kilometers (or 386,100 square miles)—arose in frontier regions, such as the Eurasian steppes.

Note:TURCHIN E LE FRONTIERE

this is the old adage that the best way to compete with rivals is to cooperate with allies. Medieval Arab philosopher and historian Ibn Khaldûn, who was a keen observer of the rise and fall of Islamic dynasties in fourteenth-century North Africa, saw social solidarity, which he called asabiya,

Note:VECCHI ADAGI CONFERMATI

How Prosocial Religions Won in the Game of Intergroup Cultural Competition

This observation brings us to the idea that prosocial religions, with their group-beneficial norms that suppress selfishness and increase social cohesion, outcompeted their rivals. There are good reasons to think that this process has been driven by cultural—rather than genetic—evolution.

Note:LA VITTORIA CULTURALE DELLE RELIGIONI

Scott Atran and Joseph Henrich summarize the idea this way: Religious beliefs and practices, like group beneficial norms, can spread by competition among social groups in several ways, including warfare, economic production, and demographic expansion. Such cultural representations can also spread through more benign interactions, as when members of one group preferentially acquire behaviors, beliefs, and values from more successful groups. Over historical time, demographic and cultural patterns have favored prosocial religious groups.

Note:SELEZIONE CULTURALE

Cultural Group Stability

when all is said and done, what matters, in cultural terms, is how well a group weathers storms that might lead to its collapse. World history is littered with the corpses of vast, but short-lived, empires, such as the Assyrian and Mongol conquests that unified large parts of the Middle East and Eurasia, respectively.

Note:RELIGIONE => MAGGIORE STABILITÀ

Returning to this study of the group longevity of religious and secular communes in nineteenth-century America, Richard Sosis looked at an ideal case study because these communes operated under difficult conditions, facing various internal and external threats to group stability. Communes that were unable to solve “collective action problems”—overcoming internal disputes, preventing members from defecting to rival groups, surviving droughts, and so on, could not prosper. Indeed, some communes were dissolved soon after they were founded, whereas others flourished. For every year considered in a 110-year span, religious communes were found to outlast secular ones by an average factor of four.

Note:LA RELIGIONE RENDE PIÙ STABILI

The evidence just discussed leads to two key conclusions: (1) differential rates of group survival favor prosocial religious groups; and (2) the combination of belief in supernatural watchers, extravagant displays, and other commitment devices explains the cultural survival advantage of these groups—precisely what would be expected if prosocial religions were “packaged” by cultural evolutionary processes.

Note:CONCLUSIONI

Neither could genetic group selection easily explain these effects, given the very short time frames (just over a 110 year span) and the fact that variation in nineteenth-century American commune membership is unlikely to be of genetic origin.

Note:CULTURA E GENETICA

Attracting Religious Converts

In her study of the spread of Islam into Africa, Ensminger argues that Islamic beliefs, supported by powerful displays of faith such as abstaining from alcohol, avoiding pre- and extramarital sex, not consuming pork, and ritual fasting—permitted greater trust, shared rules of exchange, and the use of credit institutions among converted Muslims.26 The spread of Islam in turn facilitated more trade and greater economic success.

Note:ISLAM: FORZA E COMPETIZIONE

This might come as a surprise to many, but Americans have not been as religious as they are today. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark emphasize the role of religious competition in the dramatic expansion of religiosity in America since 1776.27 Those familiar with American religious movements today know that competition among religious institutions for membership has been a long-time feature of American life.

Note:AMERICA LA COMPETIZIONE RELIGIOSA RAFFORZA LA RELIGIOSITA’. RELIGIONE=>PIU’ PERFORMANTI NELLA COMPETIZIONE TRA GRUPPI

Religious Fertility

To survive and prosper, religious groups attract followers, induce adherents to reproduce at rates greater than replacement levels, or, as the demographic expansion of the Mormon Church shows, ideally, do both.

Note:LA PROSPERITÀ DI UNA RELIGIONE. RELIGIONE=>PIU’ FERTILI

The Mormon Church grew, in a time span of just 170 years, from a small group of a few hundred to 15 million followers worldwide. Likewise, Christianity itself grew by leaps and bounds in the Roman Empire, and a once obscure offshoot of Judaism became the state religion of the empire in less than 300 years.

