On Religion

I don't believe in God. 

My not-belief is very profound, very serious. It is not a superficial new age sort of atheism. Yes, I find religious rituals silly. But it is important to understand that I don't find religious people to be silly. Eeach of us should pursue happines in the best way they think. If religion is important to them, I respect that, and I respect them. In fact I am quite envious for their capacity to find strenght in it. 

My non-belief is not motivated by the sillines of rituals and mythology. Perhaps it was when I was a teenager. But now it is way more profound. Albeit I must admit that big driver of non-belief is also rooted in my profound dislike of the attitude of some religious people to impose their beliefs onto others. Which is a form of moral violence that I despise. 

On the value of Faith

The logical apparatus of faith does not belong to me. The distance between me and faith started from a silly episode. I was eleven and was reading about the bing-bang and all that. However, at sunday school the priest told me that the Hearth was 5000 years old or something. I don't recall very well. Anyway I went and I told the priest why did he say that, given that the Earth was 5 billions years old and we knew that via scientific facts. I told him that I did not understand why was that important, what would it matter if God created Hearth 5000 or 5 billions years ago? what's important is that he/she/they created it. But the priest asked me not to read those books anymore and to trust the word of God. I think that was it for me. From that moment on I approached faith with deep suspicion. 

It was at college, during the 5 amazing years that I spent completely immersed in the study of physics that my impossibility to have faith solidified. Since then I have been a scientist. I think that, the inner core of a scientist is doubt and verification. I don't really see any space for faith. In fact, I have to fight faith constantly. For example, I have too much faith in my ideas, I know that, and continously I have to seek verificaiton in experiments. So, how can I have faith? 

Once I asked a very catholic friend of mine how could he be a physicist and a deep catholic. He told me: "I separate the two things in my brain and I just stop asking questions about it". I found that I just can't. 

Therefore I investigated the concept of faith very much, I have to say mostly in the catholic religion because I was in Italy and also because faith is at the center of everything. So I discovered that the theological appratus of the Roman Catholic church (but also of other religions) is based on an important axiom: There is 1 truth, and 2 ways to achieve it: by revelation or by demonstration. Science does demonstration, the word of god, the bible, does revelation. 

And that's my problem right there. I can't accept this axiom. I don't think there are 2 ways to the truth. In fact, I don't even know if a truth exists at all. At any rate, if it exists then it is only 1 by definition and it can only be reached through demonstration.  This is because revelation is obtained trhough interpretation of human language. Even assuming that a single human being would be revealed a truth, the moment that person tries to communicate it to other human beings, for example by the writing of a holy text, it's writing leads to a variety of interpretations. These interpretetaion depend on the specific conditions and mindset of the brain of the reader. This is simple congnitive neuroscience concepts. Therefore, the initial revealed truth quickly becomes multiple slightly different or even totally different set of "truths".  Instead, experimental data is data, even when interpreted, the quantitative outcome of an expeirment can be reproduced over and over again. And it does not depend from prejudisms. Conditions can be exactly replicated. This is the core of the scientitic method.  This is why we have a lot of religions, but only 1 science.

Given these premises, I have difficulty in accepting faith as a moral value. I often hear from friends and society that the fact that a person has faith is indicative of some superior moral position. Having faith is somehting good. I have deep concerns with this concept. While don't think that having faith is a negative feature, I firmly believe that it is not a positive feature either.  Having faith or not, is completely independent from being a decent person.  So in this regard I don't think that faith is a value at all. Faith is just a personal choice,  and it should not determine the way we interact with others and are seen by others. 

On God

Everybody at some point of their life asked themselves the big question. Is there a God. For me it was simply related to physics. What are the laws of physics. Who put them there? in a way, I found myself very close to a Spinozian interpretation of God. God as Nature, God as the laws of Nature. That is the answer I used to give myself, which is very different from the humanized myth of god that underlies most religions. But here's my open question. I don't know what is reality, or what are the lawys of physics. Perhaps there is a God. Perhaps we live in a computer simulation and the AI is God. But one thing is clear to me. Very much like  an Artificial Intelligence, God can't be understood by our brains. This is an important point, it makes one wonder wether the question about its existence makes sense at all. Perhaps that makes of me an agnostic? possibly. 

