Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Brazil's Evangelical Far Right Could Elect The Country's Next President (HBO)" video.

  1. Great to see Vice covering this very important... thing that's been growing in brazilian politics which is close to going out of control. To be clear, the evangelical take over of brazilian politics didn't happen overnight, nor it started after the current series of corruption scandals and deposition of the populist left. It's been slowly but surely advancing for a while now. In a way, it's to be expected in a country that has been building the biggest, most absurd temples of worship in the most prime real estate for years. To be clear, I have no problems with religion myself, even if I'm non-religious. But as with anything that touches human hands, power corrupts. And in the case of several evangelical temples, there is no doubt that corruption is involved. You basically have some very charismatic people using everything from simple oratory to total and complete propaganda and brainwashing techniques to harvest whatever money they can get from the poorest, only in numbers. Some churches have a fixed charging rate of 10% of wages from it's followers. They might be getting even bellow the minimum wage, but when you add up hundreds of thousands of people, it doesn't take much time for some of those priests to become millionaires. And then, of course they'll get power hungry and overtake politics so they can not only force their own beliefs on an entire population, but also find a way to get even more money from even more people. It's widely known that some of these evangelical churches basically have a whole bunch of real estate in some of the more expensive locations throughout Brazil. Unoccupied apartments and mansions that are there as investments, to launder the money collected from some of the poorest brazilian citizens. I'm not saying all evangelical churches operate this way, but several do. And just a reminder: Brazil is a secular state. Or at least it's supposed to be, like many other countries in the world. Catholicism and evangelism might be the majority, but Brazil is an extremely diverse country when it comes to religion - as it is with immigrants. The root problem here though is, as with many other countries, just a poor educational system, ignorance, and a certain glamourization of it. It's partially what led us to the current political situation, it's what puts the country in jeopardy of dropping out of secularism, and it's what makes Brazil a big potential target to schemes like the Russian interference. There is simply too many people lacking critical reasoning and blindly believing religious leaders and whatnot to make their own decisions. Either that or TV/soap opera celebrities, dunno which is worse. People wouldn't believe the sorts of bills and some of the ignorant crap I have to hear coming out from politicians mouths at times... to the point of questioning if whoever wrote that even had primary education in the first place. It's baffling.
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