Atheist Attic Visitor Profile
What is your name? (Real or pseudo)
What is your date of birth?
What is your gender?
What is your race?
What is your e-mail address? (optional)
What is the name and URL of your homepage? (optional)
Where do you live? (City, State, Country)
How would you best describe your form of freethought? (Atheist, Agnostic, Humanist, etc.)
I thank my god every day that he made me an atheist.
Were you raised as a freethinker or to be religious?
Well, I guess I was just lucky that I was never exposed to pressure to go one way or the other.
What originally set you on the path to freethought?
Nothing in particular. I've been an omnivorous reader since my 7th year, and even as a child did not permit anybody to interfere in my choice of books. Nobody did. At the age of 14, I severed all ties to organized religion without pains and without the zeal of a convert. I was no convert. I just realized who I am.
When did you "come out" as a freethinker to family/friends/public, and how did it go over?
I never hid my position. I never advertised it either. And I had the benefit of a liberal surrounding.
Do you feel it necessary to continue to hide your beliefs in any circumstances, and if so, why?
My beliefs are my own business, but whoever puts his nose into my private affairs, he better watch out.
Have you ever been the victim of discrimination or abuse because of your beliefs?
Not really. But then, I am quite capable of retaliating on my opponents' own turf.
In what types of freethought activism, if any, do you participate?
I am not the activist type, but professionally now and then I had (as historian, philosopher, and archaeologist) and have (editor and writer) to touch issues.
What do you feel is the best part of being a freethinker?
What kind of question is that? If born from different parents, with a different upbringing, and in a different setting, I would be different from what I am now. Would I feel different though? Probably not. Would I have taken the risk to actively oppose a regime that sent my grandfather to Auschwitz? I sure hope so, but I am not sure I actually would. If brought up in a religious environment, would I be anything else than what in Italy is called a "practicing" (i.e. a phlegmatic and indifferent) Catholic? I'm afraid not. But my life took a different route, and I am grateful for it.
What do you feel is the worst part of being a freethinker?
In the present day's political climate, "liberal" has become a term of insult - go figure.
What is the societal atmosphere for freethinkers where you live?
Right now? Rednecks, peasants; every church-steeple here looks like the hood of a KKK member...
How do you define "freedom of religion" and do you think your country attempts to grant this?
It is the very base of the Constitution - isn't it? One really has to keep in mind the dichotomy at the root of American history. The founding fathers of the country were not the founding fathers of the Constitution. The scattered band of religious fanatics that had colonized the East in the 16th and 17th centuries left England because the secular minded and moderately enlightened regime there didn't appreciate the puritan need to be fanatic and religiously intolerant. Now this seed of early fundamentalism is hitting us with a vengeance and present day presidential candidates are lecturing the founding fathers of the American constitution at their graves on Christian values, as if there is nobody around to notice that most of the gentlemen who drafted and signed the constitution were either deists, sworn to the principle of tolerance, or even downright atheists (not many) - equally committed to tolerance. Their age was the age of enlightenment and of Voltaire. Sadly we have progressed to a stage where the Constitution needs to be defended against the inner enemy. But every single brick of the White House, before the renovation under Truman, bore the stamp of a Masonic lodge. This is something to be remembered too.
If you could share one thought with whoever might read this profile of you, what would it be?
Whoever thinks that any system of social security could ultimately dry all the tears, or that science has the answer to everything, is gravely in error. Science is a specific methodology for the acquisition of knowledge, in fact the only methodology that works. It does give us the truth. Euclid's 'Elements' had for two thousand years been the only book of indisputable truth on the planet. But I doubt that during this time anybody on his deathbed had been able to draw comfort from the fact that the sum of all angles in a triangle makes two right angles. There is a sadness oozing from "the velvet at the bottom of all things," and I am not sure that rationalism has taught us to face it squarely. (The nowadays common mix-up of 'tragedy' with merely sad and sentimental stories is a telling sign; the loss of the sense for the tragic and the whole complex of values and insights surrounding it, has consequences. It de-humanizes.) That is why the religious rabble with their false promises is still able to be crowding the door. Rationalism has failed us because in order to save a precarious status quo in the division between church and state, it left religion with the monopoly to address the issue of consolation and comfort. But no matter how outmoded the religious legacy appears to be - coming from the early bronze age and handed down to us through dynasties of priests, shamans, and charlatans - we cannot afford not to address their issues. The failure to do so has in recent history led to consequences no less brutal than the history of religious (especially Christian and Islamic) terror over the believing mind and the infidel's body.
