I identify myself, if I’m really forced to identify with anybody, with all those who suffer the injustices and cruelties of this world; with all those who fight to their last breath to eradicate such injustices and cruelties; with all those who seek to make of every moment an eternity; with all those who do not strive for anything at the cost of their brothers, but who live in peace and fraternity with them.

I identify myself, if I’m really forced to, with those who, when they find themselves in a small, leaky boat, creaking under the storming fury of the sea, those who have no idea of the direction to go, but who row, row, row despite everything, perhaps even with an oar taken from the wreck of another boat, but who simply continue to row.

I identify with those who know that while they are alive, they are only a perpetual question mark, a match burning in the midst of the tempest.

And lastly, I identify myself with all those who know that they were born in the eye of the craziest, most senseless of cyclones, and who, in spite of this knowledge, still think that life is always a marvellous experience, reserved not only for a few vicious jokers, or parasites, but for all of humanity, and while they are debating in the eye of the cyclone, can still shout the old Indian saying: such are you.

 See Ha un senso la vita?

Translated from the Italian by Joy Elizabeth Avery. Tel: 015.703954; Email: joyelizabethavery@tiscali.it

I experience more emotion and interest in looking at images of a supernova than in all the paintings of saints in the world. A blade of grass growing out of a crack in the wall of an old, abandoned house moves me more than anything in the Sistine Chapel. I’m delighted, not by unreality, but reality: chicks hatching from their shells, the sweetness of a puppy, the first steps of a child. With bated breath, I watch a television programme showing the drama of an antelope being chased by a leopard; I observe the growth of the rocket salad I have planted, and how, just like sunflowers, it turns its tender little leaves towards the sun; in autumn, my heart full, I watch the leaves dropping from the branches of the trees, zig-zagging down through the rays of the sunset to finally settle on the ground.

These are the things which fill me with love and enthusiasm for life. I can hear all of nature speaking to me, and I reply; I feel that I belong to nature and nature belongs to me. And then I feel my heart pounding with joy, my soul is elated when I manage to understand something, to understand how certain phenomena work. I discover a source of joy every time I manage to find the secret hidden either in an object or in a person. I am passionate about life and I feverishly love every moment of it. Everything I need to live a life full of emotions, satisfaction, interests, love, I find it all in the reality surrounding me: this is my essence, my nature, condition, light, and, in the end, my destiny.

 See Ha un senso la vita?

 Translated from the Italian by Joy Elizabeth Avery. Tel: 015.703954; Email: joyelizabethavery@tiscali.it

In my opinion, a philosophy which doesn’t have the ultimate particles of the materials of which we are composed as its starting point is not philosophy, but philosophical vulgarity. First the particles, and then the philosophy. In other words, we need to have facts as our starting point, to know the facts, to live them, the facts that have made us what we are. Only once we know the facts, my dear Rossi, only then can you think what you want, imagine yourself what you want and even desire other worlds if ours is too small for you. What is important, though, is that these are your ideas and not the ideas of others. Other people’s ideas, even when well formulated, are not yours. Only by creating one’s own philosophy does man really become a philosopher. There is no other way. Only by the sweat of our own brow do we merit this incomparable freedom of thought.

You have the right to believe what you like, Rossi, once you have read this book. My duty to you will have been to explain to you, of course within my limitations, the reality which surrounds us and to explain it to you according to the precepts of nature and culture. That’s what I have tried to do. If I haven’t succeeded, I apologize, but at least I have tried.

I have already told you that, when we overcome the reality surrounding us, when we venture into the metaphysical, beyond the real, when we feel at home in worlds created by our languages and our fantasy, when we leave the island on which we live, Kant would say, for the space where twilight, illusions, and the unexpected reign, then everyone will have to think for himself, everyone will have to create his own vision of life, because everyone, in such a dark and distant zone, will be alone. And that applies to you too, my dear friend Rossi.

Only your own consciousness counts. You can discuss it with others, of course, but it will always be yours, because it has reached the culmination of your vital experience, the point at which the subjective and the objective come together in a unique comprehension of the world, that of Rossi. That has a personal ontology in every respect: your ontology, your science of being, your faith and lastly, of course, your belief and philosophy.

