Antonio Socci this weekend called his readers' attention to the latest Scalfariade, which is one for Ripley's… All of a sudden, Eugenio Scalfari declares he is not an atheist - although he has declared himself one for most of his life. Now he calls himself instead a 'non-believer' while attacking atheists of having absolute intolerance and hatred towards everyone who is not an atheist!
Is this perhaps a sign of senility publicly displayed in his weekly column in L'Espresso? The weekly newsmagazine is Italy's equivalent of TIME, and part of the media empire including La Repubblica, which Scalfari founded and was editor in chief for decades, during which time his publications became the virtual bible of of Italian secularists and anti-Catholics.)In fairness, however, one must also point out that the resident Vaticanista of L'Espresso for the past two decades has been Sandro Magister).
Or maybe after Bergoglio more or less said to him that hell does not exist, Scalfari thinks he can now 'rest in peace'in immortality knowing there is no hell in the afterlife.
Flash! Scalfari attacks atheists
[But has he not been a declared atheist for decades?]
Translated from
July 30, ,2017
There is no more 'irreligion'
[or is it 'lack of religion'?] Not even at the
Repubblica-Espresso media conglomerate which has been for decades the temple of anti-clerical secularism. In the past few years, of course,
La Repubblica has turned into a papolatrous confraternity that celebrates the Bergoglian religion with pages and pages wafting incense.
And now there is a surprising attack against atheists signed by the Supreme Secular Authority, Eugenio Scalfari, with an article entitled
"Militant atheists, here is why you are wrong!".
'It is one thing not to see yourself in any revealed religion. It’s another to believe, absolutely and intolerantly, in the great nothing'. ]
The media empire's founder thinks that today, "there are not too many atheists". He explains that
"the atheist is a person who does not believe in any divinity… For him, after death, there is nothing but nothing! In this, they are absolutists – and in a certain sense, one can call them clericalists because they proclaim their truth to be absolute!" [And doesn't Scalfari do that all the time? Before Bergoglio found a BFF in Scalfari and consecrated his anti-Catholic, anti-clerical certainties with his papal blessings, Scalfari, a cradle Catholic who received his early education from Jesuits, had already preceded him for decades in his anti-Catholicism.]
Already, that does not sound complimentary at all! But then he goes on to defend believers, who, he says, "also believe in an absolute truth, but are infinitely more cautious than atheists". Already quite stupefying words from him. But he goes farther and pulls the pin on his grenade.
"Atheists do not know they are not tolerant at all, but their attitude against religious institutions is rigorously combative. The true reason, often unconscious to them, it that their position demands hatred and intellectual wars against religions of whatever kind. Their avowed atheism wishes to be 'satisfied', therefore they do not preach it with elegant calm but provoke discussions by attacking those who believe in any afterlife, insulting and vilifying them, fighting them intellectually. Their 'thing' guides them and demands to be satisfied!" [Satisfied by getting into a fight? Having been the Secular Pope of Atheism for decades, is Scalfari telling us that was how he conducted himself?]
After this hammering, he then says he does not consider the atheist 'a person to be despised and isolated', yet soon afterwards, he steps his attack:
"Often the atheist's manner is provocatory, quarrelsome and calumnious…(and) does not inspire sympathy because of the arrogance of his ego".
Having given the atheist that added blow, Scalfari says there is "a third position, profoundly different (from atheism) – that of the 'non-believers'." He defines the latter as those "who do not believe in a transcendent divinity" but, according to Scalfari, "assume the existence of a Being in the afterlife".
We can ignore the garbled sophisms that follow because, with all due respect, one can't make heads or tails of them.
All in all,
one has the impression that Scalfari, after a life of absolute secularism, is today, at the age of 94, assailed by thoughts of rhe afterlife which leads him to ask, "And then what?" [He said that for atheists, nothing but nothing follows death. So it took him all these decades before he has begun to worry about that? For decades, it was OK for him if his death simply meant the absolute end of Eugenio Scalfari. But he was raised Catholic, so surely he knew that Christians believe the resurrection of Christ prefigured 'the resurrection of the body' at the end of time that we profess in the Creed. Was it part of his 'atheistic' self-delusion that he always had that in the back of his mind and therefore never really believed that 'nothing but nothing follows death'? Surely someone with his ego could not have borne it to think that he would not be immortal!]]
So he has made up this so called 'middle way'. But there has been a middle way all this time between atheist and believers – namely agnosticism, in which agnostics suspend their judgment simply because they cannot answer to themselves whether God exists or not and/or that no one can know for sure.