Note:MORMONI ED EBREI

The cultural success of prosocial religious groups is therefore aided in no small part by their reproductive success,

Note:FERTILITÀ

Sociologist Eric Kauffman remarks with irony that, in the culture wars between the religious and secular, arguments fly back and forth, yet neither side seems to have noticed the most important trend that may really settle the dispute. He notes: Religious fundamentalists are on course to take over the world through demography. We have embarked on a particular phase of history in which the frailty of secular liberalism will become even more apparent. In contrast to the situation today, the upsurge of fundamentalism will be felt more keenly in the secular West than in developing regions. This is because we are witnessing the historic conjunction of religious fundamentalism and demographic revolution.

Note:KAUFFMAN: L’ARGOMENTO RELIGIOSO

A study comparing the fertility rates of European Jews found that the atheists had the lowest birthrate, averaging around 1.5 children per woman (again, below replacement), whereas the religious Jews averaged nearly three, with the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel averaging six to eight children per woman.

Note:EBREI

Michael Blume explains: Although we looked hard at all available data and case studies back to early Greece and India, we still have not been able to identify a single case of any non-religious population retaining more than two births per woman for just a century. Wherever religious communities dissolved, demographic decline followed suit.

Note:ATEI SENZA FIGLI DA SEMPRE

It is no accident that religious conservative attitudes on women’s rights, contraception, abortion, and sexual orientation are conducive to maintaining high fertility levels.

Note:RELIGIONE E DIRITTI DELLA DONNA

it is possible that religious fertility is shaped by a process called gene-culture coevolution.35 Just as the lactose-tolerance allele spread in less than 10,000 years in groups that adopted milk-producing cows, goats, and camels, it is conceivable that prosocial religious beliefs and practices adopted by some groups but not others might have exerted selection pressures on the human gene pool of these groups. This provocative idea is just starting to receive attention.

PERCHE’ PIU’ RELIGIOSI=>PIU’ FERTTYILI? BOH. L’IPOTESI DELLA COEVOLUZIONE

Tutti i guai del consumo etico

Tutti i guai del consumo etico

THE MORAL CASE FOR SWEATSHOP GOODS – Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference by William MacAskill

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Argomento: lo sfruttamento dei lavoratori poveri, il consumo verde, il fair trade, il vegetarianesimo, il chilometro-zero, eccetera.

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How can consumers make the most difference?

The clothing retailer American Apparel, known for selling ‘fashionable basics’ like solid-colour T-shirts, proudly claims to be ‘sweatshop free’.

Note:SWEATSHOP FREE

The popularity of American Apparel is just one example of a trend towards ‘ethical consumerism’, where people spend a little more money on goods that are produced by workers who are treated well,

Note:CONSUMO ETICO

Sweatshops are factories in poor countries, typically in Asia or South America, that produce goods like textiles, toys, or electronics for rich countries under pretty horrific working conditions.

Note:DEFINIZIONE

Because conditions in sweatshops are so bad, many people have pledged to boycott goods produced in them, and a number of organisations devoted to ending the use of sweatshop labour, such as United Students Against Sweatshops, National Mobilisation Against Sweatshops, SweatFree Communities and the ingeniously named No Sweat Apparel, have proliferated in service to the cause. For this reason, there’s significant public animosity towards big companies such as Nike, Apple and Disney

Note:BOICOTTAGGIO

In developing countries, sweatshop jobs are the good jobs. The alternatives are typically worse, such as backbreaking, low-paid farm labour, scavenging, or unemployment. The New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof illustrated this well when he presented an interview with Pim Srey Rath, a Cambodian woman who scavenges plastic from dumps in order to sell it as recycling.

