Author:
Antonio Pascale
Publishing house:
Marsilio
Date of publication:
09-05-2023
The wager of Blaise Pascal, whose 400th birth anniversary falls in June 2023, was about God. Man is a tragic, hopeless being,” argued the pessimist Pascal, “so it is worth betting on God’s existence: nothing is lost and everything is gained. Antonio Pascale’s wager is a different one and is not about the existence of God, but starts from the following question: can we use Pascal’s pessimism to investigate human nature secularly? To understand why human beings invented God and stories? How do we go about it and why do we ask what is convenient and what is not? Thus, the other wager is to link pessimism to the search for the reasons that make life worth living. Moreover, pessimism is the lever to answer: did the idea of God arise from the empty stomach of us humans? If the idea of God is born to honor those who feed us, if the idea of God is to fill a void, then it makes sense to ask what happened to the void from which everything came. Antonio Pascale, with the sharpness and irony of his pen and head, reasons about how we are trying to fill that void. A pamphlet on the necessity of pessimism and the novelty of atheism.