is it just in brazil, or do you also have a saying that goes like like “religion, politics and football are best left undiscussed”.
my first reaction to this is: well of course these are things not to be discussed - in principle, you only discuss rational things and these are the domains of irrationality. that doesn't quite cut it though...
in the case of religion... this ‘not to be discussed’ inclination tags along with the common position that states that religion is a personal thing, a thing of the individual, isolated soul, and not a collective practice. this should sound odd, and maybe alert us to a peculiar role of religion in the modern world. i feel this every time i see a religiously zealous co-worker doing something slightly immoral in the name of the corporation; and it makes me self-righteously try, usually to no avail, to imagine what goes on inside his head when, back home at night, his mind races to reconcile these petty acts of greed-in-the-name-of-the-other with devotion to some concept of good.
did religion lose its edge of a zone of social and moral engagement to be reduced to a personal defense mechanism against daily cognitive dissonance? maybe that’s just it: religion as a collective practice would find it very hard not to challenge the myriad compromises (should the word be ‘transgressions’?) required by daily life in these subindustrial tropics. religion as a purely individual realm allows you to keep yielding, and aids your (ir)rationalization at home.
not to mention the shock value of “politics is something that shouldn't be discussed”! if it is anything, is is the VERY FIELD of discussion - politics is the act of discussing what you think is the best course of action. repress that and you stifle the possibility of a social life; you replace a political existence with daily immorality in the name of subjection to great paranoid powers, and of dependence in defensive discourses of forgiveness.
which leaves us with the thorniest issue of football...
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