Tuesday, November 21, 2017

The Least You Should Know to Be Not a “Protestant Donkey”


The Least You Should Know to Be Not a “Protestant Donkey”

By Julio Severo
“O Mínimo Que Você Precisa Saber Para Não Ser Um Idiota” (The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot) is a book written by Brazilian immigrant Olavo de Carvalho, published by the Brazilian publisher Record in 2013. “Protestant donkey” is a term he uses against Protestants.
His book removes (or censors) the vital role of the U.S. Protestantism in capitalism and ascribes it exclusively to the Catholic Church, perhaps because he relied on an Italian communist writer. In the Chapter 5 “Capitalists X Revolutionaries,” in the section “Capitalism and Christianity,” Carvalho said: “to the supreme guru Antonio Gramsci, the number one enemy of the proletarian revolution was: the Catholic Church.”
Carvalho seems to ignore that communists lie and they are not intelligent, even when they seem to be.
If Carvalho read the classical book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” written by German economist Max Weber and published in English in 1930, he did not understand anything or he understood only what pleased him. Or he is so opposed to Protestantism that he prefers communists’ word as Gramsci’s. Does he prefer to put his faith in each word of Gramsci and doubt Weber and everyone recognizing that capitalism greatly prospered only under Protestant values?
The only hindrance Gramsci saw for the Marxist advance was the Catholic Church, because he lived in Italy, where Catholic Church and State had a promiscuous relationship.
There was no other influent church in Italy. Only the Catholic Church. From this limited experience Gramsci deduced that Catholicism is the only influence.
It was not only communists who faced hindrances to advance. Evangelicals did too. Nothing opposing the Catholic Church’s interests could advance in Italy. The Catholic Church gave no freedom to anyone.
The reach of Gramsci’s vision then was not different from the vision reach of a poor farmer in the Brazilian countryside in 1944 who would see local threats as more important than Nazism in the broad World War 2. The farmer’s vision only reached his immediate reality, disregarding, by ignorance and a lack of access to media, the larger far-away international reality.
If Gramsci lived in the U.S., his “rustic” vision would be enlarged and prevailed by the reality that the U.S., with its overwhelming Protestant majority and Protestant values, was by far the greatest hindrance to communism.
Yet, in Gramsci’s limited Italian universe, there was only the Catholic Church’s political power. He completely ignored the U.S. Protestantism’s political power, including that the most prominent opponent of Marxist esoteric Margaret Sanger was a Protestant called Anthony Comstock, the first pro-life activist in the modern history.
Sanger, from Catholic Irish extraction, founded IPPF, the largest abortion, contraception and sex education organization in the world.
So to believe in Gramsci’s naïve and rustic vision is to be too much idiot.
Carvalho has no excuse to have such naïve and rustic vision. He lives as a self-exiled immigrant in the U.S., the largest Protestant nation in the world, because he recognizes in this nation the characteristic of resistance to Marxism that ultra-Catholic Brazil or Gramsci’s Italy never demonstrated.
Yet, Carvalho’s book seeks to make a fool of the readers when it dissociates U.S. Protestant values from capitalism. It is no coincidence that the largest Protestant nation in the world is also the most capitalist nation in the world. By far, the worst kind of anti-Americanism is the one denying that the fundamental values of the U.S. society are Protestant values.
Carvalho’s book is replete with omissions, which can be called censorship, about the role of the U.S. Protestantism in capitalism. The only closest reference between capitalism and Protestantism in his book was entirely negative, where he said:
“Therefore, the financial (and even, by contamination, the industrial) capital, if it had some Christian element, continued to suffer a false guilty conscience. It could find relief from it only by adhering to the cunning Protestant ideology of ‘ascetism from the world.’”
