The fall of immortals

First posted: 24 march 2010

Philosophy is dead and we killed it, apart from some gleam of men appearing here and there (although a missing person) within the decay we are passing through.

Even at the universities, during the lessons, we can feel the burden of this immense loss. We study informations (dates and datas), occasionally, if we’re lucky, we can attend at “teachers-driven” lectures about a doomed attempt to persuade students to accept the tutor’s truth, who is forcing, squeezing and crumbling authors extrapolated from their context. We try to dig into the ground written words pushing them into a self-misunderstanding, disrupting and forcing to reshape themselves and to betray their own author.

Where – I wonder then – has the real question vanished? I’m searching for the man, but where is the man if the question has disappeared? Philosophy is a continuous asking, interrogation, collision, confront beyond the so-defined dogmas, that is beyond the certitudes we build around us due to a personal choice or to find a sort of comfort, but nowadays how many of us are willing to test themselves, experiencing their limits, taking the risk of getting lost along a forest? Although everyone tends to feel the elected, the demiurge of the situation, with arrogance, only few of us understand that it’s not important to know and learn something with an absolutly certainty but it’s more important searching, changing, not being static and having the courage to change our mind.

But how can anyone get surprised by anything in the very present period of time? We believe that the desensitization makes us stronger, but it makes us more schizophrenic than we are: the thrilling of emotions, the one that frees us from all these self-imposed chains made by society that builds cyborgs, is considered as something to remove from ourselves.

We can’t dream anymore: we just schematize everthing, even the feelings. We fall in love with someone by various calculations: as in a schedule, we choose our partner, according to her/his qualities without really thinking about what we’re feeling for that person. We choose our work because of money and according to the easiest way to advance along the career. We watch a movie and, instead of letting ourselves experience it, letting the heart beat following the rhythm of the sounds that floods us, listening to the flow of the film streaming in front of our sight, we ask about the meaning of the plot to understand the moral teachings, that “something” able to fix all the fruition into an interrupted and detached frame, something able to stop the film from provoking our emotions, teaching us to give an interpretation of the worlds where it is moving on (and while I’m writing this, I’m thinking, for example, of a filmmaker like David Lynch).

Art tries to rape us and we stand by impassively: nothing can touches us if it can’t hurt us physically, what an horror! (“The horror… the horror” Kurtz said at the end of the book “Heart of Darkness” by Conrad or, if you don’t know it, in the movie “Apocalypse Now” by Coppola).

We are proud to become like stones, to prove being strong in front of people eyes who, like us, are believing in the power of impassibility without the comprehension that, nowadays, the strongest person is who has got the courage to show his tears, because he frees himself from cages that make people repressed in a mental mechanism holding them in a vise and more and more leading to apparently senseless panic attacks.

We use tricks to withdraw from ourselves and to feel something we are unable to perceive anymore. We’re drugging our senses to feel us omnipotent and, at the same time, to feel that something we lost: but without heart and pain, dreams and tears… Does it make any sense that we try to exist as if we were immortal gods? Suddenly an aporia stifles us.

The morbid jelly of Italian country: vile corruption, ethics-annihilating viruses and the shining paradigm of the classic greek-roman Titans

First posted: 24  february 2010

Today some people said me that I tend to despise Italian culture and to sign the praises of the foreign one. They also try to point how, instead of the outlanders, we have got a direct descent of the great Roman empire.

Probably when I speak I can give the wrong idea that I’ve got this “forma mentis” but, if I have to be honest, what I despise is the present Italian society, certanly not the ancient, quite another thing.

My answer to this appointment, therefore, was: “I’ve got nothing against ancient cultures, neither Latin nor Greek, which I love, but, in Italy, we don’t know them well and, very often, people abroad is more interested in a specific way about them and they’re able to drain from and actualize the teachings including them in their society. Do you want to talk, I don’t know, for example, about Seneca, Petronius or Cicero or any other Latin author?”.

