Interview with Dr. Giovanni Gaetani — Growth and Development Officer, IHEU
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was family background — geography, culture, language, religion/irreligion, and education?
Dr. Giovanni Gaetani: That’s a huge subject! Making a long story short, I can say what follows. Raised as a Catholic, I started questioning my faith at the age of 15. My “conversion” to atheism has been a slow, long, and gradual process, in at least 4 stages.
The first stage was the anti-clerical Christian one: without putting in doubt the existence of God, I started harshly criticizing the authority of Church, which I used to think betrayed the Christian message.
It was to better defend this message that I decided to read the Bible alone, without any intermediate, as an autodidact theist. What a bad idea it was! Indeed, this apologetic attempt ended up being the end of my faith in God. Why?
Because I found it impossible to keep together every contradictory message in the Bible — turning the other cheek with the fire-rain of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Plagues of Egypt with Jesus’s miracles, the commandment of stoning adulterous women with the ethics of forgiveness, and so on. “If this is the Word of God,” I thought, “I’d rather live without it…”