In contrast, there are abundant positive mentions of the Catholic Church. The less idiotic reader will notice the inconsistency in his intents when he presents the Catholic Church as the enemy of capitalism in the U.S. and England. He said:
“The [Catholic] Church seeks even today to see a solution against the supposed evils of capitalism, which where it came to existence — England and the United States —, never harmed it and only helped it, including in the dark times of persecution and martyrdom it suffered from communist and other nationalizing progressives, as the revolutionaries in Mexico who began in the American continent an open season against priests.”
By saying “even today,” he recognized the persistent opposition, in the past and today, from the Catholic Church to the U.S. capitalism — a stance that clearly fits in anti-Americanism. So his attitude of censoring the essentially Protestant capitalism and clinging to Gramsci’s naïve and rustic vision was an essentially idiotic and anti-American attitude.
To deny the Protestant soul in the U.S. capitalism is akin to denying the Jewish soul of Israel’s land. This anti-American denial is abundant in “O Mínimo Que Você Precisa Saber Para Não Ser Um Idiota” (The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot).
To those who praise the U.S. capitalism, the omission, or censorship, of its Protestant soul is dishonest.
As Max Weber showed in his classical book, capitalism, defined as mercantile operations, always existed in several forms in Babylon, ancient Egypt, China, India and medieval Catholic Europe. But he highlighted that only in the West, where there was the Protestant ethic, especially Netherlands, England and the United States, capitalism prospered freely their societies.
Not satisfied in dissociating the U.S. capitalism from Protestantism, in his article “Herança de confusões” (Legacy of Confusions), Carvalho said,
“One of the favorite myths of the American culture is that the Protestant Reformation was one of the main sources of religious freedom, individual rights and protections against abuses from a central government. Add to it the Weberian (or semi-Weberian) false belief that the ‘Protestant ethic’ created capitalism, and the only possible conclusion is that today’s citizen is indebted to Luther and Calvin, after all, for virtually all the legal, political and economic benefits of living in a modern democracy. But all of this is propaganda, not History.”
Carvalho’s accusation of Protestantism as a source of religious freedom in America being a “myth” is as preposterous as his vice of calling the Inquisition a “myth.” He has no degree in history and related matters.
There are several American authors who have specific books dispelling such accusation, including:
* William J. Federer, America’s God and Country Encyclopedia of Quotations (Fame Publishing, Inc., 1996).
* Michael Farris, History of Religious Liberty: From Tyndale to Madison (Master Books, 2015).
* Jerry Newcombe, The Book That Made America: How the Bible Formed Our Nation (Nordskog Publishing, Inc., 2009).
Newcombe’s book shows how the Bible, which had absolute primacy in the Protestant Reformation and in the early America, which was 98 percent Protestant, molded everything in America, including religious freedom.
So Carvalho’s accusation makes sense only, in the realm of ideological fantasy, if he used Marxist and Illuminist sources to understand the American reality.
Far away from recognizing capitalism with Protestantism and religious freedom, Carvalho leads his readers to misinterpret the reality by being taught that Protestantism brought greater dictatorship than the dictatorship of the Catholic Church in the medieval Europe.
Even though I am not a Calvinist, I do not understand Carvalho’s insistent rage against Calvinism, always portraying in Portuguese Protestantism, especially Calvinism, as a dictatorship never seen before. A sample, as shown in his article “Herança de confusões”:
“Even in the most praiseworthy democracies, the State is today the mediator and sovereign judge of all human actions and affairs, even the most private and intimate, with a controlling rage and an invasive dominance unknown in all previous societies — with one exception, the dictatorship of John Calvin in Geneva, which is by no means a coincidence.”
In the Soviet Union, no one could choose to be a non-communist. In the medieval Europe, no one could choose to be a non-Catholic. How does Carvalho think that Protestantism was able to make Europe worse than it was under Catholic dominance? While in the Soviet Union the people was not banned from reading Marx’s and Lenin’s communist books, in the Catholic Europe the people was banned from reading the Bible and using it to guide their lives. How was Protestantism worse if it ended the ban?
