The Man Jesus and the Roots of Secular Ethics - eBook

This book, whose title echoes Freud's last writing (*Moses and Monotheism*), starts from the hypothesis that, to address the problems of a globalized and computerized world, it is necessary to question the sacred roots of the very concept of secularism, from which not only the long Christian religious tradition derives, but also modern liberalism, founded on the autonomy of ethics from the law. The first secular person, in fact, was Christ himself. If we read his words, even though they have reached us only in the writings of the *New Testament*, which date back at least sixty years after his death, it is evident that this preacher who lived in Palestine did not intend to establish any new theocracy, but radically distinguished the transcendent sphere of ethics from that of politics ("give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's"). We are very far, in his words, from what would happen three centuries later, when Christianity became the state religion of the Empire. Psychoanalysis – to which there are only a few explicit references in the pages of this reflection on the sacred roots of Western ethics – still constitutes an indispensable inquiry to transform thought into a tool of action, capable of guiding each of us in the difficult choices we are forced to make today, on one hand in the face of the re-emergence of theocratic ideals, and on the other due to the depletion of the Western secular and liberal tradition. If it is true that there cannot be Christianity without ethics, since individual choice is at the heart of our religion, we cannot think that there could be an ethics that does not take the sacred into account and therefore does not oblige each of us to remain faithful to the liberal principles of the West. This is not just a theoretical or "philosophical" problem, because today it has an immediate political implication if we want to move forward on the path of democratic liberalizations, without losing what is most precious that has been passed down to us from our cultural and civil tradition: the irreplaceable value of individual freedom. Author: [Ettore Perrella](https://www.nepedizioni.com/ettore-perrella/)