rigo

hm. been a while since i've posted. i guess i've been kinda busy. work and hanging out and what not. i guess when i have someone to confide in, i talk to you less. oh well. does anyone really care?

anyway. nothing to important to blog about. i'm still hung up on that rigoberta book. i'm getting through it really slowly cuz i've been up to so much, hardly any free time. and i forget to bring it to the pool too.

yeah. so i'm still hung up on how religion uses the masses. Rigoberta a devout catholic still acknowledges its power over them. "Catholic Action too submitted us to tremendous oppression. It kept our people dormant while others took advantage of our passivity."
hm. a taming of the masses to get them to work for the "higher power".

christianity tells people that no matter how poor or shat they are in life here on earth, that if they reach heaven its a beautiful utopia with all the corn tortillas you can eat!

but what she goes on to explain is how this religion helps exploit their labor. and this is what i've been saying all along, i'm glad other people independently came up with it. it's not such a novel notion, but its good to hear:

"even religions are manipulated by the system, by those same governments you find everywhere. They use them through their ideas or through their methods."

but what she ends up doing, even though she realizes this corruption, is to utilize Catholicism to her advantage:

"reality teaches us that, as Christians, we must create a church of the poor, that we don't need a Church imposed from outside which knows nothing of hunger. We recognize that the system has wanted to impose on us: to divide and keep the poor dormant. So we take some things and not others. . . we have understood that being a Christian means refusing to accept all the injustices which are commited against a humble people who barely know what eating meat is but who are treated worse than horses."

so whereas before all these indian cultures were following their "ancestor's ways" as a sort of culture/religion, rigoberta starts to go from community to community to unite all the poor natives that are having their land stolen and people terrorized. this brings to mind some of the few well known examples of how other religions started, muhammed united the tribes of saudi arabia and the surrounding area to rise up and expand their new-found culture's territory. and although it wasn't really about the land, but maybe the mindset in jesus' and paul's time, they set out to make a uniform religion. see. the whole jesus concept makes it sound selfless, but i think in later roman times, maybe this dude, jesus' persona was diefied definitely used to the caesar's advantage, well, once they switched over to christianity.

so rigo was out being her modern-day jesus in hopes to create a better life for her people who only want the basic ammenities of life: a bit of land to grow food on, and peace from being hassled by outsiders. but their labor was so cheap, sometimes they never even got paid due to circumstances like acoholism or sick children.

her belief is that its, "the duty of Christians to create the kingdom of God on Earth among our brothers. This kingdom will exist only when all have enough to eat, when our children, brothers, parents don't have to die from hunger and malnutrition. "

ok, i guess i'm now just reiterating the same point here, and just to do it one last time before i move on to a slightly different topic, what i'm saying is here:
all rigoberta was doing was unifying her people by using her "enemy's" religion against them.

so i guess religion can be used for both liberation or coersion. depending on who's using it and on/with whom.

its also interesting when she gives the soldier side of the story.
raids, i guess, were fairly common at some given point in the 70s or 80s in rigo's part of guatemala. men would be tortured, women would be raped, fields would be burned, ceramics broken, etc.
one day, a 90-some year-old woman who was too resiliant and tired to run up to the mountains as was the usual form of safety from these raids, caught a soldier and killed another, go badass grandma! (with only a hatchet, nonetheless).

the point of that was, that they talked to the captured soldier, who was also a native indian, and found out how these people are manipulated to do the government's biding.

they are told that the people who live in the forests are commies. they are unspecific on how to identify one, but they should know that they're all out there in the forests, so kill the faceless commmies (the non-uniformed people)!

some are easily brain-washed and blindly go out and kill what they were told to. others are scared shitless and do the same. fortunately though, there are some that are cynical and question what they're doing. usually though, these people end up dead. shot by the government's army. that thin line of traitor or a simply a situation that looks fishy, isn't thought twice about, and the soldier is immediately made an example of on the firing line.
so those who aren't blindly obeying are forced to obey through fear of death.
the guy that was captured, however, was released and, as far as rigoberta knew, was hiding out in the forests. going home = death.

this sums it up nicely, as in this narrated conversation with rigoberta and the captured soldier.
the soldier begins:
"'We have to obey the captain. The captain is always behind us and if we don't obey, he shoots us'.

We asked him: 'and why don't you get together then if there's only one captain.'

'Well, not all of us think the same.' he said, 'many have come to believe in what we're doing.'

And we asked him: 'And what are you defending? Where are these communists?'

The soldier didn't even know what communists were.
We asked him. 'What do they look like?'

And he said: "Well, they tell me they're in the mountains, that they don't look like people, and things like that.'"

well crap. i guess i just told you that then gave you the quote. boring...
but again, the idea is that fear is a tool used to control people. for the army: death. for religion: loss of that corn-filled utopia.
and in the case of the army, too many varying backgrounds were held to do anything about the figurehead that was promoting death to commies. the existing army culture/ideal/religion kept enough chaos through that fear to keep control over its subordinates.

then rigo comes along and begins that unification of those being suppressed, going town to town giving them ideas on how to fight the army, and using the universal language of that area: spanish.

what rigoberta eventually ends up doing is using the means of power (religion and language) against the government and landowners that initially established them.
brilliant!
the point being (wait i've made too many) that she used religion to take control and give power to a group of people.
be it for "good" or "bad", religion is simply a tool for power.
its not something to be believed in as much as a culture that puts everyone who's influenced by it on the same level of understanding: this is how things are done, and this is why. . .
no questions necessary because vague or "becuase i told you so" answers will put all your queries to rest.

aint it simple when all you have to do is what you're told?
no wonder craploads of people devote their lives and freewill to whatever religion their immersed in.
its like a subculture or ammendment of one's own culture.

k. shutting up.
thanks for walking through that with me.
if it reads all fucked up, its cuz i simply let my mind flow.
and sometimes that's a jumpy ride.