Currently the grammar high school is scorned and offended because it’s judged like an environment where people study the “dead languades”, or with a terminal illness. I wonder, then, why, for example, Nietzsche or Heiddeger have taken inspiration by the Greek language and culture if it was so senseless as it seems to italian people.

Perhaps it is the study in our schools based purely on learning mnemonic versions of the translations done in classes (or clearly copied/pasted from the Internet) and, later, attached to the tests without an explanation about the text (I would say the exegesis or contextualizing but they’re teminologies unknown by the teachers themselves)?

It looks like that we don’t understand what exactly the ancient cultures offer, and continue to teach, showing how to live in an ideal way, and I’m not surprised that this point is completely misunderstood by Italian people.

I have noticed that some people get really annoyed while hearing around (in people talking) about how our country, considered as a formal “society” (what a significant word… how many euphemisms i am using here! I wonder why…), is going to fall into complete ruination (such as being corrupted by an  infectious disease orby the typical “bacillus” currupting and spoiling books pages…) and about how we are currently deeply criticized by foreign countries, blaming the collapse of our ethics, for example: we give up realizing (and getting aware of) where we are gradually directing our steps (in a sort of no mans lands, where “licet” and not “licet” are the same, where there is no difference between morality and immoral acts, between ethics or illicit behaviours), and we are unable to realize that just because we ourselves are made of “debris and ignorance” (please try to feel the sound of the spelling in my original language, italian, “we are made of “macerie e ignoranza”, translated into italian… isn’t it like the sound of ruination itself?).

Fed up by television programs (just like chickens being stuffed) and sparkles, fragments  taken from italian news (daily “chronicles” contained in the most common and sold newspapers), we tend to miss all the real facts happening around the world, being news from the outer world something “missing” in our major newspapares and tv programs (there is an italian journalist, who has written a very significant and important boom about that, entitled “La scomparsa dei fatti”, “The vanishing of the news and facts”, translated by me; this journalist’s name is Marco Travaglio, a master of true journalism). We happen (sometimes) to hear or read about the news and facts coming from all over the world, but those news are reported manipulated or filtered by the “Big Brother” of our news agencies, so most of the news are altered and reported with no accuracy or precision.

Coming back to an old problem, already discussed by me (forgive my self-quoting hypertrophy), I am wondering about how many persons really know english language here in Italy… and I am wondering whether people educated in english, here in Italy, are used to reading english newspapers (or listening to their tv news broadcasting) or not.

Some days ago I bumped into an article reporting that Beppe Grillo (an italian famous comedian and a blogger whose mission is to divulge the most important facts and news without altering or censoring them) has been invited to Oxford university to “lecture” in comunication, diffusion of culture, the media, the italian problems and contradictions, about the “humus” surrounding our country. Apart from the fact that the italian embassy tried to diffuse some information against the reputation of this person (who is honest, sincere and guided by common sense), trying to make him appear less reliable and authoritative, they also quoted some of the comedian-blogger most famous opinions and words, blaming him for being a “dangerous” paradigm of an “anti-politicians” provocative troubles maker (accusing him of being a sort of professional “provocateur”). Some sentecnes and words of this famous comedian-blogger talk about how many italians, while living in foreign countries, are sure that they don’t want to come back to Italy, looking things from another point of view, from another alternative perspective, conscious of the faults and problems stuck and attached to the social/political pattern of our society and country. According to Beppe Grillo’s recurrent critical opinion, some italian, living in foreign countries, feel like “exiled” human beings, clinged to the “kindness of strangers” while being welcomed by foreign countries. Many italians cannot stand anymore the endemic state of corruption of our country, often hurt and “slaved” by criminal organizations (mafia, camorra, ’ndrangheta, etc.) and by illegals acts committed by the political bureau. (I think you all can recall the so-called “Tangentopoli”- the crisis of italian political/social system due to the curruptions and financial crimes, called  polis, city, of the bribes-that culminated into a series of trials directed by the famous Milano’s pool, whose members were for example Francesco Saverio Borrelli, Antonio Di Pietro, Davigo, Colombo, etc.

