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Proyecto Visión 21

“They don’t need help, just the correct doctrine”

Francisco Miraval

I heard what I heard, but I was still unsure if I heard it correctly or if I was missing something. But there was no mistake. He said what he said and here I was, trying to make sense of the statement and trying to provide some kind of answer after he told me, “People don’t need help. They just need the correct doctrine”.

How can you say people don’t need help? What about people without resources, or people experiencing homelessness, or those who are marginalized or discriminated? What about those whose only hope is to survive one more day with the meager resources they can gather that day?

And what about those at the other end of the social spectrum, those who, for having everything they want and even more, have forgotten they own humanness and the humanness of others, living inside a self-imposed illusion of consumerism and materialism?

In fact, sooner or later all of us will need help in our lives. An unexpected change of luck, an accident, an illness, losing a job could leave us in a position when we need to ask for help and we need to receive help. It could happen to any person at any time.

Obviously, sometimes you need to change your mind about your own situation. You need to adopt a new perspective so you can see life under a different life (metanoia, in Greek). But that transformation is very different of simply adopting a new set of doctrines.

If addition, what should happen to those who, according to man I spoke with, don’t follow the “correct doctrine? He didn’t tell me, but I imagine he will ask questions to those people or, in other words, he will inquire about their beliefs. Very soon after that, he may even establish some kind of “inquisition.” It seems there are historical lesson we haven’t learned yet.

In our global, techno-scientific, almost trans-human society it is out of place, as this man did, to use a certain “platform” to promote (hiding behind flimsy excuses) the intolerance and dehumanization of those who follow a different doctrine, or none at all.

It is obvious that each person has the right to believe and think whatever he/she wants to believe and think, even if I don’t agree with those believes. It is also obvious that we should celebrate, respect, and defend both the freedom of expression and the freedom of religion.

That’s why, with patience and wisdom, we need to say something about those who proclaim that “If you don’t think like me you don’t deserve my help”. I wonder if the person who said that verifies the beliefs of those helping him, be it his doctor or his mechanic. That will be absurd.

I also wonder whatever happen to offering a glass of water to thirsty people or to be a “good Samaritan”. As far as I know, he who proposed those behaviors two millennia ago never asked for a doctrinal exam before helping others.

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