SEVENTH PART

Jesuísm

What is Jesuism?

Perhaps an invitation, for those who wish to follow Jesus, to reflect on the merit of substituting a doctrine based on a mythology, for another, founded in a reality.

Perhaps, at the dawn of a new millennium, the hope of a new religion, clean and healthy, without any past of black shades and without being associated to any kind of fraud.

Anyway, whatever the perspective through which it is visualized, Jesuism is a commitment by God to all humanity, expressed in the message of the human Jesus. A message of love and justice, that doesn't discriminate anybody, no matter his race, culture, credo, ideology or social condition.

It is a doctrine that values the human being, exalting his inherent spirituality, which maintains the finite individual consciousness in permanent syntony with God's infinite consciousness.

The doctrine of Jesuism rejects the three basic dogmas of traditional Christianity.

Jesuism doesn't demand that Jesus had to be born as a divine entity. It pleases us to imagine him as a common man, the son of Joseph and Mary, conceived in a natural way. A man, who, althoug educated under the Jewish Laws, changed many of its propositions and added new ideas, thus composing a different philosophy. And for his unrestricted and unshaken devotion to a heavenly Father, for his insistence in valuing unconditional love, for the importance he showed to the practice of charity, as well as for his resignation when facing suffering and death, for all these things, Jesus reached an unique level of spirituality.

Jesuism sustains that, after his death, Jesus did not resurrected physically...only spiritually. This is our conception. Nevertheless, we admitted that, through a metaphysical phenomenon, his spirit could have "materialized " before Magdalene and the disciples.

Jesuism defends, categorically, the thesis that spiritual salvation is obtained through a worthy conduct, through the practice of charity, love and solidarity.

Jesuism also demands that theory must be complemented by praxis.

That this praxis has to be exercized at two levels: individual and collective.

At the collective level, it is the duty of every citizen to demand, from those in power, a fairer distribution of goods and values among all the inhabitants of the planet, in spite of race, faith, culture or nationality.

At the individual level, to understand that it is the duty of every human being to render help to any one that is needing. Before the eyes of God, to do a good deed to a fellow human being is worth more than days of prayers and praises. It is not a true Nazarene the one who idolizes Jesus, but ignores the poverty and hunger around him and doesn’t do any thing practical to lessen his fellow’s suffering.

That Good and Evil, God and Satan, are integrated in the consciousness of each one of us. And that positive thoughts and acts increase the expansion of the divine component, while negative acts and thoughts expand the satanic component.

Jesuism also embraces another theo-philosophical aspect that can be translated in the following way:

God, as a supreme, infinite and atemporal consciousness, created this and, perhaps, other universes. Therefore, in this condition, He is above all the things and of all living beings, including, naturally, any man. Exceptional human beings, endowed of high levels of spirituality, have appeared in our planet, at different moments of history. Although diverging in certain theological aspects, they all revealed a common essence in their preachings, which is: the exaltation of justice, dignity, solidarity and love.

They were the spiritual leaders of important monotheist religions: the lengendary Moses, the illuminated Buddha, the beloved Jesus and the fighhter Mohammed. They guided the behavior and the culture of billions of human beings and they altered, in some way, the history of our species.

But, because of their very finite and temporal human condition, they can never be placed at the same level of God. Only He, due to His atemporal and infinite condition, must be considered divine.

Those leaders deserve the merit of founding their religions, according to the social, political and economical contexts effective in the regions and the times they have lived and in agreement with the cultural and spiritual characteristics of the people to whom they preached.

We, heirs of two great cultures and traditions: the Jewish and the Greek-Roman, have Jesus of Nazareth as our spiritual leader and Jesuism as our religion.

But we recognize and admit that people who profess other faiths or even those who have no faith at all, as long as they are good-will persons, also deserve a worthy life on earth and peace in the eternity.

Because, after all, two great thinkers, Christian of Dune and Carl Sagan, have shown that we all have a common origin: the primordial dust of the universe... This vision, the Nazarene vision, is a statement of theism, as well as of humanism.

We wish to finish this chapter with two citations.

The first is a passage from the book "Is God Necessary?", by Roger Garaudy.

It says : "The God we need today is not that of the theologies of domination, that didn't cease to exist, from Paul to the current Catechism of the Catholic Church of 1988. The God that we need, in a world where the "monotheism " of market opposes a handful of rich to a crowd of starving, is the God revealed by Jesus: a God whose transcendence is not expressed through power, as the Greeks' sovereign Zeus or the God of the armies of the Jews, but where the divine is revealed through the weakest and the poorest ".

And we allow ourselves to add a few sentences to the that magnifient vision of Garaudy: "The God we need is not the God that has been used, through the evocation of the Holy Ghost, to create legions of fanatics, nor to promote the illicit enrichment of a group of false prophets ...in the name of Jesus".

The second was extracted from some articles of Thiago’s Epistle (Thiago,2,14-16,24,26). By transcribing them in a collochial style, we have the following:

" What is the merit, my brethen, if someone says he has faith, but doesn't practice acts (of charity)? Can faith save him?

If a brother or sister is nude and hungry and one of you says: ‘depart in peace; be warmed and filled’, but don't offer them the things which are needed for the body, what is the merit?

Therefore, a person is justified by his acts and not only by his faith. For, as the body without spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is also dead".

These two citations adjust as gloves to fingers to the essence of Jesuism: the importance of practicing good deeds. Which should be understood not only as isolated acts of charity, but also, and perhaps mainly, as the need of a persistent fight for a social and economical universal justice.

Thus, my brothers and sisters, one must protect the weakest and feed and give shelter to the poorest, here on Earth, before waiving to them the glory of celestial peace...

Final considerations

This book resulted of countless researches, many consultations, several debates with other specialists on religion, a lot of perseverance, indifference to the inevitable wicked criticism that will certainly come and courage to challenge concepts and dogmas, ingrained for many centuries in the mind and faith of millions of people.

Of course, we are not the first to challenge what is established by ortodoxism and tradition. But, surely, we concentrated, on those pages, many new ideas, seeking the difficult and perhaps impossible task of finding the truth.

We admit, with humility, our uncertainty as having reached our goal, since even Jesus silenced when Pilate asked him what is the truth. But if we didn't reach it, we feel we got close, inspired by a great force that motived us to enunciate the challenges presented in this book.

It was a long and, sometimes, uncertain journey. But, thanks to God, we are happy to have walked up to the end !

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