Next, Carvalho said that the fearsome Marxist dangers threatening Catholics and Protestants today only came to exist because of Luther’s and Calvin’s “kind assistance,” as if before Luther and Calvin Europe, under the popes, had sheer democracy with no dictatorship, persecution and Inquisition. Essentially, he blamed Luther and Calvin for all modern evils, including Marxism. He said,
“By a quite understandable irony, Protestant churches suffer the consequences of this as much as or more than the Catholic Church, and today both have to join a common front to face fearsome dangers that would never have come to exist without the help of Luther and Calvin.”
In a sense, he is right. In an absolute Catholic dictatorship with the Inquisition (such was the medieval Europe), no Marxist ideology would apparently have freedom to expand, because the Catholic dictatorship would not want no competition. There would be no freedom also to people wanting to read the Bible in their own languages!
But, as Carvalho implies, if Catholicism is so hostile to fearsome Marxist dangers, why is the most Catholic region in the world — Latin America — so prone to Marxism? If Carvalho’s theory were correct, the biggest propagandist of Liberation Theology in the world would be the Protestant United States, not the Catholic Brazil. Why did Carvalho left Latin America and Brazil to live as an immigrant in the largest Protestant nation in the world?
This is not his only blatant inconsistency or hypocrisy.
Carvalho minimizes the horrors of the Inquisition, including by saying the absurdity that it was a advocate of human rights, and he amplifies the failings and sins of Luther and Calvin, giving them a cosmic dimension as if they were the authors of dictatorships similar to the Soviet Union.
Traditionally, the Catholic Church walks freely with socialism and Protestant churches, especially Pentecostal and charismatic churches, walk freely with capitalism.
A clear example of that reality is that in the 1960s and 1970s, in the conflict between capitalism and socialism in (overwhelmingly Catholic) Latin America, the KGB, the largest communist spy service in the world, supported sectors in the Catholic Church, while the CIA, the largest capitalist spy service in the world, supported Pentecostal and charismatic sectors of the evangelical churches.
Even today, evangelical churches offer the best resistance to Marxism. The far-left-wing Brazilian activist Marilena Chaui recognized that the top threat to Marxism in Brazil is the Prosperity Gospel, which was born in U.S. Pentecostal churches.
Even Gramsci would be able to see this reality, if he lived in Brazil or the U.S. But Italy, where he lived, was actually a too small universe, fatally limiting his vision.
The basic reality in the Americas is: where Protestantism thrived, capitalism prospered. Where Catholicism thrived, Liberation Theology, which is a radical enemy of the Prosperity Gospel, thrived. Is it a wonder that the largest Protestant nation in the Americas is also the most capitalist nation in the world? Is it a wonder that the largest Catholic nation in the Americas is also the nation most adherent of Liberation Theology in the world? Is it a wonder that the Prosperity Gospel, which is biblical capitalism, was born in the U.S.?
For Carvalho, to recognize that the Prosperity Gospel of Pentecostal churches influenced by the U.S. is the top threat to Marxism conflicts with his esoteric vision, because the overwhelming Catholic Brazil is syncretic, so syncretic that other esotericists, as Paulo Coelho, may at ease identify themselves as “Catholics” or “mystic Catholics.”
But both would never be able to identify themselves as Pentecostals or charismatics, because sooner or later they would come across the ministry of spiritual deliverance, which is common in this kind of churches.
Similarly, the less idiotic reader will notice that the usage Carvalho does of Catholic Church is as contradictory as his attempt to omit and dissociate the U.S. Protestantism from capitalism.
In the actual Catholicism, the pope is the head and supreme authority in the Catholic Church. In Carvalho’s Catholicism, he, not the pope, is the actual authority. In Carvalho’s movement, his authority is above the pope’s authority.
In “O Mínimo Que Você Precisa Saber Para Não Ser Um Idiota” (The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot) there are nine positive mentions of the Inquisition, exalting fanciful “benefits,” belittling its horrors confirmed by historians and trampling on the innocent blood of Jews and Protestants who were the main victims.