Note:ROVISTARE IN DISCARICA

A clear indicator that sweatshops provide comparatively good jobs is the great demand for them among people in developing countries. Almost all workers in sweatshops choose to work there,

Note:DOMANDE DI ASSUNZIONE

The average earnings of a sweatshop worker in Brazil are $2,000 per year: not very much, but $600 a year more than the average earnings in Bolivia, where people generally work in agriculture or mining. Similarly, the average daily earnings among sweatshop workers are: $2 in Bangladesh, $5.50 in Cambodia, $7 in Haiti and $8 in India. These wages are tiny, of course, but when compared to the $1.25 a day many citizens of those countries live on, the demand for these jobs seems more understandable.

Note:PAGA DELLO SFRUTTATO

Nobel Laureate and left-wing economist Paul Krugman has stated, ‘The overwhelming mainstream view among economists is that the growth of this kind of employment is tremendous good news for the world’s poor.’ Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University economist and one of the foremost proponents of increased efforts to help those in extreme poverty, has said, ‘My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops but that there are too few.’

Note:PERSINO A SINISTRA SI AMMETTE A DENTI STRETTI

The four East Asian ‘Tiger economies’ – Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan – exemplify speedy development, having evolved from very poor, agrarian societies in the early twentieth century to manufacturing-oriented ‘sweatshop’ countries mid-century and finally emerging as industrialised economic powerhouses in recent decades.

Note:TIGRI ASIATICHE

Bangladesh had a large number of children employed in ready-to-wear garment sweatshops at the time. Out of fear that this act would pass, factories quickly laid off 50,000 child workers. According to the US Department of Labor, rather than going to school or even finding better jobs, ‘it is widely thought that most of them have found employment in other garment factories, in smaller, unregistered, subcontracting garment workshops, or in other sectors’. Considering that transnational corporations typically pay much higher wages than domestic sweatshops, the lives of these youths likely became worse. Indeed, an investigation by UNICEF found that many of these laid-off underage garment workers had resorted to even more desperate measures to survive, including street hustling and prostitution.

Note:BANDO AL LAVORO MINORILE IN BANGLADESH

The correct response is to try to end the extreme poverty that makes sweatshops desirable places to work in the first place.

Note:LA RISPOSTA CORRETTA

Fairtrade certification is an attempt to give higher pay to workers in poor countries. It’s commonly used for consumables grown in developing countries, such as bananas, chocolate, coffee, sugar and tea.

Note:DEFINIZIONE FAIRTRADE

First, when you buy Fairtrade, you usually aren’t giving money to the poorest people in the world. Fairtrade standards are difficult to meet, which means that those in the poorest countries typically can’t afford to get Fairtrade certification. For example the majority of Fairtrade coffee production comes from comparatively rich countries like Mexico and Costa Rica,

Note:IL FAIRTRADE NON AIUTA GLI ULTIMI

Second, of the additional money that is spent on Fairtrade, only a very small portion ends up in the hands of the farmers who earn that money. Middlemen take the rest. The Fairtrade Foundation does not provide figures on how much of the additional price reaches coffee produces, but independent researchers have provided some estimates. Dr Peter Griffiths, an economic consultant for the World Bank, worked out that for one British café chain… less than 1% of the additional price of their Fairtrade coffee reached coffee exporters in poor countries. Finnish Professors Joni Valkila, Pertti Haaparanta and Niina Niemi found out that, of Fairtrade coffee sold in Finland, only 11% of the additional price reached the coffee-producing countries….

Note:GLI INTERMEDIARI SI ACCAPARRANO IL GROSSO

Finally, even the small fraction that ultimately reaches the producers does not necessarily translate into higher wages. It guarantees a higher price for goods from Fairtrade-certified organisations, but that higher price doesn’t guarantee a higher price… for the farmers who work for those organisations….

Note:NON TUTTO VA AI SALARI

Given this, there is little altruistic reason to buy Fairtrade products. In buying Fairtrade products, you’re at best giving very small amounts of money to people in comparatively well-off countries.

Note:CONCLUSIONE

Another major area of ethical consumerism is ‘green living’. Per person, UK citizens emit nine metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent every year. (Recall that carbon dioxide equivalent, or ‘CO2eq’, is a way of measuring your carbon footprint that includes greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide, like methane and nitrous oxide. For example one metric ton of methane produces as much warming as twenty-one metric tons of carbon dioxide, so one metric ton of methane is twenty-one metric tons of CO2eq.) As we’ve seen, climate change is a big deal. It’s therefore natural to want to do something about it, and the obvious way is to move to a lower-carbon lifestyle.

