The apparent contrariety

Abstract

There are societies in which individual and social mentalities are deeply imbued with religion, which dominates as a philosophy of life, and which guides its followers from the most insignificant to the most important thoughts and acts. There, secular life is the faithful reflection of religious ideology, unfolding in the shadow of its ancestral and collective narratives. There, present and future celebrate a mystical past, which they replicate through a circular effort and in their own circumstances. There are societies in which social life interferes little, if at all, with the religious one; where religion is merely tolerated, instead of being assimilated or consuming. There, religion is not an ideological guide, an all-leading factor and force, but only a reminiscent paradigm; there, present and future shape themselves as stages of an evolutive spiral. A society to which religion imposes itself as a force that tends to perpetually conserve the status quo, opposing paradigm shifts in order to keep society on the uniform path of the imposed ideal; and a society that believes that since the fundamental reality is matter acting according to its internal laws, ideology appears, exists and becomes through and in the image of the material being subject to evolution, beyond its developments and avatars.