But obviously Scalfari will not settle for an already existing category and so has created an ad hoc category: the non-believers, who, he says, "do not believe in an afterlife dominated by the transcendent divinity that most religions believe in, nor in the arrogantly nihilist nothing professed by the atheists."
Then he continues hammering on atheists whose
"ego(I), he says, is substantially elementary… that does not think, that does not see itself acting, and that does not judge. And therefore it is an ego that is animalistic. I am sorry that atheists remind me of the chimpanzees from which the human species evolved".
It is not clear when and why Scalfari stopped being an atheist. Nor why he has developed such a hostility for atheists. Indeed he himself had been declaring himself resolutely atheist. In an interview with Attilo Giordano on January 15, 2016, wile promoting his book “
L’allegria, il pianto, la vita” (Joy, tears, life),
he was asked: "Are you an atheist or an agnostic?" He replied: "Totally atheist. I said so even to the pope".
Now all of a sudden, he says an atheist is 'an I that does not think', in fact, 'an animalistic I' recalling 'the chimpanzies from which our species derive".
As a Catholic, I would never say that of atheists or whoever. The mystery of man is much more complex and profound. For instance, Giacomo Leopardi [great Italian litterateur of the 19th century) had professed himself atheist, yet it would be impossible for me to describe him as someone 'who does not think" or who is 'animalistic".
The strange and even scandalous philippics of Scalfari appears to have passed mostly unnoticed. Yet an atheist – Corrado Augias - who has collaborated with Scalfari all his life protested in
La Repubblica itself. In his weekly column where he comments on letters he receives, he publishes a letter from a reader who says he is atheist but protests, "I do not recognize myself in the words that Scalfari wrote in L'Espresso".
Augias comments: "I, too, am an atheist, and tranquilly so – I do not hate anyone, if only because at my age, it doesn't serve any purpose. I do not know which atheists Scalfari knows to describe them in such crude terms".
[Perhaps Scalfari is describing the atheist he knows best – himself, even if he now says he is no longer atheist. No, worse - he would seem to imply in this last column that he was never an atheist.]
Augias continues: "I have never met any atheists like this. Scalfari's description recalls the most smug anticlericals of the late 19th century, who either became caricatures or provoked episodes of genuine ferocity". And Augias recalls the time "some violent thugs tried to throw the coffin of Pius IX into the Tiber during his funeral in 1878, screaming 'Cast the pig of a pope into the river!'"
So the 'verbal encounter' on the pages of
La Repubblica may seem to be acute indeed. But frankly, I do not think it is sincere.
*
A note on Augias (born 1935): Wikipedia tells us "he is an Italian journalist, writer and TV host. He was also a member of the European Parliament in 1994–1999 for the Democratic Party of the Left. He became popular in Italy as host of several shows dealing with mysteries and criminal cases of the past. He also wrote a series of crime novels set in the early 20th century, as well as essays about peculiar features of the world's most important cities: I segreti di ("The Secrets of...") Rome, Paris, New York City and London."
I take it up from there. In 2006, he published a best-seller in Italy entitled INCHIESTA SU GESU (Inquiry on Jesus), in the form of an interview in which he asks questions of Biblical 'scholar' Mauro Pesce. They dwell on how very little is known of the historical Jesus from the Gospels but nonetheless attempt a 'historical reconstruction' in which, according to a sympathetic reviewer,
"What emerges clearly is an image of Jesus as a man who appeared to be invested with power that sometimes even he himself could not grasp, someone who was definitely a loner, an elusive figure, someone who probably would not have understood how much would be done in his name after he died. Above all, Augias and Pesce depict a man who had no intention whatsoever of founding a religion, but only to disseminate a message of redemption and forgiveness in view of the Kingdom of God which he considered to be imminent".
All the problems inherent in every idea within that paragraph arise, of course, from the fact that Augias and Pesce completely ignore the divinity of Jesus (they are atheists, after all, and recognize no 'god' but themselves) and seek to sketch out the biography of a mere man based on the 'objective facts' they can glean from the Gospels, which they admit is scant, likewise ignoring the fact that the Gospels are not - and were never meant to be - just about a man named Jesus, but about the Son of God who became man himself in order to redeem mankind from the Fall, and what he taught and above all, did, to make that possible.
Coincidentally, Volume 1 of Benedict XVI's JESUS OF NAZARETH was published a few months later - the total and complete antithesis of the virtual non-entity Augias and Pesce conjured as an open insult to the generations of Christians over two millennia who have lived the message of Jesus and those who have died proclaiming it.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/08/2017 01:21]