 See  Ha un senso la vita?

 Translated from the Italian by Joy Elizabeth Avery. Tel: 015.703954; Email: joyelizabethavery@tiscali.it

See Ha un senso la vita?

Translated from the Italian by Joy Elizabeth Avery. Tel: 015.703954; Email: joyelizabethavery@tiscali.it

Religion is not salvation

God and religion are not salvation

God and religion are slavery

Slavery of the mind and slavery of the body

God is not love

God is not understanding

God is misery

God is bloodshed

God is misery and bloodshed

God is not a dream

God is not a joy

God is a nightmare and much sadness

God is an endless mockery

A deadly invention against life and humanity

To all of you

Fools of the earth

If you don’t have any better idea

To live your lives:

Then have fun!

Dio: un’invenzione mortale

Dio non è salvezza

La religione non è salvezza

Dio e la religione non sono salvezza

Dio e la religione sono schiavitù

Schiavitù della mente e schiavitù del corpo

Dio non è amore

Dio non è comprensione

Dio è miseria

Dio è spargimento di sangue

Dio è miseria e spargimento di sangue

Dio non è un sogno

Dio non è una gioia

Dio è un incubo e tanta tristezza

Dio è una bestialità infinita

Un’invenzione mortale contro la vita e gli umani

A tutti voi

Sciocchi della terra

Se non avete un’idea migliore

Per vivere la vostra vita:

Allora buon divertimento!

You are born and you don’t know why you are born

You are here and you don’t know why you are here

You grow up and you don’t know why do you grow up

You live and you don’t know why do you live

You become conscious, if ever you become conscious,

Of what you feel, what you do and where do you live

But this doesn’t allow you to say:

“I know!

I know why I am here

I know how things are

Because I know the source”;

Conscious, impotent, fatherless

Blind but with wide open eyes

Keep treading risolute rebellious and ready

Your dangerous piece of road:

You know!

You know all too well

It’s cristall clear:

Tomorrow you’ll be no more!

L’abc dell’esistenza

(Ovvero la realtà per com’è e non per come si vuole che sia)

Nasci e non sai perché nasci

Sei qui e non sai perché sei qui

Cresci e non sai perché cresci

Vivi e non sai perché vivi

Diventi consapevole, se mai diventi consapevole,

Di ciò che senti, di ciò che fai e dove vivi

Ma questo non ti permette di dire:

“Io so!

So perché sono qui

So come stanno le cose

Perché conosco la fonte”;

Cosciente, impotente, orfano

Cieco ma con gli occhi spalancati

Percorri deciso ribelle e pronto

Il tuo pericoloso pezzo di strada;

Lo sai!

Lo sai fin troppo bene

È tutto chiarissimo

Domani non ci sarai più!

What does this mean? It means that all of the descriptions, definitions, ideas and representations which we have made for ourselves of the world, are only “ours”, including the definition that the world “is as it is”. We are the ones who describe the world and not the other way round. We are the ones who have an idea of the world, and not the other way round. We are the ones who are prisoners inside the world! Our vision is subjective and has nothing to do with whether it corresponds to reality or not. It is subjective, end of story. Realism, any type of realism, in this case, is always and in any case subjective realism, human, as we observe things.

At this level of interpretation, thought, reality and falsity become confused, they lose their meaning, the meaning which we gave them. The world, the true world, is unnameable. It cannot be described because any description is personal. In other words, the world does not have a name, but every imaginable and unimaginable name, it does not have a form, but every imaginable and unimaginable form, it does not have a definition, but every imaginable and unimaginable definition. This means that it does not have its own name. It is, exactly that, unnameable. You cannot say to Parmenidean scholars, “it is”, because such a Parmenidean “it is”, whatever it means, is always a human definition, therefore subjective, personal, Parmenidean.

