[ExI] The Manifesto of Italian Transhumanists

[Stefano Vaj]

On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 5:43 PM, Amara Graps <amara at amara.com> wrote:
>  Bryan, see my comment here:
>  http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2008/01/14/storm-over-rome-physicists-against-pope-ratzinger/#comment-91952
>
>  and my previous post(s)
>  http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2008-February/040996.html
>
>  regarding a saga involving the Pope. Here is one example of his role in
>  the Italian government; A very well-qualified (for once) scientist was
>  nominated to head the CNR, and some number of Vatican sympathizers in
>  the Italian Parliament hung up his nomination due to his signing a
>  letter objecting to the Pope making a speech at the inaugural events at
>  Rome La Sapienza University.
>
>  If you look at the laws passed in the Italian Parliament in the last
>  5 years, you will find a few significant anti-transhumanism
>  laws passed, due to the influence of the Church.

Amara is right. The growing political power in Italy of the Catholic
Church, in a period where its religious power has been in steep
decline for decades and its ranks are growingly filled by immigrated
priests, does not depend from any kind of overwhelming popular
support, but on two main factors:

- the enormous assets and financial resources it has accumulated
during the Cold War when the Christian Democrats were entrusted with
the task of keeping the communist party out of the Italian government
by the entire West and West-friendly Italian public opinion, also
thank to the fact that after twenty year of fascist regime the Church
was besides the communist party the only Italian force to have a
diffused, territorially widespread coverage;

- the fact that in the nowadays bipolar political system, the 4 or 5%
of catholic fundamentalists are believed to be on most occasions the
swinging vote, determining whether the right or the left is going to
govern a given municipality o the entire country; thus, both
coalitions tend regularly to put forward candidates with an immaculate
catholic or philo-catholic pedigree.

Having said that, pro-life is the concern of a militant minority which
is a source of embarassment even to the small catholic parties,
religion is largely irrelevant to the everyday life of the average
Italian unless as a folkloric tradition on the occasion of births,
funerals and (less and less) marriages, and creationism, far from
being a debated issue, is mostly laughed off from schools and
academias.

Yet, denouncing the catholic lobby or challenging openly its tenets in
public is of growing political sensitiveness, to the point that you
would be hard-pressed to find a communist or former communist
politician who is willing to admit his own allegiance to dialectic
materialism... :-)

Stefano Vaj