Note:GREEN LIVING

One common recommendation… is to turn off or shut down electronic devices when you’re not using them, rather than keeping them on standby. However, this achieves very little compared to other things you could do: one hot bath adds more to your carbon footprint than leaving your phone charger plugged in for a whole year;…

Note:STAND BY

hours. Another common recommendation is to turn lights off when you leave a room, but lighting accounts for only 3% of household energy use, so even if you used no lighting at all in your house you would save only a fraction of a metric ton of carbon emissions.

Note:SPEGNERE LE LUCI?

Plastic bags have also been a major focus of concern, but even on very generous estimates, if you stopped using plastic bags entirely you’d cut out 100kg CO2eq per year, which is only 0.4% of… your total emissions….

Note:SACCHETTI DI PLASTICA

Similarly, the focus on buying locally produced goods is overhyped: only 10% of the carbon footprint of food comes from transportation whereas 80% comes from production, so what type of food you buy is much more important than whether that food is produced locally or internationally. Cutting out red meat and dairy for one day a week achieves a greater reduction in your carbon footprint than buying entirely locally produced food.

Note:KM0

However, there is an even more effective way to reduce your emissions. It’s called offsetting: rather than reducing your own greenhouse gas emissions, you pay for projects that reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere.

Note:OFFSETTING

While the carbon we release by flying or driving is certain and verifiable, the carbon absorbed by offset projects is less attestable.

Note:LA TIPICA CRITICA ALL’OFFSETTING

Monbiot’s concern doesn’t… provide a good argument against carbon offsetting in general. It just shows we’ve got to do some research in order to find a way of offsetting that’s genuinely effective. That’s what we did at my organisation Giving What We Can….

Note:MA MONBIOT ESAGERA

The charity we ultimately decided was best is called Cool Earth. Cool Earth was founded in 2007 in the United Kingdom by businessman Johan Eliasch and MP Frank Field, who were concerned with protecting the rainforest and the impact that deforestation might have on the environment. The charity aims to fight global warming by preventing deforestation, primarily in the Amazon.

Note:PER IL TUO OFFSETTING DONA A COOL EARTH

It uses donated money to help develop… rainforest communities economically to a point where they do better by not selling their land to loggers….

Note:COSA FA

Cool Earth claims it costs them about $100 to prevent an acre of rainforest from being cut down, and that each acre locks in 260 metric tons of CO2. This would mean that it costs just about 38¢ to prevent one metric ton of CO2 from being emitted.

Note:CALCOLARE L’OFFSETTING

Using this figure, the average American adult would have to spend $105 per year in order to offset all their carbon emissions.

Note:105 DOLLARI OGNI ANNO. STIMA MOOLTO CONSERVATIVA

George Monbiot claimed that carbon offsetting is a way of ‘selling indulgences’, in reference to the medieval practice in which Christians would pay the Church in exchange for forgiveness for their sins. On a similar theme, a satirical website, CheatNeutral.com, offers the following service: ‘When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere.

Note:ALTRE OBIEZIONI POCO SIGNIFICATIVE

the animal welfare argument is much stronger for some animals than for… others, because some sorts of animal produce involve a lot more suffering on the part of the animals than others. In fact, eliminating chicken and eggs removes the large majority of animal suffering from your diet. This is because of the conditions those animals are kept in, and the number of animals needed to provide a given number of calories….

