The minister who manipulates the Bible to create political hatred

This is not just any minister, but the Minister of Education, Abraham Weintraub, who carries on his shoulders the enormous responsibility of training millions of children and young people for the future of the Brazilian nation. The minister, on the occasion of a meeting in Brasilia organized by the NGO Todos por la Educación, in addition to irony about the coronavirus, which could have infected the organizer, Priscila Cruz, one of the leading figures in the world of education, is still it served as the Bible to remember the wrath of God.

Bringing the biblical psalm out of context “The Lord will bring upon them their own iniquity, and will destroy them in their own malice; the Lord our God will destroy you ”(Psalms, 94,23), he has manipulated the holy books to sow political hatred.

The minister, who seems to know the Bible, should know that his quote refers to a verse in the Old Testament, that of the still vengeful God, who proclaimed the destruction of the enemy and that it is not possible to read it today without taking into account the New Testament, which is the culmination of the Old Man, in which Humanity makes the quantum leap from “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” to that of mercy, forgiveness of enemies and universal love. Any other political use of Sacred Scripture, and more so in a secular state, is to hurt democracy and try to sow tares to keep Brazilians divided.

If religion, whatever it is, does not serve to defend the principles of freedom and the defense of the marginalized and does not contribute to keeping alive the values ​​of civilization, conquered with so much pain throughout the centuries, it will only serve as an instrument of domination and division. The essence of any contact with divinity, is either liberating, or leads to alienation that desecrates Humanity.

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While in Brasilia the Minister of Education fell into the smallness of wanting to offend a militant who perhaps does not agree with her political principles, coming to invoke against her the wrath and punishment of God, a program on TV Globo about the hard life that They carry transsexuals in jail, aroused the wrath of intransigents remembering the "eye for an eye" at the Weintraub. It was on the occasion of the intervention of the doctor Drauzio Varella, who brought to the program his great professional experience of relieving the pain of prisons and denouncing possible abuses committed with prisoners.

If, at first, the doctor's account of a trans woman, whom he had just visited in prison, aroused the solidarity of thousands of Brazilians who knew that the detainee had been without a visit for years, and whom Varella came to hugging to console his loneliness, a storm soon arose over him when he learned something he did not know then. The detainee had previously committed a terrible crime, stupid and killing an innocent, a sin for which she has already been convicted and is paying in jail.

The doctor wanted to remember that he went to jails not as a judge or lawyer but as a doctor to help the prisoners. And a professional cannot fail to heal a sick person, whatever the crimes he might have committed.

And it is here where the curses of the Minister of Education against those who do not think like him for whom he evokes the punishment of God, with the outrage against the doctor Varella.

Since we live with a Government whose motto is "God above everything", and in which the ministers evoke the Old Testament to justify their sowing of political hatred against those who do not think like them, here too we must remember that the Gospels, which They are also part of the Christian Bible, they propose a God to the antipodes of the eschatological fury of the followers of President Bolsonaro.

Suffice it to recall that the curses of the prophet Jesus, who heralded a world opposite to the ancient world of anger and vengeance, were only against the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and the oppression of the powerful, never against sinners. When he hugged and cured the lepers, he did not ask them if he had killed someone before. His compassion for pain already revealed the birth of a society based on compassion and forgiveness, rather than hate or revenge.

To the men who asked for the death penalty against the adulterous woman, Jesus provoked them by saying "whoever of you is clean from sin should throw the first stone against her." They all left "starting with the oldest," says the evangelist.

If Jesus had visited the trans detainee today for her crime, surely he would have done it not to remind her of her sin, for which she was already paying, but to remind her that she was not alone in life and that God's mercy was greater than justice of men.

In the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee, Jesus took up the defense of the tax collector who on the last bench of the temple asked God for forgiveness for his sins, while condemning the pride of the Pharisee who boasted proclaiming: "I am not a sinner like that tax collector" .

One of the works of mercy of Christianity is that of "visiting prisoners." And that work of mercy does not discriminate the greater or lesser guilt of the detainees but focuses only on the loneliness they have to endure to atone for their sin.

I was a witness, as a journalist, of the famous visit of Pope John XXIII to the Regina Coeli prison in Rome, destined then for prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment for what their crimes must be very serious. The Pope, mixing with the prisoners, embraced them, blessed them and even reminded them that some of them could be there unjustly due to some error of justice. He did not go to acquit them or condemn them again since it was a function of men's justice. He went to comfort them.

And Pope John Paul II went to prison to meet Ali Agca, the young Turk who shot him and put him on the brink of death. And he ended up asking the civil authorities to be forgiven.

The justice of God does not always coincide with that of men and no one has the right, least of all in politics, to invoke the name of God to punish or ask for heaven's punishment against anyone. The rest is to desecrate the sacred texts.

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