So after the eclipse of common sense,of rational thinking,of critical toughts many italians are sinking into the aberration of the nonsense, symbolized by the gossip news, by the lacking of true informations, by the meaningless and pathetic reference to our latin (greek) roots and traditions, as if italian people were all fond of learning about our cultural origins, as if our cultural traditions (the greek-roman source of knowledge) could be learned by osmosis or treasured into ourselves just like a sort of genetic “acquisition”.

Humanistic VS Science

First posted: 15 december 2009

“Once upon a time”, classical and scientific studies (that is to say, humanistics and experimental/research theories taught in science-oriented colleges and universities) were a single “entity”, interrelated and feeding one another in a mutual need and support, and they completed one another.
Today I was speaking to some university students involved in a scientific “branch” and I’ve, sadly, learned, instead, that they think as scientific and classical studies being two differents “worlds” without connections.

In my opinion, studying the most significant authors (that could be considered as paradigms and models of wisdom and knowledge) of the past and of our present, I think that writers and scientists, who represent humanistic and scientific fields, are more than “workers” in a specific context and with a particular background, both sharing the same creative view and “artistic” frame of mind that sustain their inclinations to develop their skills, intellectual and professional. So art itself is the invisible common source they take inspiration from: without this little spark of imagination or irrationality/rationality it wouldn’t be possible any progress, discovery, research (generally speaking).
Now, instead, people who study the “the objective, material substance of nature” desperately need to separate (“a priori”) themselves from who is interested in classical studies, usually asserting (as a logical kind of excuse and explanation) their “truth” by referring to conventions and rules (or so called “dogmatic principles”, that couldn’t be subverted or criticized) that other thinkers (the philosophers and humanistics experts being their primary target to “defeat”) are unable to understand or to keep in their behaviours, methods, theories.

To offer a summary of the speech (that i heard from those students i met): “Scientists are the only one to be able to seize the deep hidden meaning of nature, earth, universe, human mind etc. owning the “key” to unlock the mysteries of human knowledge, on the contrary, people who prefer classical studies live in their own world created by themselves, that is not considered to be true or important by science addicted and fanatics (not the skilled, expert, professional scientists)”. Others say: “Your studies are «hollow» meaningless, you’re bound to statements that tomorrow could change and, so, everything you’re perceiving as real will crumble”. So, at the end, the “scientist” students (as they define themselves, clinging to a definition – science experts or researchers – that doesn’t suit them, that will never be their hand in glove or cup of tea, being something they won’t ever reach) accuse humanists to be “anarchicals” and to live their life in a bad way because they ask too many questions without an answer, while the other ones accuse them to be dull.

The most absurd thing I heard was that mathematics cannot be considered a sciences, I mean that, in their opinion, the mother of science today isn’t considered like that because it’s too much involved with philosophy.

Because of this type of mentality we’ll disconnect this two branches of knowledge in suck a strong way to cause an hole: we’ll create “workers” (I mean, brainless operators of automated, mechanical acts, such as robots, rings of an endless chain of programmed actions they have to perform, complete) of science that apply rules without creating or seeking new ones and artists without creativity because they’re too fond of their non-existent existential problems in order to become famous without hard work or efforts (because, let’s confess it, the majority of students of classic studies, in Italy, don’t like studying or they use only their memory without comprehension of the text to get good marks from the teachers).

In the italian society, the classic studies are perceived as unnecessary and they tend to diguise themselves as science. We don’t understand, in this way, how many both “branches” of studies, although looking as opposite poles, are necessary to the human being: otherwise why do novels, videogames, movies (and so on) exist? How could we cope with (trying to stand it) the stress of our society if humanistics subjects and studies were considered to be just pointless hobbies or void occupations (for lazy, “timekiller” persons), failing to understand their therapeutical benefit in restoring our inner mental balance and emotional structure?
Is relaxing (by enjoying humanistics and art) forbidden in our society? Should we give up feeding our brains with the powerful combination and alchemy of humanistics and science tasted together?