Note:VEGETARIANI: CONCENTRARSI SUI POLLI

The only quantitative estimates of farmed animal welfare I’ve been able to find come from Bailey Norwood, an economist and agricultural expert. He rated the welfare of different animals on a scale of –10 to 10, where negative numbers indicate that it would be better, from the animal’s perspective, to be dead rather than alive. He rates beef cattle at 6 and dairy cows at 4. In contrast his average rating for broiler… chickens is –1, and for pigs and caged hens is –5. In other words, cows raised for food live better lives than chicken, hens, or pigs, which suffer terribly…. The second consideration is the number of animals it takes to make a meal. In a year, the average American will consume the following: 28.5 broiler chickens, 0.8 layer hens, 0.8 turkeys, 0.37 pigs, 0.1 beef cows, and 0.007 dairy cows; in the UK people eat less meat on average but, like Americans, consume far more chickens and hens than cows. These numbers might suggest that cutting out chicken has a far bigger impact than any other dietary change. However, most broiler chickens live for only six… weeks, so insofar as we care about how long the animal spends in unpleasant conditions on factory farms, it’s more appropriate to think about animal years rather than animal lives. In a year, the number of animal years that go into the average American’s diet are as follows: 3.3 from broiler chickens (28.5 chickens consumed, each of which lives six weeks = 3.3 animal years), 1 from layer hens, 0.3 from turkeys, 0.2 from pigs, 0.1 from beef cows, and 0.03 from dairy cows. Combining these two considerations, we arrive at the conclusion that the most effective way to cut animal suffering out of your diet is to stop eating chicken, then eggs, then pork: by doing so, you’re taking out the worst suffering for the most animals for the longest time….

Note:STIMA SOFFERENZA/CALORIE

Psychologists have discovered a phenomenon that they call ‘moral licensing’ that describes how people who perform one good action often compensate by doing fewer good actions in the future… Amazingly, even just saying you’d do something good can cause the moral licensing effect. In another study, half the participants were asked to imagine helping a foreign student who had asked for assistance in understanding a lecture. They subsequently gave significantly less to charity when given the chance to do so than the other half of the participants, who had not been asked to imagine helping another student….

Note:PERICOLI DEL CONSUMO ETICO: CI FA DIVENTARE CATTIVI

La catechesi di Giacomo Biffi. Parte terza: l’enigma di Cristo

La catechesi di Giacomo Biffi. Parte terza: l’enigma di Cristo

Rendiamo omaggio alla verità cercando di capirla.

Il disegno di Dio è Cristocentrico, unitario e ontologicamente limitato.

Ontologicamente limitato: la creatura non può essere totalmente perfetta, altrimenti avrebbe natura divina.

Il nostro limite vanifica certe domande: perché questo e non quello.

Per comprendere meglio il disegno guardiamo alla sua fine. E alla fine c’è il Cristo Redentore crocifisso e risorto. Cristo è modello per l’uomo, per questo lo consideriamo “fine”. Cristo è modello per l’uomo indipendentemente dalla sua venuta, che si è realizzata per facilitare la salvezza di ogni singolo uomo.

Perché questo ordine tra gli infiniti possibili? Per evidenziare la misericordia (amore). Il nostro Dio ha un gran gusto a perdonare.

L’ordine prevede creature che liberamente peccassero (da qui la necessità di redenzione).

Dio non permette il peccato, Dio permette la libertà. Dio desidera solo il bene che porta con sé la possibilità di male.

Gesù: ci sarà più gioia per un peccatore pentito che per 99 giusti. Ma che significa? I 99 giusti non ci sono, l’ordine divino prevede per tutti peccato e pentimento.

A questa idea era già arrivato il Mersch: nel Cristo si riassume la creazione, da sempre Dio ha voluto per l’uomo un immenso perdono. L’uomo è il vertice dell’evoluzione e il Cristo il vertice dell’umano.

Esempi di centralità della misericordia. Il Manzoni sui Santi peccatori e la loro “caduta in grembo a un’immensa pietà”.

Il finale dell’ Esamerone di Sant’Ambrogio: Dio crea l’uomo per perdonare i suoi peccati in un atto di amore.

Il peccato non è al centro, come in Agostino, ma è la redenzione al centro.

Quali sono i rapporti tra il Cristocentrismo e il  Dio di Israele? Gesù è il Figlio.

