The scam

A lot of people are convinced that, for a few centuries now, a fresh wave of arrogant science, crass materialism, and cold atheism has been trying to sweep away the noble edifice of a philosophical-religious tradition that has always existed, one that is, in a sense, innate to European culture. Maybe even to human nature. I'm obviously talking about all the schools of thought inspired by idealism, whether secular or religious.

Life, our own nature and the nature around us, the urge to fulfill ourselves in the world we discover all around us: this is the real starting point, the fixed foundation on which to build any cultural structure. And the drive to understand all of it is the kind of curiosity that has guided human activity for tens upon tens of thousands of years, since long before anyone talked about science, materialism, or atheism. That, for me, is the tradition that matters.

It was only a little over two thousand years ago that the ravings (beautiful and interesting ones too, mind you) of idealists and their various mystical-metaphysical spin-offs started catching on in Europe. It wasn't a single party but a family of ideas that blended together over the centuries and ended up telling us more or less the same thing. They told us that everything we see and hear isn't real; worse, it's filthy matter to steer clear of. The senses deceive us, and the universe has to be interpreted through storytelling, or even through science fiction. Higher ideas are all that counts. The idealized horse, which you will never see, matters more than the ones you've happened to see in real life: gorgeous, sure, but insignificant. And then the body is garbage, while the soul is sublime. The life we lead is contemptible, so it has to be lived in self-contempt, in guilt, repentance, and atonement, preferably somewhere near a cave, sneering at the assholes enjoying the shadow show on the back wall, while waiting for the sublime, true life that will come after death, which is therefore not the end but the beginning of real existence.

Older spiritual and anthropological outlooks (animistic, Dionysian, polytheistic) at least celebrated nature and life, with all their limits and all their fears. In Europe they were pushed aside, or bent into shape, by abstract ideas, demiurges, Manichaean entities. It's all cheap junk, and my mind (and not just mine) has its legitimate doubts about it. Those are doubts the bad teachers have never managed to dispel with honest arguments. They've always been forced to retreat into underhanded, absurd, and above all unfalsifiable answers, which makes them, for anyone who measures ideas that way, intellectually petty by definition: higher knowledge, holy spirits, faith, miracles, revelations, the kingdom of heaven, the Last Judgment.

Blaming science, atheism, and the rest is like looking at the finger instead of the moon it's pointing at. We've always seen the truth with our own eyes, heard it with our ears, touched it with our fingers, and breathed it in through our noses, long before that family of ideas tracing back to Plato and his heirs gained strength in Europe. And it's a gorgeous reality, not something to be wary of.
Anyone who rejects idealisms and their offshoots, religious or philosophical, is only trying to understand this reality. Questioning idealistic systems is a perfectly normal result of this noble, ancient, human activity.
Idealism wasn't the victim of a cowardly stab in the back. It was idealism that attacked human nature. And finally, with the arrival of the modern era, some people have started avenging it again.

The deception had already been dented by Galileo and other poor devils who were shunned, thrown in the slammer, or even burned at the stake. That wasn't because they were fighting "idealism" from an armchair, but because they dared to look and say what they saw. Later, Darwin with natural selection and Nietzsche with the transvaluation of values shook the edifice to its foundations. Popper, for his part, in a world more and more dominated by science, showed that what can't be falsified isn't science. None of them closed the file. They just made it harder to pretend that junk is still untouchable.
It's incredible how many people still slip on the sludge that's left of it.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Amen - part three: superstition

Those who don't accuse me of blasphemy or stupidity over what I've said about heaven and hell might still, if only out of superstition, call me reckless: if the afterlife existed, and hell weren't the revelry inn you're so keen on, don't you think they could make you burn there for exactly what you wrote?

The answer is simple, even if it's not intuitive. I've actually read the New Testament, the letters of Paul of Tarsus to the early Christian communities in particular. When Big Paul the persecutor converted and got appointed head of the apostolic delegation for the Gentile territory, he changed sides, but not his stickler habit: the requirements he set for getting into heaven are as bizarre as they are strict. I take great care not to meet them, so if that parallel reality really existed, I'd end up roasting straight away at "Churrascaria chez Satan."

That would be the fate of someone with my lifestyle, my values, and my convictions. It would still be, even if from here to my last day I took to writing hypocritical ass-kisses to the whole ecclesiastical establishment.
Precisely for that reason, since hell would be waiting for me anyway, it would pay to make friends with the owners of the joint. Maybe they'd reserve me a less scorching corner, where I'd keep singing the praises of the host.

Who knows? I might even become the official court propagandist. Not bad for someone who, to avoid the heavenly drag, is ready to risk ending up skewered on a rotisserie spit for all eternity. Right?

