The need for a true separation of state and Catholic Church in Latin America
Antonio Vergara Lira
IAFT Director and Spokesman for Latin America.
Representing the Chilean and Ecuadorian organizations.
London, August 2014
Mr. President of the International Association of Free Thought.
Dear friends, directors and spokesmen of the IAFT.
Ladies, gentlemen and dear young people present at this 4th Congress:
Astronomers of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced in March that they were the first detected gravitational waves that swept the early universe during a period of explosive growth. This is the most important confirmation achieved so far about the theories of cosmic expansion, saying that the cosmos expanded by 100 billion billions times in a very short time during the Big Bang. The findings were made with the help of BICEP2, a telescope located in the South Pole which scans the sky at microwave frequencies, where the fossil energy of this fundamental event is gathered.
Predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago, the discovery of gravitational waves would be the final piece of one of the greatest discoveries of the human intellect. It will help scientists understand the start of the universe and how it has evolved into a fullness of galaxies, stars and nebulae.
The Known Universe came after the so-called Big Bang, which took place thirteen thousand eight hundred million years ago. Moments later, as noted, space itself began to expand exponentially.
I must add that scientists estimate as a result of the above, that there are over one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. Most galaxies have a diameter between one hundred and one hundred thousand parsecs, an astronomical unit that means: parsec = 3.262 light-years.
After these scientific wonders, that I cannot imagine, I wonder, can anyone certify or determine the “creation” of the universe as an action of someone of our likeness, which also may govern our daily lives?
I can understand the “insolence of ignorance” … disguised as “faith” and … I respect it, but I demand that these believers are not involved in my life, not in the millions of men and women worldwide, more serious also, if they do it with abuse, lies, force, dictatorships and economic abuse of all kinds, as is the case nowadays.
The Latin American freethinker thought, if anything, is progressing through access to education for children and youngsters. Do not forget that Latin Americans entered the formal history of mankind in October 12, 1492, with the arrival of Christopher Columbus and his daring expedition, unfortunately including commercial propagators and fans of the “Holy Catholic Church” that under the protection a CROSS justified the death of sixty millions of indigenous peoples, by the mere fact of thinking that the SUN was their source of life.
I want to highlight a short paragraph of one of the papers submitted to this 4th Congress by our friend Alfredo Jimenez, from Panama, when he says:
“The education received by the individual in the first years of his life, from his birth to the time when the transition from puberty to adolescence occurs is critical, fundamental and perhaps the most important of their life cycle, because that its fixed permanently, its main referents, including ethical and aesthetic kind.”
Therefore, I believe that our freethinking struggle in the so called “Latin America,” is to achieve an education and secular formation of children and youth in the future. It will be a bad historical memory which for over five hundred years our culture was coined under the ominous shadow of the “cross” a symbol of falsehood, error and dogma that blocks the light in the permanent and endless search for truth.
I consider very important the theme of this 4th Congress regarding the “separation of church from state,” but for the people in the place where we live, some of us here in the congress, where such separation exists constitutionally but not in a real way, it is essential to contribute to education to free us from these powerful domination … that are religions.
Dear friends, the full text of my speech will be posted on the website of the IAFT and my administrative report as one of the Spokesman of the Latin American Congress Oslo, Mar del Plata, Concepción and present will also be posted in the web page.
Ending this greeting, summarizing the above, with words spoken recently by Mr. José Mujica, President of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay: “Let’s try to archive the beginning of reasoning of the human species.”
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