Notiamo la formula di fede di Paolo nella Lettera ai Corinti: noi veniamo dal  Padre nostro Dio e siamo destinati a nostro Signore Gesù Cristo. Israele (creazione) e la Pasqua (Pasqua) sono unite. Dio e Signore vengono distribuiti al Padre e al Figlio. A Dio spetta la preposizione “da”, l’origine. Al Figlio spetta la preposizione “di”, nel senso di “per mezzo di“.

L’altro testo è l’Inno ai Colossesi: Egli è l’immagine, in lui sono create tutte le cose, tutte sussistono in lui… egli è il principio (modello), il primeggiante e per mezzo di lui tutte le cose saranno rappacificate in Cielo.

Cristo è il Primo. Lo stampo originale. La totalità entra in relazione con lui al fine della sua salvezza.

Tutto ciò cosa vuol dire? Come si traduce l’esegesi in teologia? L’esegesi d’altronde è strumentale alla teologia! Non siamo Giansenio che esauriva la teologia con la memoria e la contemplazione: il ragionamento, pdr lui, annacquava il vino della fede. Contro: San Tommaso: il ragionamento trasforma l’acqua in vino di fede, come nelle nozze di Cana.

Molta teologia di fine XX secolo cerca di de-ellenizzare il cristianesimo: impresa impossibile. Il cristianesimo nasce in ambiente irrimediabilmente ellenico.

La teologia si è avvalso largamente del concetto di causa, un concetto dominato bene anche dal profano.

Causa finale. Cristo è il fine dell’uomo. In che senso. Nel senso che l’uomo perfetto si comporta come Cristo. Cristo è inviato da Dio per aiutare l’uomo a riconoscere questo modello. L’ invio del Cristo è un interferenza di Dio nella storia allorché ci si rende conto delle debolezze dell’uomo e s’impone la necessità di un aiuto.

La condizione mondana dell’uomo è un mix di tentazioni e di aiuti. Ma qual è il giusto mix? Il Mondo con Cristo si rivela un giusto mix.

A cosa siamo destinati? A Cristo. La gloria di Cristo è la causa secondaria finale (la prima è sempre Dio).

Ma la creazione che fine ha? Cristo esiste per il mondo o viceversa?

All’apparenza  Cristo è inviato a redimere ed è quindi  funzionale alla redenzione (e quindi al mondo). Ma Scotocompie una rivoluzione copernicana: è il mondo ad essere in funzione di Cristo. Il perché è evidente da quanto dicevamo prima: l’uomo buono è fatto per la santità, per uniformarsi al “Cristo eventuale”. La redenzione è un intervento successivo voluto una volta costatata la debolezza umana.

  Il Cristo è il modello, viene dunque prima (primato di Cristo). Il Figlio, ricordiamolo, nasce per necessità dal Padre, quindi nello stesso istante. L’uomo è creato per adeguarsi al Cristo che è suo modello.

Causalità esemplare: Cristo è il modello dell’uomo. Ci insegna la perfezione. Se esiste un uomo/Dio possiamo aspettarci una sua perfezione con i limiti della natura umana.

Cristo è modellato su Adamo o viceversa? Il modello è sempre il più perfetto.

COMMENTO PERSONALE

Perché l’uomo? Qualcuno dice che siamo creati per amore. In realtà questo bisogno del Dio d’amore è soddisfatto con la generazione del Figlio che consente l’atto d’amore pieno, ovvero quello tra pari. L’uomo per Dio non è un “pari”, è piuttosto un bambino, un cucciolo che va aiutato. L’uomo è creato per la misericordia, ovvero per quell’amore speciale fatto di aiuto e affiancamento. Ecco allora a cosa puo’ serivire avere in famiglia un cucciolo: a far crescere un amore asimmetrico fatto di misericordia e impegno quotidiano.

perché i tennisti grugniscono?

Perché i tennisti grugniscono?

Per sopportare meglio lo sforzo.

Per darsi un ritmo.

Per simulare aggressività e intimorire l’avversario.

Per incoraggiare se stessi e pensandosi come chi dà il massimo.

Per richiamare l'attenzione su un evento in cui sono protagonisti.

Per coprire l’impatto della pallina con la racchetta in modo da non rendere disponibili preziose informazioni circa l’effetto impresso.