Man began has been excogitating ideas about the world from the very beginning of human life. I would very much like to know how Homo habilis perceived the world 2.5 million years ago, but that is impossible. However, over the long intervening period, man, meaning Homo sapiens, has had many different iterations of understanding: animistic, chaotic, perfect, created by gods, created by one god, a world created by the imagination, ignorance, in short, a world of fairy tales and myths.

Then, much later again, man rethought the situation and his methods. He understood the world as consisting of four elements, pre-Socratic and pre-Aristotelian: water, air, land, fire. Later, in the 4^th century B.C., Aristarchus, a Greek philosopher and scientist, posited the theory of heliocentrism, meaning that the Sun is stationary and at the centre of the universe.

Centuries after this, the Alexandrian astronomer and mathematician Ptolemy removed the Sun from the centre of the universe and put the Earth in its place. This Ptolemaic concept was defended for many centuries, until Copernicus, in the 1500s, returned once again to the Aristarchean theory of heliocentrism, putting the Sun back into the centre of the universe.

After Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, the 16th-century Italian physicist and astronomer, discovered sun spots, Jupiter and what we now call the Galilean moons, the phases of Venus, the rings of Saturn and the seas on the Moon, thus confirming the theory of Copernicus.

Johannes Kepler, who lived at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century, freed the stars from the positions allocated to them in the Ptolemaic circles. Newton, during the 17th century, in his turn, developed the universal law of gravity and believed that the world was enclosed in a kind of gigantic box with some nuts inside which were attracted to each other.

Laplace, the 18th-century French mathematician and astrophysicist, corrected the errors in Newton’s theories on the orbits of planets, and maintained that they moved around the Sun, also postulating the theory of black holes.

Then came the phase of the entropy of the universe as proposed by Boltzmann in the 19th century, who declared that the universe was dying: the second law of thermodynamics leaves no doubt about this, describing how every celestial body consumes energy and that, when there is no energy left, it will die.

After this, there followed the stationary universe of Hoyle, Gold and Bondi in the 20th century. The Belgian physicist and astronomer, Georges Lemaître, who also lived during the 20th century, believed that the Earth began with a conflagration, the so-called Big Bang. Einstein confirmed the theory of the Big Bang and developed his own theory of relativity. Edwin Hubble disproved the theory of the stationary universe and demonstrated that the universe is expanding, in the so-called redshift, and that the galaxies are moving away from each other, thus confirming Lemaître’s Big Bang theory.

In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two American astrophysicists, discovered background cosmic radiation thus definitively confirming the Big Bang theory. Nowadays, the Big Bang is not spoken of any longer, but rather a number of big bangs in the infinite history of the cosmos, resulting in multiverses, meaning younger and older universes.

In this manner, but always according to our methods and interpretations, we have managed to explain to ourselves how the cosmos we live in works. But then, definitively, what do all these wonderful descriptions and definitions of the universe tell us? Nothing, absolutely nothing, is what the America philosopher John Searle would say. To put it in a nutshell: when man disappears off the face of the earth, and this will happen sooner or later, there will no longer be man’s fantasies, explanations, methods of calculation, nor his science nor his culture.

Therefore, we should ask ourselves this: before the birth of the world, was there a name to describe it? And we must answer that there was no such name. And then we should ask ourselves: when the world disappears, will there be a name to remember it by? No. And then, what will remain of it? Only its unnameableness. The universe is, in fact, unnameable.

 Translated from the Italian by Joy Elizabeth Avery. Tel: 015.703954; Email: joyelizabethavery@tiscali.it

The history of mankind has always borne the hallmarks of violence, starting with the first head of a tribe, through the Pharaohs of Egypt, right up to the current American president, Barack Obama. It is only the methods of governance that have changed, not the contents. The rich and powerful of the past subjugated the weak and poor, and today’s rich and powerful subjugate the weak and poor today. This has always been the case, and continues to be so in the present.

Every political party is a type of institutionalised violence. Democracy is nothing other than power, power which politicians hold in their hands, but not the people who vote for them. The populace exists only and exclusively to vote for the tyrants who will rule over it. This is violence, pure, calculated, legalised, unpunished violence.