A less attentive reader will never realize that the advocacy of the revisionism of the Inquisition that Carvalho makes collides with the largest capitalist nation in the world, the U.S., which has always championed propaganda against the Inquisition. In the United States, Protestants and capitalist Jews joined forces in systematic campaigns to show the world the horrors of the Inquisition.
The U.S. that has always been a barrier to communism was also an obstacle to the Inquisition. Is not opposition to this U.S. leadership in awareness also a form of anti-Americanism?
In Carvalho’s case, it is a contradictory anti-Americanism because he lives as a self-exiled immigrant in the very country whose Protestant values he despises. He achieved the unprecedented feat of exalting an American capitalism without Protestantism and an Inquisition without horrors! That is, he amputated the Protestant ethic where it always existed — in American capitalism — and he introduced an ethic where it never existed — in the Inquisition.
The less idiotic reader will easily identify in his revisionist effort the same dishonest tactics used by the Jew-killing Holocaust revisionists.
However, even supposing the reader does not notice that capitalism and Protestantism have always gone very well together (the U.S. being the ultimate example), the minimally intelligent reader will notice other phenomenal discrepancies if he compares the book to other Carvalho’s writings.
On July 7, 2017, Carvalho said in his Facebook:
“I am not aligned to any right, but I have not changed my conviction that in a healthy country there should be left and right, both entitled to an equal share of radicalism.”
A genuine conservative categorically rejects any coexistence with the left. Carvalho does not. While a genuine evangelical conservative believes that in a healthy country there is no coexistence with the left, Carvalho thinks exactly the opposite.
Perhaps this explains why, although Carvalho attacks the left, the left’s major Brazilian media outlets, such as Folha de S. Paulo and O Globo, interview him in a respectful way.
He has a smooth talk, eloquence and seduction that is typical of astrologers. By the way, he can be called an “astrologer,” not by the way of cursing, but because he founded the first school of astrologers in Brazil. His involvement was not merely of an innocent man who studied astrology and esotericism. He really took students, who paid their classes, to study astrology and esotericism. He became a master-astrologer consulted by major magazines and television channels. He was a master in this and other occult capacities.
The same seduction present in his old school and astrology course is present in his current course of “philosophy.”
On July 7, 2017, a Protestant said:
“I am a Protestant Christian and a student of Olavo de Carvalho. What is Olavo de Carvalho’s problem? Because he’s a Catholic? Being a Catholic, he does more for humankind and defense of general Christianity than thousands of Protestants who do not even know the difference of socialism and capitalism.”
If this Protestant donkey (a term used by the astrologer who labels as “donkeys” Protestants who do not pay his classes) thinks that anti-Marxist speech makes the astrologer better than thousands of Protestants, so considering that Jesus Christ never directly and nominally attacked Marxism, does this mean that the astrologer is greater than the Savior?
Considering that Adolf Hitler, who was an esoteric Catholic and had millions of Catholic and Protestant followers, already had an anti-Marxist speech almost 100 years before the Brazilian astrologer, does that mean that the Nazi leader is above all?
With a stridently anti-Marxist speech, Hitler achieved the status of “savior of Germany.” With a stridently anti-Marxist speech, Carvalho is achieving the status of “Brazil’s savior” among the adherents of his political esoteric cult in Brazil.
I do not know what’s worse: An astrologer pretending to be conservative, one of his adherents pretending to be Protestant, or an idiot pretending to be smart just because he’s taking classes from an astrologer.
Hypnosis, like astrology, is part of the occult. Only hypnosis explains the tremendous blindness of Protestant donkeys.
By Protestant donkey I mean Protestant adherents of Carvalho who blindly follow him. All his Protestant adherents are Protestant donkeys. They are Protestant very suggestible to the eloquence of the astrologer.
I once asked an Protestant if he believed in everything the astrologer said about God and the Bible. He replied no and the reason given was that he had enough biblical knowledge to know that the astrologer was wrong, but he assured that in politics and geopolitics the astrologer was quite right.
