Modern Day World Lost Spiritual Orientation and Sank in "High-Tech Paganism," Kusturica Believes
Moscow, 3 March 2010, Interfax – Renowned film director Emir Kusturica regrets modern-day humanity has lost spirituality.
"High-tech pagans have invaded the world today. This paganism doesn't do any good to a human-being. A person today lives under permanent technological control… However, the main difference of modern people is that they lost spiritual orientation. Uniqueness of a human being as God's image is leveled down in the world today," the film director said in his interview published by the NG-Religii paper in association with the Spas TV channel.
According to him, "Today a high-tech person is more disposed to biological life rather than spiritual. He is interested only in material values and is a pagan of technologies. And today this pagan opposes a man of God as Feodor Dostoevsky so often told about.
"Today a high-tech pagan is a consumer who doesn't ask eternal existential questions. He is losing his identity and becomes a part of controlled crowd. He doesn’t' have a soul, he is ready only to consume. Unfortunately, today I often see that majority of Serbs and Russians are turned into such pagans. They live with all their technologies in a spiritual vacuum," Kusturica said.
Atheism "destroys a soul and turns us into biological mechanisms consuming products imposed by ad industry," the film director believes. According to him, it leads to imitation of western culture samples and "not the best of them. You know, there's a lot of high quality cultural events in the West too, but youth chooses only the worst – paganism of technologies."
On Đurđevdan (St. George's Day) in 2005 Emir was baptized into the Serbian Orthodox Church as Nemanja Kusturica (Немања Кустурица) in Savina monastery near Herceg Novi, Montenegro. To his critics who considered this the final betrayal of his Bosnian Muslim roots, he replied that: "My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. OK, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were Orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks."
Moscow, 3 March 2010, Interfax – Renowned film director Emir Kusturica regrets modern-day humanity has lost spirituality.
"High-tech pagans have invaded the world today. This paganism doesn't do any good to a human-being. A person today lives under permanent technological control… However, the main difference of modern people is that they lost spiritual orientation. Uniqueness of a human being as God's image is leveled down in the world today," the film director said in his interview published by the NG-Religii paper in association with the Spas TV channel.
According to him, "Today a high-tech person is more disposed to biological life rather than spiritual. He is interested only in material values and is a pagan of technologies. And today this pagan opposes a man of God as Feodor Dostoevsky so often told about.
"Today a high-tech pagan is a consumer who doesn't ask eternal existential questions. He is losing his identity and becomes a part of controlled crowd. He doesn’t' have a soul, he is ready only to consume. Unfortunately, today I often see that majority of Serbs and Russians are turned into such pagans. They live with all their technologies in a spiritual vacuum," Kusturica said.
Atheism "destroys a soul and turns us into biological mechanisms consuming products imposed by ad industry," the film director believes. According to him, it leads to imitation of western culture samples and "not the best of them. You know, there's a lot of high quality cultural events in the West too, but youth chooses only the worst – paganism of technologies."
On Đurđevdan (St. George's Day) in 2005 Emir was baptized into the Serbian Orthodox Church as Nemanja Kusturica (Немања Кустурица) in Savina monastery near Herceg Novi, Montenegro. To his critics who considered this the final betrayal of his Bosnian Muslim roots, he replied that: "My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. OK, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were Orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks."