You can read the whole "Amen" saga by following this link.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Amen - part two: the closing argument

Some of you may have thought my reflections on heaven and hell (you can find them by following this link) were blasphemous, or maybe just nonsense: completely baseless foolishness.
Objection, Your Honor. To clear up any misunderstanding, I call to the stand none other than the Bible itself, in paper and ink.

The Book of Genesis opens, like all great literature, "in medias res", with God, all alone for who knows how long, suffocating from boredom and falling prey to a compulsive creationism, which kicks off the history of the world. 
But even the world, so lifeless, doesn't save him from the tedium. So, using recycled materials, the way every clever kid does to get around that annoying state of mind, he builds himself a little toy: man. Then he plants the Garden of Eden and plops him right in the middle of it.
Man, though, is a lot like me: he wanted to be born in hell, where he surely would have had a blast. Instead he finds himself in this gorgeous place that looks a bit like Switzerland or Singapore. He stands around dazed for a few moments, admiring the splendor, but once the "wow" effect wears off, he starts getting bored shitless.

God, who has few rivals when it comes to empathy, partly because he's the only one around, notices: as you'll remember, he'd been through the same thing himself not long before. So he makes him animals, but the trick turns out to be a washout: man plays with them for a little while and then gets sick of them.
So God tries again and creates woman. In its own way, this gimmick also has to do with a hole, but it's definitely no washout. And this time man is into it. Woman piques his curiosity and tempts him into breaking the rule against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The two little scamps, using the advice of an alleged talking snake as an excuse, eat the symbolic apple, setting off down the fantastic epistemological path we've never left since. 

Mr. Touchy finds out, though, flies into a rage, and kicks them down to hell.

So, to sum up: in heaven everybody tends to be bored out of their fucking minds, the host included. The moment they try to entertain themselves a little — fucking, snooping around, raising doubts, asking uncomfortable questions — they get told to head on down to hell, evidently a better fit for that kind of activity.

Now, taking into account a source above any suspicion whatsoever, you tell me, Esteemed Members of this Illustrious Jury: when I said hell would be a more interesting place than heaven, where exactly was I wrong?

You can read the whole "Amen" saga by following this link.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Amen

Not that I count on it much, but if the afterlife really existed, between heaven and hell I would choose the latter.
It must be a place full of souls who party hard, chat, yell, drink, smoke, get high, fuck, fall in love, dance, sing, read irreverent literature, listen to tempting music, think, doubt, cry tears of emotion, laugh with delight.
Fire doesn't scare me, it's just a symbol: it represents warmth, joy, dance, love.
Heaven, though? What a gigantic pain in the ass. Those ashen faces, the snooty smiles, the pale straw-yellow skirts. The doorman's sad, persecuted-political look, good old Peter, would be enough to sink me into the most oppressive form of depression.
Honestly, I prefer the carnival style, the brazenness and the mocking grin of Satan.
P.S. I almost forgot: Amen!

You can read the whole "Amen" saga by following this link.

The Antichrist - Friedrich W. Nietzsche

Let's start by stating that this is not a book against Jesus Christ, meaning the historical person, the religious prophet or the revolutionary philosopher. This is definitely a very harsh criticism of Christianity, the Christian church and its founding fathers (the Apostles, Paul of Tarsus, the Popes, the priests), of its roots planted in a corrupt version of Judaism (corrupt when compared with the original form of it) and of the German Lutheran reformation.
One might not agree with Nietzsche's conclusions, judgments, opinions and some creative historical interpretations, which I do find extremely fascinating and often very convincing, at least much more convincing than most of the orthodox ones - the idea that the Greco-Roman tradition was bled by Christianity from inside (as opposed to destroyed by a natural catastrophe or a military invasion), that the middle age crusades did contribute to obliterate the advanced Moorish civilization in Spain and that the German Lutheran reformation did a similar thing to the Italian Renaissance cultural-revolutionary movement, is a brilliant historical intuition.

The praise of folly - Erasmus of Rotterdam

I’ve been having this book on my reading list since I was a student. I finally checked it off. It’s a very ironic, yet extremely disruptive text written by this Dutch renaissance intellectual at the beginning of the 16th century. It targets superstitions, common ideas and attitudes of a wide share of society, and it’s particularly sharp against theologians in genearal and the Catholic Church more specifically. 


Inshallah (Insciallah) - Oriana Fallaci

A novel based in Beirut, Lebanon, during the 1982-84 Italian army peacekeeping mission to the Middle Eastern country.
The Israeli army has recently invaded the country and ousted the Palestinian fighters. Along with American, French and a few British soldiers, Italian sailors, paratroopers and Bersaglieri are patrolling the sensitive areas in and around Sabra and Shatila, where a few months earlier bands of Maronite phalangists had carried out a terrible massacre.