When I asked him why he thought the “astrologer is right,” his motive was uncultured: As he did not know enough and the astrologer read a lot, the Protestant donkey concluded that the astrologer should know much more than he does.
His certainty was wholly based on his own lack of knowledge. Worse than the ignorant who trusts in his own ignorance is the ignorant who trusts in the ignorance or malice of others.
I asked him then, “Is the astrologer honest in biblical matters and the Inquisition?”
The Protestant donkey replied, “No.”
I concluded, “If he is not honest in some important matters, how can you trust him to be honest in other matters?”
The astrologer pays back the generous blindness of Protestants with public statements that he will continue to curse them, as if both of them were in an adulterous and immoral affair where it is common for the lover to be cursed and to be hit by the man married to another woman. In the case, Carvalho, who is already married to esotericism, said in 2016:
“Luther and Calvin were hatred-filled souls. The former was guilty of genocide, the latter the creator of a totalitarian government. Their followers are on the way of Hell, and if it is necessary to revile them using all the curse words to take them from this mess, I will do it pitilessly.”
However, a Protestant donkey never minds to be treated and cursed as if he were a communist. Evidently, Protestant donkeys like to be cursed by the astrologer as if they were mere prostitutes. They lost all capacity to be shamed.
Unfortunately, there are prominent Protestant donkeys.
Some were shocked by Congressman Marco Feliciano at the same time recommending esoteric Paulo Coelho and Olavo de Carvalho. See: http://bit.ly/2sOM12h
Feliciano was even mentioned by the BBC as the greatest politic supporting the astrologer, because in the Brazilian Congress he praised Carvalho “as a true prophet” — the same man who extols the murderous machine of the Inquisition that killed men and women of God.
Usually Feliciano condemns torture and genocide. In 2015, from the floor of the Brazilian Congress he condemned the genocide of Armenian Christians by Turkish Muslims, not allowing himself to be deceived by the campaign of Islamic revisionism against the massacre of Christians. However, he was unable to escape the astrologer’s revisionism against Jews and Protestants.
In a bewildering contrast, instead of using the floor of the Congress to condemn the Inquisition (which has already been condemned even by the legislators of the Brazilian State of Pernambuco, which today has an official date in memory of the victims of the Inquisition), Feliciano has shamelessly exalted in the Brazilian Congress the greatest Brazilian advocate of the revisionism of the Inquisition.
How did not Feliciano, who is an Assemblies of God minister, become an idiot of the revisionism of Muslims, but became an idiot of the revisionism of a Brazilian astrologer? Seduction? Hypnosis?
What is the difference of Feliciano crying out against the revisionism of Muslims, but silencing before the revisionism of the astrologer? If he could accept one, why not the other? What accounts for this “prejudice” and “discrimination”?
And it is not only Feliciano who was seduced by the smooth talk and eloquence of the astrologer. There are even traditional Protestant ministers. Last year, I reported on a traditional pastor and his wife who converted to syncretic Catholicism after taking classes from the astrologer. See: http://bit.ly/1Q1cmTA
Last week, I reported on Fábio Blanco, a writer who eventually left his Baptist church after taking classes from the astrologer. Now he is defending esotericism. See: http://bit.ly/2ukNyhP
All of them are unable to see the astrologer’s inconsistencies. They do not see even his most blatant and lying offenses against their former faith, in one of which he said recently:
“Protestantism was born from hatred and blood thirst. Its Christian inspiration is ZERO.”
Protestant donkeys, or idiots, have their minds so cauterized that they are unable to feel offended by the astrologer’s offenses. But as is typical among them, if you point out that the astrologer’s statements are offensive, the Protestant donkey or idiot is offended — with you!
Who seems to have made the most accurate comment was the Brazilian singer Lobão, who said: “Offense is the jerk’s expediency.” If he is right, the astrologer is one of the biggest jerks in Brazil. He spares no offense to anyone.
If you, even being a physician, say that cigarette is harmful, the astrologer throws out a bucket of offenses upon you.