If the populace, the citizens, the subjects, whatever we want to call them, do not pay their taxes, just to give an example, democracy, the democracy which they have voted for, sanctions them, threatens them, distrains their property, arrests them and in the end, imprisons them. That’s how democracy treats the people. But is this how democracy works when it is a question of the politicians? No, not at all, because there is no need. Why not? Because Mr Politician does not need to break the law. Why should he? He’s got everything he needs; he’s either rich or super-rich. For him, democracy makes everything possible, even the impossible. He has no need to break the law, in fact, he wants the law, he wants this type of democracy, he wants the courts, the police force, the prisons, the death sentence, because only within these kind of systems does he feel sufficiently protected to be able to enjoy all his privileges and wealth; wealth which has been robbed from those who voted for him, and to send to prison anybody who threatens his immunity and his affluent and privileged lifestyle.

We live in a culture of violence which has been raised to the level of a dictatorship, a kind of studied juridical savagery which is supported by the laws, a culture of exploitation, of justified criminality, of systematic barbarisation. Ours is a human society based on common sense, solidarity, and good customs? No way! Ours is a sad story where the weak are subjugated by the powerful. These are the laws of the jungle, the social jungle in which we live.

 Translated from the Italian by Joy Elizabeth Avery. Tel: 015.703954; Email: joyelizabethavery@tiscali.it

We should think of our species and many others as being in perpetual danger of extinction. This theory is expounded by Dana Desonie in her book “Cosmic Collisions”. She continues that, in July 1994, we were witness to the collision of more than 20 fragments of approximately one kilometre diameter from the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with the surface of Jupiter, and that the most important thing which Shoemaker-Levy 9 taught us is that cosmic collisions are not phenomena which only took place in the past, but that they are events which could happen in a human lifetime, and that contemporary science should take this into consideration.

Desonie says that the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet entered the stratosphere of Jupiter travelling at a speed of 60 kilometres a minute and that, if it had hit the Earth, our fate would have been similar to that of the dinosaurs. Palaeontologists have discovered that, during the course of 540 million years, there have been 24 mass extinctions during which between 25% and 95% of species have disappeared.

Some years ago, Piero Bianucci wrote in the Italian daily La Stampa (in the supplement Specchio) of the passage of a small star from the constellation Ophiuchus, Gliese 710. He wrote that the transit of Gliese 71 across the Oort Clouds would cause a gravitational interference serious enough to thrust millions of comet nuclei towards the sun. Earth would be hit by a very hailstorm of these cosmic icebergs of tens of kilometres’ diameter. Fortunately, this event would take place in one and a half million years and during this period, Gliese 710 would flare menacingly like a blood-coloured star of enormous magnitude.

According to latest astronomical discoveries, it seems that it won’t be necessary to wait for one and a half million years for the earth to experience being hit by a storm of celestial detritus. There are plenty of others waiting in the wings. The Lowell Observatory in northern Arizona warned that a killer asteroid of 15 kilometres’ diameter could hit the Earth within 50 years, another asteroid with the name NT-7 should hit the earth in 17 years, and yet another will pass closely within a few days, although perhaps not as closely as the one which grazed Canada in 1972.

Recently a comet with the name Swift-Tuttle passed quite closely to the earth. The experts, after its passage, announced that it would hit the earth next time round, in 2126. Obviously, this announcement has created a lot of panic. Understandably so. When you know that, in 113 years, you will be at the mercy of an inevitable end, you ask whether there is any point in having children, why should you continue to build, or continue to live? In other words, confronted with such a deadly perspective, you begin to ask yourself some uncomfortable questions.

In order to avoid global hysteria and the resulting chaos, those who predicted this fatal impact between the Earth and Swift-Tuttle in 2126 quickly took back what they had said, stating that they had been mistaken and that the comet would not hit the Earth next time, although it would come very close.

I remember when I was in Australia during the 1970s, the mass media announced that the remains of a satellite, Skylab, would hit the country. People’s reactions were incredible. Just the idea that this extremely small object from space could land on somebody’s head gave rise to a general sense of hysteria. Just imagine what would happen if there were an announcement that everything on earth could be destroyed by a comet!