Dedicated to the humanistics lovers. In memory. R.I.P

The “status quo” that stifles my imagination

First posted: 11 november 2009

We live in a society of social climbers unable to work seriously on a project. There are only three categories of people, excluding some exceptions and those persons who are fanatically addicted to metaphysics, that is: who thinks to be a leader, who prefers to pretend to cooperate with others but, actually, is searching for an easy way to get his work done by others and and those persons who are dominated by the happening of casual events and incidents, without realizing that the day after they will need to forget the tactics and the strategies in order to survive and get a real life.
I made a wonderful experience with groups in the working activities with some mates: all the persons who wanted to work in our project with full interest about it or, just, because they were serious persons (dedicating every effort to do a good job), are ignored or pushed away by others who were just looking foward to get a good mark, underestimating the importance of team work and accurate ways of working together.
What will it happen if we keep the same behaviour in our future jobs? We have, obvioulsy, built a social structure and system full of stressed people, because they think to be oppressed by the world and because their goal is working the least they can, asking for others to do their job instead of focusing over it themselves.

The “magic” key word, here in Italy, seems to be “to committ” our own duties, efforts, hard works to others, taking advantages on honest and good persons (that are considered to be instruments chained to the will of immoral and lazy persons).
We are used to “cleaning our hands” without getting aware of our own mistakes, thus giving up doing something serious that requires and demands skills, efforts, concentration and management. Sometimes we could notice that most people happen to define some works and activities as impossible to complete, too difficult to achieve, as if those goals and works were just arcane nightmares, dark shadows of an hellish entity coming to defeat our natural defences and to subvert our inner mental balance.

Sometimes i feel that the tickling of time passing is something like an obsessive “paranoia” for some types of persons, that cannot manage to treasure the stream and fluxus of the waves of time, being overthrown by the sensation of anguish and frustration. Instead of seizing the day, they refrain from facing to face the real developing of events, missing the chance to transform their creative energy into some positive and original project.

How can we demand, therefore, to build a society where people work or, at least, live together in a constructive way if this project is tought to be impossible ” a priori”?

The unfaithful deontology of teachers

First posted: 26 october 2009

While I was speaking to a friend has risen one old school problem that, thanks to new technologies, now has more intensified: students prefer to copy during class test (assignments) rather than to learn the lesson.

This girl told me that her youngest sister is starting to believe that his mom is bad because she doesn’t help her with the solutions of the tests posted through cellular phone like the mother, teacher herself, of one of her mates does.

I remember when I was young I was astonished because of my friends’ tricks, while completing tests, and when I told my parents this they replied to be smart and tricky and to learn from my mates how to use these tricks. This view point in our parents persists during the years and it’s increasing with the a sense of protection for their children, so they tend to improvises excuses like: “Well, doing this, my son can get good marks with the minimum stress” or “Poor baby, he has got so many things to do: swimming, volleyball, football, that he hasn’t got time to study, we have to help him in some way”, and so on.

Cellular phones (being forbidden during lessons) removed by teachers in classroom are a distant vision considering the fact that each student has got a minimum of four mobiles to be sure that he can use them with full access and with a good network system.

I remember that during my final test (this examination is called “Maturità” here in Italy, due to the fact that a student is supposed to be mature enough to face this exam in the best way), we couldn’t use mobiles and the traditional word of mouth (a sort of suggestions spread from students to students, in a chain) because teachers arranged our positions in a rational way, some boys thought out to put some little notes with maths’ solutions in the bathroom, hung behind the toilet: some problems started to appear when a young professor, smarter than them, made suspicious by the strange coming and going of the male students from the toilets (a sort of walkaround in crossroads), found the “hidden” place. The president of teachers’ commision warned us that he was going to nullify the tests in case that misbehaviour and malicious acts kept happening, he expressed a good telling-off blaming that unacceptable conduct but then all blew up in smoke bubbles.