On the meaning of life? 

Within my system of thought, the answer is pretty obvious: life has no meaning. Because there is no god, there is no objective definition of values, or meaning. There is no good or bad. And there is no natural or non-natural. Anything that is possible and allowed by physics is trivially natural. But life has a goal, and it is to go on, in spite of a universe that is clearly not made for it. So, even if what we do has no importance at all for the grander universe, it is important to us, and it is important to the people that we care about, care about us and all the others. In this sense, I am an existentialist. I think that we give meaning to our lives. We give ourselves purpose and ethics. I can't say who is right or who is wrong, objectively. But I have my ethics and I will follow it, and I will try not to harm others and make them happy. That's the meaning of life. 

On the dangers of the ascetic ideal, moral rightness and the deep root of religions

Most religions, but not all, deal with the idea of reptitude and moral rightness. More speficially they set a series of deontological rules that must be attained to reach the after-life, elinghtment or similar. These rules are ethic propositions that are meant to define the right from the wrong. Some, or many of those rules, are rooted in practical needs of the ancient societies that created them,  and they were (and are often stiall are) used as state laws. In essence these rules define the ethics of the faifthful individual. Nietzsche thinks that these rules are mostly built to suppress basic human insticts and promote some form of ascetism and rational behavior. Indeed often these rules are set to manage and control  sex, passions and violence. Insticts and feelings that are deeply rooted within the human animal and that are often associated to unappropriate behaviors, or destructive behaviors. Nietzsche used to think that the negation of instict was ulitmately the negation of humanity. I find myself to fully share this vision. The idea that a person is pious when they're detached from insticts, sufference, desires and sex, really does point to the fact that the pious person negates pleasures. I find really strange that we should spend decades of time trying to negate pleasure, trying to negate and refute what makes us happy. It is important to note that the idea that moral rightness comes from the negation of pleasures and instincts is not unique to religions. In fact, it can be found in other aspects of human behavior. Very clear examples are the idea of superiority of the rational mind of Kant. Following the specific example of Kant, the idea that the rational thought is superior to anything else is in fact quite common in science. I find myself often in contact with scientsits who refute life or think that scientsits are not to be bothered with heartly silliness and pleasures. Apparently we should work in dark labs and avoid fun and parties. Conferences should be dry rational meetings where humans are supposed to interact like robots. For some, going to a party to have fun while doing a conference is an unacceptable sin, definitively not an appropriate behavior for a scientist. These people, profess a very similar ascetic approach to life to any religion. And some of them are not religious at all. So the problem of religion is actually not unique to religion. The main difference with other forms of ascetism is simply that religions empower and validate on a very large scale the ascetic idea which ultimately leads to the belief of moral superiority of a group of people. This matters because in the practice of things, the mass validation of moral laws offered by religions  is used as a justification for moral judgement of those that don't follow the same set of rules and values. The unfaithfuls, to the pious mind, can become wicked, evil and sinners. At the extreme, it is this type of moral validation that justifies mass murder, terror attacks, persecution of minorities and women that are carried out by subsets of religious people. However, I don't think that there is nothing intrisically bad in religions. Instead it is human nature that seeks for justification of bad deeds through moral validation. Similar mechanisms are clearly observed today in american politics, even more than european politics. Both democrats and republicans sincerely believe to be better persons than the others being heroic patriots or defenders of self-determinsm and science. So the debate radicalizes into clash of factions that truly believe that other is unowrthy, a sinner in the name of the ascetic ideal. I hate the ascetic ideal, I hate it when I see it in religions, and I hate it when I see it non-religious practices. But here's the big contradiction, pehaps the ascetic ideal too is a human instict. Perhaps, our genetics built us to develop validation of our moral thoughts so that we can justify mass murder of competing rival groups. But we don't live anymore in the jungle, and my very dear friend, Proff John W Krakauer, conviced me that it is possible to steer human nature to be better than this.