If you, even being a Jew or a Protestant, say that the Inquisition tortured and killed thousands of innocents, the astrologer throws out a bucket of offenses upon you.
If you, even if you are a Catholic, challenge his shallow, superficial and syncretic Catholicism, the astrologer throws out a bucket of offenses upon you.
On the subject of the Inquisition, I know from experience. In the very year that he published his book “The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot” in 2013, Carvalho began to throw bucket after bucket of offenses upon me. I say “he began” because he never stopped. To this day he continues to throw offenses against me — exclusively because I, like every good American evangelical and every Jew, cannot and will never accept the revisionism of the Inquisition, just as I will never accept the Holocaust’s revisionism or the Islamic revisionism of the Genocide of Armenian Christians.
I am not stupid, much less a Protestant donkey, to accept this revisionism and his dishonest effort, widely documented in his book, to divorce American Protestantism from capitalism. I will never accept this kind of idiotic and anti-evangelical anti-Americanism.
The title “The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot” is too pretentious, because instead of ridding readers of idiocy, it leads them, under hypnosis or seduction, to complex idiocies, especially Protestant readers who, instead of the genuine American Protestant capitalist conservatism, end up giving their attention and soul to an esoteric conservatism that values the Inquisition and a false American capitalism mutilated from its essential and original Protestant values.
Carvalho became a powerful philosophical-esoteric illusionist, manipulating and twisting seductively the reality of capitalism, Inquisition, Protestantism, homosexuality, and other important matters.
His illusionism should be totally unnecessary and rejected among Protestants. Decades before Carvalho, the anti-Marxist conscience of the Brazilian Protestants had already been formed with American help, and nothing the astrologer did added anything to it.
His illusionism is the fruit of his history. Carvalho’s alleged “anticommunism” came from what he learned from the Traditionalist School, which mixed anti-Marxist conservatism with New Age ideas. The Traditionalist School was founded by the esoteric Muslim René Guénon, and Carvalho was one of the chief introducers of this sorcerer and his New Age ideas in Brazil. In addition, he translated one of Guénon’s books into Portuguese.
The film itself, “The Garden of Afflictions,” a cult of the astrologer’s personality, is a New Age work with various esoteric features, which can be checked here: “The Garden of Afflictions,” a New Age Movie.
Since when do Protestants need esoteric inspiration and advice from a neocon to fight against Marxism? Before Carvalho, they already had great inspiration from American evangelical leaders. And their fight is very well recorded in the History of Brazil.
Syncretic Catholicism is an excellent partner of esotericism in Brazil. That is why Carvalho and Fr. Paulo Ricardo commend each other. In his best-selling book, Carvalho talks a lot about religion, especially Catholicism, but he shows an obsessive rage to erase the vital American Protestant importance in capitalism. If this is not anti-Americanism, then what is it?
If what Lobão said (“Offense is the jerk’s expediency.”) is correct, then Carvalho is, with former Brazilian president Lula and his socialist adherents who love to offend, one of the biggest jerks in Brazil.
Only an equally stupid, or idiot reader, does not see it.
The typical cynical propaganda of Carvalho’s adherents is to claim that the astrologer’s offenses are misinterpreted comments and that to understand the astrologer’s esoteric mind, the victim must immerse fully into Carvalho’s cult, buying his books and taking his classes. For the astrologer’s pockets, this is excellent. But in the end, the victim ends up, in addition to his emptied pockets, with his mind emptied, becoming idiotized by a false and mutilated reality and conspiracy theories.
Only an imbecile, or idiot reader, and above all bewitched, does not see the eloquent mutilations and counterfeits of American capitalism and the Inquisition in “The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot.”
Jesus said that the truth sets you free.
The Bible, not the book of an astrologer, is “The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot.”
Jesus’s words, not the words of an astrologer, are “The Least You Should Know to Be Not an Idiot.”
Now, knowing this, you’re only going to be a jerk, idiot, Protestant donkey, and bewitched if you want.
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