Then, later on after getting the final high school degree, we choose the proper college (university) to attend at, and we are sure that teachers are more serious and firmer than the previous ones we had during high school. We think that a strict discipline should be kept and taught in order to defend the right moral conduct of students and preserve the right attitude and behaviour during tests, examinations, etc.

Then, suddenly, we get more and more aware that strict discipline and firm moral conduct are chimeras, mere illusions; in fact, during tests, and even oral examinations, many students manage to find a way to be tricky, to complete their works just by using unacceptable hints, tips, suggestions they are not allowed to follow. For example, during an italian literature and language university test (a written one) a mate of mine put some notes in her dictionary, and each of those notes contained some tips and helps about the test itself. She rewrote and copied entire parts of her class books just to be able to copy them without studying and putting efforts to get ready and well skilled for the exam.

So, we’re wondering if teachers pretend they cannot solve that issue, just because they prefer to keep their privileges, defending their positions and roles, as if correcting the mistakes, blaming the unacceptable conduct, punishing the misbehaviour and malicious acts could ruin their working position or spoil their roles. We can think that they fulfill their profession (that is teaching) in the best way they can: maybe they are just lazy, or they are just childish or indifferent when they pretend not to see and notice students that perform illegal or forbidden acts. But then, i think that each job has got its own professional deontology so teaching moral principles, correcting bad actions, requiring fair play and frank and clean acts is part of a teacher role and profession.

I’ve got some doubts about the principles of some teachers at times.

At this point I wonder if graduated persons, work and apply what they learned, thanks to copying (and, therefore, they don’t know), are really competents and well prepared for the exercise of their duties and, most important, I wonder why we still believe that italian school is one of the best in the world (this is what italian people say, but, if they can, they also send their sons to attend at a foreign university abroad) founding that we are the first who destroys the bases from the foundations.

How much time could it take to discover the usual “naughty boy” (that is proud of breaking the rules and obtaining good marks by “scamming”) in the classroom? Should we suppose that, being “naughty scammers” too many, thus we’d better close our eyes and pretend not to notice them?

The moral “decorum”, the pathological sublimation of sex

First posted: 13 october 2009

At university, i attended at a class with required presence, called: Audiovisual Laboratory.

The teacher asked us to create some documentaries about the topic of sexuality in our society, this means how sex is perceived and processed in the present.

Each student was (only in theory) free to think about some ideas, concepts, subjects, which, then, could be developed with the other students.

My first thought, about this situation, was: “We’ll «slaughter» us one by one” because unfortunately the team spirit, when the exam is based on how you create the work, disappears and leaves its place to the unbearable attempt to “emerge” above all: a bad idea if you want to work in a prolific and friendly group.

However this is another story, now, I’d like to talk about the choice of subject: the sexuality.

I was thinking about this and I found, in my library, a book by Martha C. Nussbaum (“Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law”) regarding the criminal incidents of acts against natural sexuality committed breaking the laws. When I read it I imagined a picture about all of us, in this society, hidden behing masks at the same moment that we’re ponting a man (or a woman), blaming them because they don’t conceal themselves while fulfilling and pleasing instinctual and sensual acts, not protected by fictious masks and camouflages. Sexual and erotical intimacy, coming from instinctual needs, are feared by some persons, because they are unable to cope with them in a natural way. A human being, capable of living his/her sexual needs with natural attitude and quiet mental disposition (without being affected by pathological deviances) sometimes “scares” us provoking disgust and sense of repulsion. His weaknesses and (apparent) “vices” are at large, in front of us, unmasked and frank.

We think to be different from animals because of our rationality; some of us are longing to tear away, throw out of themselves and remove all the instinctual pulsions and needs, which belong to our unconscious self, and that’s really part of us, so intrinsic and indelible.

We try to rationalize sex and instincts, to force the irrational side of our nature into something acceptable for the other people.

