Another form of Christianity that resonates in the Global South and is therefore growing in places like Africa is prosperity churches. Preachers of the prosperity gospel are so called because they teach that material wealth and physical health are signs of God’s spiritual blessing and that poverty and disease are evidence of sin or lack of faith. At the extreme, preachers suggest that one can demonstrate faith and unlock the blessings of heaven by tithing or giving to the church, sowing a seed to reap a financial harvest or healing. Many evangelical Christians consider prosperity preaching dangerous, self-serving, and a threat to true Christianity.
If God exists, and I truly don't believe he does, he will know that there are limits to human understanding. He was the one who created this confusion in which there is poverty, injustice, greed and loneliness. He doubtless had the best of intentions, but the results have proved disastrous; if God exists, He will be generous with those creatures who chose to leave this Earth early, and he might even apologise for having made us spend time here.
📚🔔 Tatil zili çaldı!
Bir yıl boyunca verilen emeklerin ardından şimdi dinlenme, keşfetme ve yeni maceralara atılma zamanı. 🌞
Bu yaz bol kahkahalı, bol anılı ve elbette bol kitaplı geçsin. Tüm öğrencilere keyifli tatiller diliyoruz! 💙📖
Finally, amid a culture grounded in values of competition and materialism, we confront not only actual material conditions, pertinent as they are, but also how people are induced to see themselves. When people judge themselves or are judged by others according to financial achievement, being lower on the pyramid-even if in a relatively stable position-is itself a source of stress that undermines well-being. In the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky's tart phrase, "Health is particularly corroded by your nose constantly being rubbed in what you do not have."
Racism, poverty, inequality-in this society, people's faces are constantly rubbed in what they do not have and what the system daily reminds them they do not deserve.
In 1974 the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, cited earlier in this book, coined the phrase "sociogenic brain damage." Technologies since available to us confirm that stressed environments, including penury, do interfere with brain development. More recently, one scientist has called poverty a "neurotoxin." Brain scans of children and young people from deprived backgrounds have shown reduced surface area of the cerebral cortex, as well as smaller hippocampi and amygdalae-the subcortical regions involved in memory formation and emotional processing. The brain's serotonin system in adolescents has been seen to be impaired by the stresses of poverty, increasing the risk for emotional turbulence.
Both inequality and poverty stir the by now familiar brew of disturbed genetic function, inflammation, chromosomal and cellular aging, physiological wear and tear, hormonal disturbances, cardiovascular effects, and immune debility, all of which combine to bring illness, disability, and death. Biologically embedded in utero, in childhood, and throughout adolescence, all these are further exacerbated by adversity or threat at any stage of life. Stress hormone levels, for example, are much higher among children of low economic status -a biological hazard for future illness of many kinds.
At the same time, while modern technology has ended natural alienation (the struggle for survival against nature), social alienation in the form of a hierarchy of masters and slaves has continued. People are treated like passive objects, not active subjects. After degrading being into having, the society of the spectacle has further transformed having into merely appearing. The result is an appalling contrast between cultural poverty and economic wealth, between what is and what could be. ‘Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation’, Vaneigem asks, ‘entails the risk of dying of boredom?’