But what would really happen if a killer asteroid were to crash into the earth? What would people do, what would people say when they discover, with mathematical precision, that behind that little dot in the sky there is a big asteroid getting ready to hit the Earth? How would they behave during the time they had left to live? According to Desonie, using current observation technology, we would be able to identify such a meteorite directed towards the Earth between 250 and 500 days in advance. What would people do before the impact?

It’s difficult to imagine. Certainly, dear reader, you would probably say that it would be better not to be around when it happened, but you would be wrong, my friend. It would be a privilege to experience the last minutes of mankind’s life and to enjoy this spectacular event, this extraordinary finale!

Just think: what if the asteroid fell right on your head? Billions and billions of tons of rock, ice, mud, metal, at a completely crazy speed, right on your head! What a thrill! What a finish! What a wonderful death! In less than a second, everything finished!

Now try to imagine, just try to imagine what you would do before such an apocalypse took place. For example, what would you tell your children? How would you feel? What would you be thinking in those last few moments before the end? What would be your last words, your last actions, your last thoughts? And the other folks? All of the human race, what would they think in that last terminal instant?

To begin with, there will always be those who try to take shelter in caves. Others will be overwhelmed with desperation; others try to escape to the moon or to remove themselves as far away as possible from the site of the impact. Others will try to escape to the depths of the sea, or run to bunkers or anti-nuclear shelters. And then there will be those who take their own lives before they are killed by such heavenly bodies, particularly those who know that the asteroid is headed for their region. Others will take sedatives, like people who are terrified of flying, so that they wouldn’t have to look death directly in the face. And there will be those who will want to finish their life in an embrace, a deathly embrace with their loved ones and those close to them.

Wherever such a killer asteroid smashes into the land or the sea, there will be a crater of hundreds of kilometres and a cloud of detritus will rise up to the skies, shielding the earth from the sun’s rays and creating a kind of nuclear winter. Any humans left after the impact will find themselves in thick darkness which will cover the earth for years to come. For many species there will be no escape, including the human ape.

At this point, one question will be heard from the still smoking rubble:

“Who lived on earth?”

And the answer from the smoking rubble will be:

“Nobody.”

Nobody, in fact, saw us come into this world.

Nobody will see us leave it.

Ours is a story which will have no story.

Because this is what is written in the void in which we find ourselves. *

Because this is what is written in the ultimate particle of material.

All the rest is a question of fairy tales.

*  See also the post: Am I a believer, atheist or physicalist?

See also:  Ha un senso la vita? (Does life have a meaning?)

Translated from the Italian by Joy Elizabeth Avery. Tel: 015.703954; Email: joyelizabethavery@tiscali.it

The first instance, and the one which revolutionised my existence, I owe to my Uncle Carlo. It was a winterís evening. It was cold outside, gusts of wind could be heard and rain mixed with hail was rattling on the roof. Uncle Carlo and I were sitting silently in the warm near the hearth. Suddenly, my uncle confronted me with the question:

Do you know that you’re actually richer than me?

That’s not true, Uncle, I answered immediately, as if I had been expecting this question all my life, you’re richer than I am. And that was the truth.

I’m not talking about material things, money, houses, land, animals, he replied dolefully, and yet with a force which sounded almost like disgust, I mean wealth in terms of age, youth, of life. You’re still a boy, I’m getting on, you’ve still got many years ahead of you, but I’ve only got a few left, do you understand?

No, I replied.

All the worse for you! he said.

Auntie, (his wife) said I, says that when we die, we all go to heaven and live there for ever.

So then you understand! he practically shouted in irritation. And anyway, don’t talk to me about the stupid things your auntie says!

Stupid? I asked incredulously. I had never heard him speak like this about my auntie before.

Yes, stupid! he affirmed.

Can you explain? I asked him.

I don’t know how to explain it.

But I still don’t understand.

One day, perhaps, you’ll understand. And now be quiet, he cut me off, and started to stoke the fire, obviously irritated and fed up.

I looked at him, bent my head, and so I didn’t speak again.

