How Religion Made Your Life Unsafe

 

Hello! Have you ever noticed how our country is such an unsafe and violent place? Where almost daily impunity outrages us? Almost everyone blames politics or poverty, but few look at the deep influence of religions that shaped our society and how that influence is responsible for much of the violence we experience.

The History of Colonial Poverty

Our history begins with the Roman-origin tradition and the colonial period. This entity was a fundamental partner in the process of colonization. Colonization took everything from indigenous peoples: their culture, names, languages, and, most importantly, their land. In exchange, it offered the promise of paradise after death. The exchange was brutal: they lost a vast heritage in return for a religious tradition. The result is the structural poverty that affects millions of descendants, condemned to low-paying jobs and lack of opportunities.

The same happened with enslaved Africans. Religious leaders of the time used misinterpretations of sacred texts to justify enslavement as a divine right. When they were finally freed, they were abandoned to their own fate, without land, money, or support. This foundation of extreme and historical inequality is the fertile ground where crime flourishes.

The Influence of Religious Forgiveness on Laws

Religious morality has infiltrated our legal system. The concept of unconditional forgiveness — the famous "forgive your brother seventy times seven" — created excessively lenient laws. Our Justice system hesitates to punish exemplarily, as it waits for the moral redemption of the criminal. This is why we resist harsher punishments, like the death penalty for heinous crimes: the concern is always about not sending the criminal's soul to hell.

This philosophy, however, ignores the existence of individuals, like psychopaths, who will never feel empathy or remorse for their actions. This naivety also reflects in how we treat juvenile offenders. The idea that "to children belongs the Kingdom of Heaven" influences laws that grant excessive tolerance to young people who today have full awareness of their actions. They can already vote, work part-time, and many are already parents, but they still cannot be held responsible for their actions.

As a result, adult criminals use these adolescents as legal shields, knowing the punishment will be light, while the victims remain without justice, and many lose their lives.

The Valorization of Criminality

In these traditions, the ex-criminal who converts is often celebrated more than the faithful who has always followed good conduct. The reason is doctrinal: faith focuses on the "sinners" (the sick), not the "righteous" (the sane). This valorization generates a wave of conversions in prisons. Many criminals realize that faith is a shortcut to social acceptance and, surprisingly, to religious leadership.

This often becomes a disguise: there are communities where drug trafficking is ironically dominated by traffickers who claim to have converted. The situation has become so contradictory that many criminals even ask their god for protection before committing serious crimes against their victims — all based on this religious and philosophical distortion.

Sin and Grace: "The Called: It's Friday!"

The moral ambiguity of our society is evident in the classic phrase: "I am not ready to accept faith now." This is, in fact, an excuse to postpone responsibility and "enjoy life," which is nothing more than parties, vices, casual sex, and often crimes, under the expectation that God's Grace will forgive everything in the end.

The logic is that the more one sins, the more God's glory abounds in forgiveness. This mentality destroys the sense of individual justice. Why do good today if God is always ready to forgive me whenever I want? Why not commit crimes if I will always be forgiven?

This mentality can also be seen in our festival calendar, which is not random. Carnival is not a Brazilian festival; it was brought along with religion. While indigenous peoples consumed beverages and plants in sacred rituals with specific purposes, organized religion institutionalized Carnival as a planned period of excess.

The goal was simple: people needed to sin to feel guilt and, thus, seek absolution during Lent, essential for maintaining the role of religion. After all, it came to seek the sick, not the sane. Over time, this cycle became weekly: "Sextou." People leave work seeking excess and immediate gratification; they spend Saturday hungover (an informal penance), and on Sunday, they seek moral reconciliation in religious temples.

The problem is that the lack of moderation in this cycle leads to domestic violence, alcoholism, infidelity, crimes of passion, and traffic accidents, where intoxicated criminals kill people almost every week — tragedies that our legal system, based on eternal forgiveness, continues to fail to punish adequately. Thus, we live in a cycle of crime and impunity.

From Devotion to Alienation

The tradition of asking for the intercession of deceased humans (spirits), even if they were pious and exemplary, has roots in Rome, where blind obedience to emperors was reinforced through worship. This culture accustomed us to venerate other humans and their symbols.

Today, veneration has shifted from the deceased to political leaders, athletes, artists, and even clothing brands, money, and the ego itself. By training society to bow, placing other humans in the place of the Eternal, over time, people become vulnerable to bowing to anything.

This partly explains the blind intensity of political fights in the country, conflicts among organized fan groups, and the worship of pop music stars.

Another Religion

The French-origin religious tradition, popular among the middle class, also has its share of influence. Its belief in past lives and the Law of Cause and Effect often justifies poverty and inequality as the results of "debts from past lives" that people are supposedly paying.

This view discourages structural change (like paying fair wages and creating better work environments) and encourages charity (like donating clothes and food) only to alleviate "karma." Moreover, this philosophy infiltrates the laws, where exemplary punishment is avoided because it is believed that the criminal is here to "evolve," or that the victim might be paying a "debt."

Evidence that this religion affects our safety is seen in cases where the Justice system accepted a letter dictated by a spirit, exonerating its alleged murderer, even though the letter contained errors, as the deceased's name was signed incorrectly, swapping an "i" for a "y" or vice versa.

Here you can see how beliefs influence our society when supernatural evidence without any scientific proof is used to justify the conviction or acquittal of someone who may or may not have committed a serious crime. This also contributes to our legal insecurity, as courts must be secular and rely on material and documentary evidence.

Other Religions and Security

To understand the impact of all this on insecurity, just look at the world. For example, in Islamic countries, justice is retributive, with a focus on immediate and exemplary punishment. There is a tendency to have lower crime and violence rates due to the high cost of crime.

In China, a country influenced by Buddhist and Confucian philosophy, laws are strict and punishment severe, focusing on social order and responsibility. As a result, the Asian country has very low crime and violence rates, due to an extremely rigid and punitive legal and surveillance system.

In Japan, a country shaped by Shinto, Buddhist, and animist mentalities, honor, responsibility, and social cohesion are valued, focusing on public shame and punishment as the individual's failure before society.

This mentality created one of the safest countries in the world, with laws that, although not ultra-punitive, are applied rigorously and without the legal leniencies we see here.

The difference is clear: where the law is based on justice, order, and punishment — not on religious tolerance and forgiveness as the primary foundation — insecurity is contained, and crime decreases, turning the country and society into true security paradises, very different from our countries colonized under another religious mindset.

Conclusion

In this essay, we demonstrated how the doctrinal and historical influence of certain religious traditions shaped our society, creating a country of extreme inequality, with a slow and permissive legal system, and a culture of excess and postponement. These factors together form the scenario of our insecurity and violence, which worsens every day without an apparent medium-term solution.

The aim here is not to criticize any tradition, but purely to provide an analytical and sociological reflection, where the challenge is to seek real solutions that promote justice and security for all.

Finally, we focus on the maxim of our religion that says: "when we change our thoughts, we change our words and actions, and eventually we change our society." All human problems have solutions, and we are here to promote this change, focused on reason and the renewal of our minds. 

May the Eternal bring us laws perfected in what is right and actions that truly bring justice and security for all.

Aisi~