User talk:Akulo

Decapentaplegic
Okay, I guessed I jumped the gun here. I deleted the article under CSD A1, which says an article can be speedy deleted if it is short (which your article was). I guess it is appropriate for your article be kept on Wikipedia, but you must expand the article. We cannot have one-line articles on Wikipedia that are not helpful, nor useful. Also, you must write it in encyclopedic form, so no sentence fragments, bad grammar, etc. Thanks!  Nish kid 64  01:06, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Blocked
I am an American citizen living in the People's Republic of China. I am accessing Wikipedia.org through the Great Firewall illegally via Tor and Privoxy. I would like to continue to contribute to Wikipedia.org during my stay here. Please advise.

Primo Levi
Input0output needs to reclassify Primo Levi on the following pages, though I'm not sure there are categories for "Jewish irreligionists" and "Italian irreligionists":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jewish_atheists

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Italian_atheists

. Here are some relevant quotes:

http://books.google.com/books?id=lyrxNjmra8YC&source=gbs_navlinks_s

http://books.google.com/books?id=lyrxNjmra8YC&q=atheist#v=snippet

http://books.google.com/books?id=lyrxNjmra8YC&q=irreligion#v=snippet

http://books.google.com/books?id=lyrxNjmra8YC&q=irreligious#v=snippet

. Also note the fact that Christopher Hitchens dedicated _The Portable Atheist_ to the memory of Primo Levi (from Primo Levi's Wikipedia entry):

Christopher Hitchens' book _The Portable Atheist_, a collection of extracts of atheist texts, is dedicated to the memory of Levi "who had the moral fortitude to refuse false consolation even while enduring the 'selection' process in Auschwitz". The dedication then quotes Levi in _The Drowned and the Saved_, asserting, "I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day."[34]

. Here is a more extensive quotation from _The Drowned and the Saved_:

"I entered the Lager (Auschwitz) as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief.  It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice... I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer.  This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death... naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the “commission” that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed; one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected the temptation; I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it."

. Input0output may very well dispute this, but I think that Ian Thomson and Christopher Hitchens are more reputable authorities on what Primo Levi believed (or didn't) than either of us.

One selection that does seem to support Input0output's assertion that Levi was something other than an out-and-out atheist is the following:

http://books.google.com/books?id=mGzmdvFtIXkC&pg=PA370&lpg=PA370&dq=%22hear+Levi+define+himself+as+'una+persona+in+ricerca',%22&source=bl&ots=Wm1MlooWUg&sig=LWMKMQAXJsO6Ep2AvYL7hL2ZoMY&hl=en&ei=4lSJTNKLL4W6sAOUp93aBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22hear%20Levi%20define%20himself%20as%20'una%20persona%20in%20ricerca'%2C%22&f=false

On 25 October 1975 Levi was in Rome... Later in the autumn Levi spoke to Waldensian schoolchildren on the nature of anti-Semitism. Their teacher, Pastor Guiseppe Platone, edited the Italian Protestant newspaper _La Luce_, for which Levi occasionally gave interviews. Platone was surprised to hear Levi define himself as 'una persona in ricerca', 'a man in search of a faith', since he assumed that Levi was an atheist. In fact Levi envied believers -- the more so, the older he got -- and wished he could believe in God. 'To have a father, a judge, a teacher would be good, calming.'

. I, too, wish there were a God: that would mean that death isn't the end and that my life has meaning sub specie aeternitatis. Unfortunately, wishing something were true and believing it actually might be true are two different things. Based on what I've read, I don't think that Primo Levi believed that the divine had any (reasonable) possibility of existing. Thus, for all intents and purposes, he was without "God" or "gods", and thus he was an atheist and not an agnostic, which is what the label "irreligious" seems to imply. Classification of Levi's religious (dis)belief[s] as something other than atheism is mere pilpul.

Akulo (talk) 20:30, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

(Excerpts from Ferdinando Camon, _Conversations with Primo Levi_, Marlboro, Vt: Marlboro Press, 1989)

CAMON: So, chemistry and literature; concentration-camp writer, and scientific and naturalist writer. The fact that the literary writing came after the concentration-camp books suggests that the Auschwitz trauma had receded almost to the point of disappearing and that it wasn't simply negative. How about at the private, personal, family level?

LEVI: No, as I said, Auschwitz was not simply negative for me, it taught me a lot. Among other things, before Auschwitz I was a man with no woman, afterwards I met the one who was to become my wife. I very much needed someone to listen to me, and she listened more than others. That's why, in sickness and in health, I'm bound to her for life. Before that I was full of complexes, I don't know why. Maybe because I was a Jew. As a Jew, I'd been made fun of by my schoolmates: not beaten up, or insulted, but made fun of, yes. After my return from Auschwitz, I had a great need to talk, I looked up my old friends and talked their ears off, and I remember their saying to me, "How strange! You haven't changed a bit." I think I'd undergone a process of maturing, having had the luck to survive. Because it's not a question of strength, but of luck: you can't beat a concentration camp with your own strengths. I'd been lucky: for having been a chemist, for having met a bricklayer who gave me something to eat, for having overcome the language difficulty. This I can claim to have done; I never got sick -- I got sick only once, at the end, and this too was lucky, because I missed the evacuation of the camp. The others, the healthy ones, all died because they were transferred to Buchenwald and Mauthausen in the middle of winter. I had an argument ... are you a believer?

CAMON: Why do you ask?

LEVI: I had an argument with a believer, a friend of mine from Padua, your city, by the way.

CAMON: You're not a believer?

LEVI: No, I never have been. I'd like to be, but I don't succeed.

CAMON: Then in what sense are you Jewish?

LEVI: A simple matter of culture. If it hadn't been for the racial laws and the concentration camp, I'd probably no longer be a Jew, except for my last name. Instead, this dual experience, the racial laws and the concentration camp, stamped me the way you stamp a steel plate. At this point I'm a Jew, they've sewn the star of David on me and not only on my clothes.

CAMON: With whom did you have that argument?

LEVI: If you remember _The Periodic Table_, he's the one mentioned as "the assistant" in the "Potassium" story. He's a believer but not a Catholic; he came to see me after my release to tell me I was clearly one of the elect, since I'd been chosen to survive in order for me to write _Survival in Auschwitz_. And this, I must confess, seemed to me a blasphemy, that God should grant privileges, saving one person and condemning someone else. I must say that for me the experience of Auschwitz has been such as to sweep away any remnant of religious education I may have had.

CAMON: Meaning that Auschwitz is proof of the nonexistence of God?

LEVI: There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God. [On the typescript, he added in pencil: I don't find a solution to this dilemma. I keep looking, but I don't find it.]

(The following from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the _Random House Dictionary_, © Random House, Inc. 2010.)

atheist –n.- a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.

agnostic -n.- a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as god, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.

An agnostic position is one that leaves open the question whether there exists a god or gods, professing to find such a question unanswered or unanswerable. For the atheist, the question has been answered, and in the negative.

Jaroslav Pelikan (b. 1923), U.S. theologian. "Atheist/Agnostic," _The Melody of Theology: A Philosophical Dictionary_, Harvard University Press (1988).

Akulo (talk) 20:20, 30 September 2010 (UTC)