Neither did he.

In spite of my youth, this episode shook me, giving rise to questions which, up until then, I had ignored: questions about life, about death, about the existence of God. I wanted answers to this sudden feeling of apprehension, but I couldn’t find them. Neither could Uncle Carlo, when he was more approachable and less surly, answer my persistent and heart-felt questions, but I was convinced that he would have given anything to be able to answer.

It was this experience with Uncle Carlo which revolutionised the existence I had led up until that point, and my childish beliefs.

The second instance came about through philosophy. Philosophy, (not the academic subject, but the desire to know and understand everything), has been my companion throughout my life. It would be possible in this particular case to synthesise by saying that, from Kant onwards, superior beings such as Zeus, Brahma or other gods are no longer created by starting with a concept, but starting with the human being. Therefore, first there is the man, then the concept (the idea, the mind, the imagination), first there is Man, then Zeus, the gods, Brahma, whatever you like, Nirvana, Heaven, etc. This means that everything invented by Man is relative to Man and is connected with Man. In a nutshell, everything to do with culture is a product of Man and it is Man who is the god or the demon to inhabit the planet Earth.

The third instance came about through evolution, which has taught me that our little nest is built on an absurdity, that we are children of chance, purely incidental. Big bang theories here or there, we come from a world without name, nobody can ever know its true origins, these are unknowables. Our roots, our realm, our homeland, are indeed unnameable. This state of being unnameable should not be understood in a positive nor in a negative way and neither is it possible to name it, because a phenomenon whose origins remain a mystery cannot be given a title. It is simply unnameable.

More than that. Our location in the universe is referred to as the Milky Way, a dot, like billions of other dots strewn across the immensity of the cosmos. Our home, within this immensity, remains suspended in a never-ending abyss. In other words, our existence is balanced in a cosmic void. In this place without any handholds and without any principles, science is poetry and philosophy is another kind of poetry.

Just like trying to flee from the arms of Death, it is impossible to escape alive from such a void. It is our prison and our grave. No way out, no escape, we are trapped, condemned to be conscious witnesses of our own end, which will be both ignoble and cruel.

The fourth instance I owe to physics. By right, we belong to the material world. We have a good understanding of the metamorphoses involved in becoming conscious beings. The most significant four evolutionary steps are: first the passage from nothingness (the unnameable) to the big bang or whatever one wants to call it; the second step is the passage from inanimate to animate material; the third is from biology to culture and the fourth is from culture to consciousness of nothingness.

The two nothingnesses, the first and the last steps (we rise out of nothingness and return to nothingness), are united in the end in one great nothingness. In fact, our appearance prefigures our disappearance: one day we will no longer be, and with this last step, we end our coincidental and momentary appearance in the world of form and phenomena.

So, within this vision of life, is there still room for a believer or an atheist? Certainly, I have no difficulty in defining myself not as a non-believer, but as an atheist. Only that this definition is wrong, out of place, arbitrary. To be an atheist, you challenge those who believe in the existence of a god, of God, but if God doesn’t exist, and He doesn’t exist, why pollute the air with futile and noxious arguing? Because of how the world is made, there is no room for God, nor for believers, nor for atheists and even less for agnostics. As far as I’m concerned, I think both believers and atheists believe. The first believe in God, the second believe in the non-existence of God, therefore both believe and cannot exist without each other. It’s as if they were the two faces of the same coin. It is clear that as long as there is an atheist left on the face of the earth, there will be a believer and vice versa. Christians exult!

However, only one world exists, the physical world. I am a physicalist, I believe only in physics, because everything originates, flows and takes breath from physics. All knowledge is born of physics. We are an assembly of cells. I myself am a composition, an amalgam of atoms, an emanation of material. And this is the reason why, even if I wanted to, I cannot be either a believer or an atheist. I am, if I have to be anything at all, a physicalist, who believes that everything which exists in the universe is made of material, and as such, this is my identity and my destiny.

Translated from the Italian by Joy Elizabeth Avery. Tel: 015.703954; Email: joyelizabethavery@tiscali.it