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The decline of religious belief in the 20th century  “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”. James Joyce   Immense and often unexpected shifts of events were the most obvious characteristics of the period (1890-1940). These were accompanied not only by intense physical and emotional pain but also by a breakdown of assumptions about stability, certainty, continuity and tradition. These shifts caused confusion about the center and the periphery, about whether there were still such centers, and if there were where these could be located, and about the relation between centers and margins. All these questions failed to turn into positive answers precisely because shifts of power were shattering centers to pieces and made the relation between center and periphery hard to pin down. The fact that the Victorian age had been long and relatively stable, still attached to the principles and values of continuity and tradition, made this sense of crisis feel, sound and look even more rampant in the early 20th century, especially in the aftermath of Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, followed by King Edward’s death at an interval of only nine years, in 1910, when King George V came to the throne. Britain was not alone to experience this: in the rest of the Continent and even in US previous societies had tended to have a visible center and to produce centrally located cultures on a model provided by God as the supreme authority, and by extrapolation, the monarch as the supreme authority in human societies. Professor Codrin Liviu Cutitaru from the University of Iassy offers an edifying overview on the matter:   The King represents God on earth (from the teachings of the Old Testament where we learn that God approves at one point on the suggestion that people should be led by kings and no longer by judges and priests) and his unnatural, violent elimination from the top may push the whole order of things into immediate devastating chaos (example of such situations appear in different Shakespearian tragedies, where Kings are killed and substituted by impostors; this happens in Hamlet and Macbeth, where Claudius and Macbeth replace violently their monarchs and eventually bring disaster into the social and political order of their countries). In other words, modernity marked a paradigm shift from the continuity of tradition to the disruption of it and this engulfed status quo could not have remained without repercussions at the level of religious feeling. In the medieval times, modernus was used as an antonym of antiquus. Modernus was anybody whose name descended from a venerable past. Antiquitas stood for the essential uniqueness of tradition, whose continuity had not been broken by the advent of Jesus Christ. This paradigm of continuity could hold only by dint of strong faith, which was faith in divine authority. The challenge of this faith came along with the critical spirit of the Renaissance, and acquired even more force when the Romantic thinkers grew aware that the religious spirit was in dissolution. The myth of God’s death inflamed the spirit of the Romantics long before Nietzsche made it the main point of his prophetic doctrine. In this respect, Nietzsche fathered the profound sense of a crisis brought about by the death of authority voiced with so much zeal by the early 20th century. As Matei Calinescu argues, “the crisis of religion gives birth to a new religion of crisis, in which all the insoluble contradictions of the Judeo-Christian tradition are simultaneously brought to discussion in order to shake any sense of despair and sufferance”. The spirit of the age also affected Catholicism. Politically it was expressed in the separation between state and church which had occurred during the French Revolution. Starting with the second half of the nineteenth century, the church was almost everywhere in fact and in law separated from the state. There were some exceptions the most important being those churches which had been state-churches since the sixteenth century in countries not affected by the revolution, namely England and the Scandinavian countries. This contingency of events caused a confusion of minds which appeared less definitive in the second half of the 20th century. The will of the Catholic clergy towards centralization unto Rome continued. To be continued Ionut Manea

In tracking down the post-communist structure one ought to be aware and reconsider or reflect upon the emergence of communism as such. In “The New Encyclopedia Britannica”, vol.3, communism is described as “a political system or social organization based on common property or upon the equal distribution of wealth. The term is also applied to political programs and movements inspired by Marxist-Leninist principles, that seek to bring about such types of social organization”.  P496 The origins of the idea of communism lie deep in Western thought. The idea of a classless society, in which all the means of production and distribution are owned by the community as a whole and from which any traces of a state have disappeared, has long held a fascination for human beings. Many of the utopias described in literature (e.g. Thomas More’s Utopia ) grasp for the common ownership to some extent. Communism came into developing a new meaning in 1848 with the publication of the “Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. According to the Manifesto, all human history had been a long, protracted struggle between an exploiting class, the capitalists in the present age, and an exploited class, the workers (the wage-slaves), the proletariat. This historical struggle enters its critical stage with the dominance of capitalism backed by the Industrial Revolution. Here it is the point when one ought to dissociate Karl Marx from his early predecessor Friedrich Hegel. For the latter one, things of the Spirit dominated the material world, that is (mind over matter), whereas for the former one, matter stood alone in the struggle with the spiritual world (matter over spirit), or in a postmodern view (infrastructure over suprastructure). As I have mentioned above, the advent of industrialism/industrialization sharpened the class-difference or class-war causing the working classes everywhere to realize their oppression at the hands of the capitalists together with their common interests. “A Spectre is haunting Europe – the Spectre of Communism”. Or, in the final lines: “The Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite”. Extracts from “The Communist Manifesto” However, this most anticipated revolution did not boost overnight causing Karl Mark to reevaluate his thinking. In “The Critique of the Gotha Program” 1875, Marx wrote that “the revolution will not immediately bring about the ideal, classless, communist state. Prolonged birth pangs will accompany its emergence from capitalist society, and a period of adaptation, the dictatorship of the proletariat will be necessary”. The materialization of the program took the form of a political party that sought to implement the above-mentioned articles unto stark, daily life. A detailed examination of the history of the communist regimes under the form of political parties is beyond the scope of my presentation. It suffices to say, nevertheless, that it covered most of the 20th century political life in Eastern Europe causing irremediable mental and physical damages. …to be continued Ionut-Andrei Manea  

The deadly mass sterilization in India has sparked outrage worldwide. In a surgery spree, more than 80 women were submitted to the procedure in less than 5 hours, all done by the same doctor. Dozens of women have become ill from which 14 have already died. Population growth control is a controversial topic, especially when it comes to the developing world, where population reduction seems to hold the key to ending poverty. But is it really that simple?

Many French people cannot remember when the immigration problem started in Calais. This is not a new issue, but sometimes it appears in a sudden way and we are aware because the tension is unbearable or it coincides with other related European matters. We could see in the news, just to bring one random episode as an example, how hundreds of African people were asking to cross the famous fence while a big group of policemen waited on the other side. When the migrants tried to get through, they were attacked with pepper spray – that was the end of the gathering.