Mr Saramago, a Portuguese writer, honoured sometime ago with a Nobel prize has wrote a new book where he criticise God and its "harshness" and "evilness" saying that the God of the Bible is a bad figure with no mercy. The Catholic Church has through the Episcopal Portuguese Conference come to the battleground, criticizing, in very harsh terms, Mr. Saramago book and statements, considering it an offense to the divinity and to Catholicism.
Mr Saramago is entitle to freedom of speech and as an atheist to criticize God in what terms he likes. Mr. Saramago was a former Stalinist and is a member of the Communist Party and anyone who takes sometime to return to the pope, Karl Marx, can find tracks of the same absolutely prejudice on religion and God. Marx was a Prussian, from a Jewish family that was obliged to repudiate Judaism and convert to protestantism to survive in the Prussian society. Others figures of the communist pantheon had a well-known conflictual relationship with religion, as Mr. Lenin or Mr. Stalin.
What Mr. Saramago says (and writes) is nothing new. He has - we can guess- something to solve before coming into terms with the Creator, but that is his problem, not ours. What worries most in this episode is the the strong terms that the Catholic Church choose to react. It seems that we are returning to the Inquisition time and somewhere in the roadway an inquisitor process is put in action and a desire of bonfire and summarily judgment is awaken.
Nobody gave the Catholic Church the power to speak in God's name; we believe He didn't, and there is no Angel coming down to Earth to explain the deliberation of the Divinity.
So with the Wisdom, God hand to those who saw the light we are tempted to say: let the poor man say and write what he wants, because he is entitle to this by free of speech and thought. If you are outraged by the terms of the book don't read it, though it away, but don't come to say what one can write or not. We don't need a return to the dark times of the Church when it decide what was truth and what was not. That is why we have the separation of Church and State, of the religious and the profane worlds; and we are very happy we that. Thanks God.