How many times do you think or hear someone saying: “It’s disgusting and sick”, watching a film where images recall, remind, or hide inside them something of sexual but not in an explicit way? It disgusts us, unconsciously, but we can’t realize what is really close to us:

Is it too hard to disclose our innermost desires, digging into our dephts, making it human or to understand that animal instinct belongs to our being?

The importance of television in our society

First posted: 03 october 2009

Some people, like me, are addicted to videogames, there are some who use common drugs (trying to smoke even tea bags or ideating a system to create a sort of opium with the poor poppy seeds taken from the edge of a polluted road), some people are addicted to being stressed and there’re some who prefer massification. To tell you the truth, what, in my opinion, worries me most is the last group that I define: “men without qualities”.

Without the passive and destabilizing use of television, these people cannot survive, they can’t concentrate during the study, they can’t even fall asleep (probably because they need to be lulled by the soothing voice of Bruno Vespa - an italian anchorman of a tv talk show dedicated to politics, with politicians discussing and debating about various topics and subjects) and they aren’t able to find a solution if, by chance, their precious survival set is broken.
It’s not important what sort of programs they usually watch, it’s the action itself, thaat is being in front of a television, that makes them feel good, relax, entertaining them gently and giving them the possibility to freeze their brain, that passively absorbs material devoid of substance, or the possibility to talk with their friends, socialize, and then they chat about useless topics, wasting their time (for example, you could hear them saying “Who’s who? Is that person doing the right thing? Is that famous person behaving well in his/her personal life?” and things like that, mostly gossip stuff). It isn’t the single act of a person (who, perhaps, after working all day long, is tired and needs to freeze thoughts, desiring to free is mind and having fun) that I blame, but the reiterating routine and the looking for an action of incapable de-individualized people where the only desire is to immerge themselves in the confused and meaningless “helzapoppin” of the tv smoky fog everyday 


I have the chance to observe groups of young people beyond my imaginary glass case where I place them: they live in a psychiatric hospital while I’m the researcher who takes notes, or, maybe, I’m a patient who secretly drinks a bit of “Milk corrected with mescaline (Milk plus)”, and the team of doctors try to bring me back to reality, unbearable for me (and I’m sure they would try to force me to accept the state of things, but they would miserably fail).
I need major themes, profound topics, depth, i am a seeker of intellectual efforts, but only books, and very few elected persons, lately, are able to share them with me: it’s a pain thinking that most people is trapped, blocked, frozen in a stall position where they cuddle themselves without consciousness.

In this situation, television becomes a paradigm of what I don’t want to approach, that is the android man, totally mechanic and cybernetic, compared to the true self, a human being fond of learning through art, books, travelling, etc.
Pasolini (and I’m sorry to talk about him because, too many people are deliberately manipulating his theories adapting them to their viewpoints and their frame of mind) realized what this medium was able to cause if used like a marketing “tool”. He wrote about television like a mean that, if badly oriented, generates the implosion and degradation of the tradition of our own idiom: today even journalists, in Italy, don’t know their language well.

The most disappointing thing is, however, reading an university essay and finding that: there is no consistency, the verb tenses change in every phrase or they’re omitted, there is no punctuation (maybe they think to be a new junior “Joyces”), there isn’t any knowledge of the syntax, and the spelling is to be deciphered or decrypted. We can blame teachers but this is a “disease deeply persistent and deadly” in the italian society: all people are suffering for it but they don’t do anything to remove it because they’re not interested in improving their own intellectual/cultural foundations, but they prefer to survive getting used to television programs.

Italian school: the religion hour

First posted: 10 september 2009

A day in September I was fooling around the web and, by chance, I found one of the latest interviews of the italian minister of education and school, Gelmini, who was talking about the issue of Catholic (Christian) doctrine in schools. She was referring to the teaching of this Catholic faith in schools, expecially asserting that christian doctrine should be predominant and exclusive.

