Is there a God?

There is one thing that is striking in the reactions to Maradona's death. And it is the resonant, repeated, obsessive toll of the word "god". Everyone, without exception, wrote, said, shouted that Maradona was a "god": of football, in the most profane and contained version; of all of us, in that bordering on mysticism. Facebook posts, tweets from celebrities, editorials in the gazettes, elzeviri in the evening newspapers: god, god, god. Maradona was, indeed is, a god.

There is no social level, cultural level, even political side, which has not attributed the sacred epithet to Diego, or which has not given him the honors, indeed the adoration, due to the gods. But here we do not want to talk about the footballer who described himself as "the hand of God", but rather the need underlying his process of divinization. It is this fact that is surprising. Not that Maradona "ascended to heaven" by popular acclamation. After all, it can fit.

We are talking about the greatest champion in history because he was able to be the most human, in the round, for better or for worse. And his astonishing ability to rise from a thousand and more falls in the mud of vice, sin, perdition has made him a thousand times more lovable than certain samples perfect as cyborgs, but fake as figurines and immobile as statues. What, in truth, amazes in the whole "Maradona as god" business, is not the word "Maradona", but the word "god".

And above all the passion, the longing, the insistence with which it was pronounced and then spread in the ether, and on the web, like a drumming and inextinguishable echo: god, god, god. As if an incompressible need appeared, furious, from the collective unconscious and premises from the abysses of the psyche of every person on earth. And not only, not so much, the need to deify Maradona, but the much more archaic, pre-logical (truly religious) need to be able to greet the return of God among us. Almost as if the most secularized era of all time, that of exasperated secularism, of the transmutation of all values, of the rejection of faith, of prevailing materialism, of rampant consumerism, had finally broken its banks.

A civilization full of orphaned, disoriented, disoriented individuals, a system where only the points of the GDP count, while people do not count: if anything, they are counted and weighed according to how much they consume and, if necessary, they "go ". In this desertified and asphyxiated context, void of "Eternal", "Good", "Virtue", "Beauty", "Justice", "Truth", "Hope", "Charity", " Spirit ”and of all the transcendent, high and“ other ”values ​​- in a word,“ drained ”of every trace of God – suddenly God reappears.

But not as an existing reality, because (almost) no one believes in it anymore. Rather, as a forced regurgitation of an unexpressed need, as an unexpected outcome of a need that has been compressed for too long. Perhaps it is time to ask ourselves not so much about the planetary impact of the news that Maradona is dead, but about the global consequences of the fact that God is "dead". And how much a world can hold up without a certain kind of connections; of links with a supra-dimensional reality not already "desired" (knowing that it is not there) as when we call "god" to Maradona. But, instead, invoked (knowing that there is) as when we turn to God, believing in him.

Francesco Carraro

www.francescocarraro.com

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Is the article God there? comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/dio-ce/ on Sat, 28 Nov 2020 09:19:32 +0000.