Culture

The 9th International Symposium of the World Centre for Humanist Studies (WCHS) will take place the 28th, 29th, and 30th of April. Since the beginning of the WCHS international symposiums, 15 years have passed and the organisational deployment of volunteers around the world to make it happen has multiplied in each edition of the symposium.

Human rights do not have the universal validity that corresponds to their purpose.

To begin with, human rights suffer the physical, economic, racial, religious, sexual and psychological or moral violence strikes, considering violence as a methodology of the different forms of discrimination.

And there are wars, poverty and social exclusion, racism, religious intolerance, gender inequality, censorship, defamation and coercion, as concrete expressions of daily attacks on human rights around the world.

In the context of the 9th WCHS Symposium, dedicated to the limits to overcome in order to get out of the unprecedented crisis that affects us, the eradication of violence is obviously one of the issues at stake.

The persistence of political and economic powers in using violence as a means to maintain or extend their hegemony, and the generalisation of violence as a basis of expression for human existence, lock humanity into destructive, pusillanimous and dead-end patterns.

The gender issue is crossing our borders of thought. Today the issue of gender raises not only sexual diversity, but also includes identity, the relationship between peers and with other generations, the relationship with the world, the interpretation of reality, etc.

In parallel, it is increasingly evident to society that violence against women is an undeniable historical fact over the centuries; An issue that, according to feminist currents, responds to the patriarchal structure of today's society.

In different regions of the world, entire towns were devastated by invaders who converted them into slavery and through territorial invasion and material looting, entire population strips remained submerged in poverty until the present.

But not satisfied with this type of holocaust, an attempt was made to suppress the Cosmogony of these Ancestral peoples with different campaigns of "Extirpation of Idolatry", as in the case of America.

The world is in crisis, however, there are overcoming actions that, driven by the people, cross borders. At the same time, the forces that are still dominant, responsible for the serious current social and environmental problems, seek to sustain discourses that slow down the processes of change and deepen conflicts, often reversing important achievements of social groups.

What is consciousness? In principle, it is something that can only be experienced by those who possess it. It cannot be "seen" from the "outside". One way of asking about the consciousness that can be in a given "object" would be to ask "Hello, is anyone there? This is intended to show that consciousness is what allows us to define ourselves as "someone", as a "person". Consciousness is thus the essence of our existence. Literally, without our consciousness we would not exist. We are, above all, bearers of consciousness. Of course, this is only a point of view....

We invite you to participate in the following thematic areas

Health 
Education 
Economy and Society Social Ecology 
Non-violence 
Disarmament 
Gender and feminisms
Indigenous People and Decolonization Movements Human Rights 
Conscience and the world 
Spirituality and Transcendence 
Non-violent society Communication for the 21st century 

The situation of crisis that humanity is going through at the present time is evident. The crisis manifests itself at different levels and in all spheres of human action, thought and experience. History has recorded numerous crises that endangered the survival of human groups in different times and places, but in this case – as it was the case a few decades ago with the “cold war” – it is a global crisis.

We start by stating that health is a fundamental human right and access to comprehensive, quality, and timely care must be guaranteed to all people, without any discrimination, according to need and respecting the beliefs and choices of each person.

This care can be provided from different perspectives, concepts, and interventions, freely chosen by people, requiring these therapies to show effectiveness and not cause more harm than they intend to repair.