The minister, one of the least appreciated by the students and not overrated or “rated” at all, (students probably would see her as a full time worker in a fast-food) underlined, how much important is to teach the Christian doctrine in schools as one of the most important subjects.

I quote (similar to the original text) in synthesis some of her phrases (compositions abandoned to the law of inertia), just to give you an idea:

1. “It’s not correct or advisable to teach comparative history of religions in schools; we have to focus just on the Christian/Catholic faith and doctrine”.

2. The minister added that comparative studies of religions isn’t attended in Muslim school system; and our religion isn’t just a faith or a doctrine, but a cultural principle and moral value”, (and we can say that we can’t be bothered to listen to this kind of words anymore)

3. “because in our country the Catholic religion cannot be compared to the other religions. It has a greater significance, it’s practiced by the majority of the population and it has got a valuable and worty tradition. We can’t make it equal to the other religions, which they must be respected” (to following a religion as a practice: does it mean treating the garden plants, making the Swedish square or biblical hermeneutics, which are things that require some practice?).

Currently the hour of religion as far as I can see, watch and learn from some other sources (for ex. high school students who still follow this lesson) is limited to an hour time completely abandoned to random disquisitions about teenagers subjects, suitable for stereotypes and recurrent positive themes (such as ex. “if you’re a teenager then it’s a right thing to be in a group, arguing with mom and dad or not, sitting up in some place all day long, thinking about  problems that appears to be unbearable, but in reality they aren’t, and things like that, included going to discoes, having fun, etc, we can say that “Junior Woodchucks Guidebook docet”), or similar issues that, at the best hypothesis, are referred to religious matters in general or are slightly connected to civic and ethical principles or sentimental education; often they turn to be  monologues of teachers chatting. We don’t talk about religion whether Catholic or not, but mere banalities related to everyday life (“human, all too human”).

Now I wonder, why did Gelmini intend to use the religion of Islam as a comparative field to make our own religion (Catholic and Christian) rise over other doctrines? I should think that here, in my country, the Muslim religion is not understood and it is degraded to serve as a simple point of reference (to adfirm the predominance of Christian faith). Perhaps because there are, in her extensive knowledge of philosophy, only these two religions and did the others decay in the filaments of the cobwebs in the attic? How many religions does she consider? And what about the new age and the new cults (included the self-made religions, crossbreeding, melting pot)? Why so much obstinacy?

A true fact is that “the Catholic religion strongly influenced our culture” but in the past, not now (we can notice it by looking around our selves: when do we study or practice or follow the religious teachings in everyday life? and in which way?).

At this point it could originate a new article parallel to this one so I’ll try to avoid it here, maybe I’ll do it in another post. For the moment I invite you to look for an answer.

Why did we have to discriminate students, who for a personal choice or for their family, decide to defend the right not to attend at the religion hour, depriving them of the opportunity to gain credits or any benefit, in the final text, about the examination and the average mark signed by the religion teacher?

Perhaps a solution could be found in what the Gelmini throws away, that is an equal education of the various religious currents (carried out by competent teachers and through a right training process) introduced like a philosophy rather than an unnecessary and confused belief (if you haven’t got a faith).

How much could be interesting, for example, if religion professor started to talk about not only our religion but also the oriental ones, finding the differences and similarities, facilitating to understand how all religions are somehow linked.

Moreover, why in the traditional high schools, for example, where there are classical matters with their possibility to face in the original language and, in detail, the cultural context of the periods like pre-Christian, Catholic, Christian, more and more often, this historical period, at the best, underestimated or skipped, and generally overlooked?

It’s absurd and senseless that in a branch of studies like that where we can find the instruments to face the culture, the development and specific origins of the greek-roman origin of the Christian religion the teachers don’t invite their students to investigate these main themes.

We should stop imposing the religion lesson as a set of dogmas and faith principles, offering, instead, a course about the comparative history of religious movements understood as cultural systems and ethics, soaked with ideals and prospects of an education to civility.