Don Chisholm:
>Ed, regarding your comment: >It is beautiful, melodic dream-like stuff with
>birds twittering through it<
>
>You seem to loose sight of the fact that about 80+% of the bowlers and
>factory workers, both in your home town and in Sao Paulo, believe in some
>story of another. (snip)
>
>I'm suggesting it's time to create a story of success. Just because the
>story might be technically feasible, which I still think it might be,
should
>be no reason for its rejection - a good story does not have to have angels.
>
>The Story does not have to be followed by, "Halaloolia", but by, "Hell, we
>can do it!"
>
>There is a growing chorus of people suggesting we need change, such as
>Theobald, Raven, Moore, McMurtry, Rifkin, etc. who all tell of why the
>existing must go.
>
>I'm suggesting it's time we create a story of HOW success could emerge out
>of a dark time in human history.
Don,
At about this time last year I was in Sao Paulo. While there I attended
several church services, not Catholic, the established church and the church
of the establishment, but Protestant and very fundamentalist. The
Protestant movement is growing very rapidly in Brazil, and Catholicism is in
retreat, so much so that the Pope himself is concerned about it. The
movement is doing some things that are very positive. It is giving
disparate groups of people a sense of commonality and belonging and it is
pumping money into things like community centers and pre-school education
for poor children. In doing these things, it is most certainly not
appealing to logic. It is asking people to help their neighbors and the
poor across town because God wants them to. And there are plenty of
Hallelujahs and plenty of guilt trips laid on by clever pastors to move
things along.
It is difficult to find fault with this process. It is doing good and
making people happy if, at the same time, guilty. Yet what bothered me
about it was that it was based on an absolutist view of the world. The view
of everyone I was able to speak to within the movement was that they were
absolutely correct on matters of faith, culture and society, and that
everyone else was wrong. For example, they roundly condemned Carnival as
the work of the devil, and ever so many of them moved out of Sao Paulo to
prayer camps when Carnival was on. I could see them banning Carnival if the
movement became strong enough.
The point I'm making is that the kind of change you speak of would probably
have to be based on a very strong message, much like the message being
accepted by the Brazilian poor. But if a message is that strong, it could
become very dangerous to anyone who disagrees.
Ed Weick
