-- George Orwell, Notes on the way, April 1940

In this country, as in all catholic countries, nobody is more merciless than the church, the hierarchy of church, and all those who, for one reason or another, consider the church above the people.
But in front of this merciless force are medical scientists, whose category in Italy is made up essentially by affiliates of the catholic church, and who are the representatives of a stubborn force which is two times merciless: one time for the power of religious dogma, and the other for the power of scientific dogma.

There's a third force which is equally capable of merciless acts and cruel indifference to the destiny of the individual. Such is the force of magistrates and the book of law. Far from being as it should an independent riverbank against the floods of injustice that always waste our falling landscapes, the italian magistrates are capable only to bash the poor, the hopeless, and the left-out (There are exceptions, when magistrates go against someone who was or still is powerful: but this is only when there's an invisible battle going on among factions, and the magistrates just take one of the sides: It balances nothing).

These days, the most tragic example of all these forces converging to destroy the hopes of the people, is the case of Piergiorgio Welby, an Italian citizen who is literally imploring his physicians to let him die, and who is forced into a suspended state of hellish life for this atrocious coward mix of mistaken sense of scientific duty, imitative brainless religion and cretin soulless application of the law.

Welby wrote to the Italian newspapers: "In any case so long, gentlemen, who are making of endless torture the mean, the obligatory instrument to realize or defend your values!
What are going to be (and how) the dead or the living who will remain when we will all be gone, we don't know, neither you and I."

People who felt moved by Welby's story marched in the streets these days. To ask for mercy and justice for all those who are in the same situation. Actually they didn't technically march as they held a "vigil", with candles and all. The prayer vigils are of course religious practices and in fact, many of those who are expressing solidarity to Welby are Christians religious people.

The reasons to "hold a vigil" anyway, go beyond a casual choice dictated by the spirit of those who organized it. The vigil is supposed to be also a moral point which, in an indirect way, is meant to say to the Vatican (the real culprit in this whole story): "your authority and your religion are a fake: ours are real because we feel real mercy and we know what pity is."

There's a bit of hypocrisy there, and also a bit of sincerity.

It would be incredibly difficult and artificial to try and extricate from this story where religion begins and where it ends, what's the bad that it brought into it and what is the good. In the name of what in a society without religion or the idea of religion people would light candles (or doing anything equally "ritual") to stop merciless acts of governments? I don't seem to recall anything similar in supposed "materialistic" societies men tried to establish.

This bring me to the final part of this post, which is dedicated to scientist and author Richard Dawkins.

In a recent interview, to promote his new book "The God delusion" set against the idea of god and religion, there's this exchange:

-- In The God Delusion, [you quote] John Lennon's Imagine and suggest that without religion the world would be a happier and more harmonious place.
-- Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot...
-- But surely this is a very naive way of looking at things. Even if religion disappeared overnight, there would still be a predilection for violence in the human character.
-- Yes, I agree with that.
-- [Aren't you] implying quite the opposite?
-- Hmm, let me try to think that through... If the only thing you've got against someone is that they support the wrong football team, you might get into a fight about it, but you will stop short of killing them. Now that's something you might well not do if you've been taught from babyhood upwards that your God will approve of such behaviour. You don't have to produce evidence to support your belief. You simply say, "It's my faith", and are blind to any kind of argument. If part of your faith is the righteousness of killing infidels or apostates, then that does seem to me to go further than the ordinary aggression which you pessimistically attribute to humans anyway.

Suddenly I think Richard Dawkins is a stupid man, who doesn't know the first thing about the world. This is most certainly not true, and still, it looks like he is dreaming of a debate he's having in a theoretical reality.

For example: to blindly believe that 9/11 and the London bombings (and even the crusades!) are acts dictated by faith is incredibly shallow and dumb. Anyone with a little education, a little criticism and the ability to look behind the lies of the media should know better than that. Such events are obviously caused by greed and the battle for power and not by religious reasons. Religion is simply an instrument in the matter which could easily be replaced by any other instrument after just a bit of testing. Terrorism, moreover, is mostly staged (included the events Dawkins talks about, and others, such as the IRA fight against the British government) and even if you don't want to believe it --because you're too "reasonable" to-- you cannot ignore that it wouldn't be possible without the complicity and collaboration of people of the most diverse religions. People not on the field --creating diversions, removing defenses, cooking lies in the media-- because of their religious faith.
(Also, to say that a football supporter would stop short before killing is just absurd, news are full of examples that proves exactly the contrary, but whatever.)

Now, there are more profound reasons to argue that it is shallow to identify religion and the idea of God with the "evil" things done in its name. The real story of humanity is one of evil and cruelty since its early beginnings, and --like it or not-- very often religion acted as an organizing principle against violence injustice and cruelty, and inside whose boundaries violence and cruelty where limited and not heightened.
It is well known that (one could say unfortunately, but it's all a matter of points of view) in African countries descended into anarchy and violence (say Somalia) Islam is welcomed because it is an organizing principle under which life is more peaceful, an order is given, streets are kept clean, old-timers are respected etc.

Now I am the first to loath religious states, fanaticism, the forced numbed down mentality that very often religion creates. I never practiced religion and I'm not even baptized. I advocated emancipation from religion many times. I spent hours of my young life outside classrooms --since elementary school-- waiting for the "religious hour" to end.
I read "Why I am not a Christian" at sixteen, joyously.

Nonetheless, I recognize religion as an instrument --like many. History is there to prove how it can be used for good or for bad. Isn't Michelangelo's art, for example, a product of religion in the sense that religion gave to him an organizing philosophical principle under which he could handle and tell about the struggle between good and evil as he perceived it in his everyday life? One can argue that that sort religion was a simplification and a lie, but this didn't produce a simplified or untrue art, did it.

And this brings me to my final considerations. The power of the church and of the dogmas in general can make the authority merciless and cruel and stupid. We all know that. The answer is always: education, emancipation, free-thinking process and so forth. I'm all for that.
Yet religion, even if it is nothing but a simplified version of a mistaken philosophy (I don't know, I am always searching in a way), can make people more resistant to merciless authorities. It does that by providing a simple set of rules, which no maker of ideas and laws can easily change or ridicule.
After all they're simple enough to give a soul to anyone.

-- George Orwell, Notes on the way, April 1940