/ world today news/ July 29 this year is another date for which the end of the world has been announced. Fortunately, each year there are an unknown number of dates that are set as the last for our humanity, but none of them are true. However, again and again the superstition that the last day will come is revived. Superstition, in fact, is the foundation on which these fears rest.
There have always been similar predictions about the end of the world in history. This is a manifestation, perhaps, of some phobia about how much our fate as humanity is known or not, commented to BGNES the theologian Assoc. Prof. Svilen Tutekov, lecturer at VTU “St. St. Cyril and Methodius”.
It is known in psychology that there is a difference between phobia and fear, because fear is of something real, while phobia is fear of some fictions, some imaginary things. In this case, it is about some kind of collective phobia, that life will fail in some fatal way for us, comments Prof. Tutekov. This next sensation should be thought of in this way. However, the important thing is that in recent decades due to the dominance of this consumerist way of thinking, the phobia of the end of the world, is starting to become a sensation and it has to do with the endless sea of information in which we live and we are very prone to succumb to this type of collective phobia . The example of the news about the end of the world from 2012 was very telling, adds Tutekov.
According to him, Bulgarians are superstitious, but to the extent that every modern person, although there is something specific to our culture, perhaps because of the special mixture of Christianity with pagan heritage. Our Christianity is very domestic, which is a good breeding ground for the birth of superstition. Superstition in the Bulgarian context, on the one hand, is a manifestation of the unexperienced pagan past – proto-Bulgarian, Slavic, Thracian, and on the other hand, it is a manifestation of insufficient Christianization of our people.
On the one hand, we have a very high degree of religious illiteracy, ignorance of the religious phenomenon, and this creates prerequisites for more and more superstition, according to the associate professor.
What exactly is superstition? Etymologically, superstition means replacing belief with something that is false, phantom. In a Christian context, faith and superstition are incompatible things. It is no coincidence that even in the Holy Scriptures of the old and new testaments there is a very clear and principled warning to guard against superstition, which is a prerequisite for being in the true faith. In the ranks of the church we have a very interesting testimony that our faith is based on specific events and facts, ie. if we take the Holy Scriptures, the Gospel in the whole tradition of the church, we have an extraordinary desire to have faith tied to specific historical facts and events, and from here also to specific historical personalities. This is very important for faith. From this point of view, faith and superstition are two incompatible things.
Superstition is born where there is a lack or replacement of faith with something that is quasi-religious, Tutekov pointed out.
The big problem is that modern man lives in an environment where our postmodern culture manufactures various superstitions. New and new needs arise from man to believe in just such a superstitious way. The subculture itself feeds the superstition. This is very characteristic. An example of this is our boundless faith in the power of technology. We have boundless faith in all that technology brings. Next, our boundless belief in the power of information. We create new and new idols. This is characteristic of our postmodern culture, it creates new and new idols – movie stars, sports stars. There is even a marked desire for them to be somehow characterized religiously, we call them “icons”. These are new idols that modern culture fabricates and feeds this false belief of modern man.
If we look at it from a biblical point of view, faith has idolatry as its main alternative. If a person falls away from the true faith, he automatically enters into idolatry, i.e. there is no third option. Therefore, naturally, in the spiritual crisis in which modern man lives, new idols are born and a new type of superstition is nurtured. One becomes more superficial in this superstition.
Paradoxically, it is precisely modern man, who is extremely based on technological achievements, on the development of technology and the huge amount of information, precisely this modern man, who is much more susceptible to more primitive superstitions than in the Middle Ages. That’s the paradox. It is because of the loss of true faith, which is reasonable and gives meaning, according to associate professor Svilen Tutekov.
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