BELGRADE, THURSDAY

AWARD WINNING Guatemalan historian, Antigua Tikal, whose legendary twenty-five volume history of the Maya, Don’t Forget The Rain?, is in its two-hundreth edition, has told an online audience that history will not look favourably at the Twentieth Century’s attempt to replace traditional religion with what he calls “the golden calves of secular cults”.

He told his viewers: “Communism, Fascism, even humanism, they all fail because they cannot deal beyond mere existence, cannot appeal to the imagination of humanity, which is consistently way beyond the normal lifespan of the average human. They offer paradise on earth, which they never deliver. Only hell. At lest with religion hell is a punishment, not a prescriptive lifestyle. I am continually brought back to the fate of the Jews in the Old Testament when strayed away from God. Man is perpetually the slave of his own hubris, and his fate is always nemesis.

“Unfortunately, we continue to struggle at the wall at the end of the lunatic blind alley where we now find ourselves. “Secularism is joined by religious fanaticism, and creeping nihilism, and the end result remains the same. It will continue that way. I am now one hundred and five years old. Most of me is already dead. All of my friends are gone. I live among strangers. I am grateful for your kindness, your respect, but I long to join those I love. I leave you to your imaginations.”