Who am I?

1 • Preliminary note

I think you’ll agree with me that a dad and a mom want what is good for their children.

So they’ll try to give their children everything that they – in good faith – believe is good for their growth.

Let’s make some examples on this.

Let’s take the case of a mother who wants to have her son baptized…

See, somebody has already tensed up, put off by the example I just made…

But don’t worry.

By now, common thought has it that the custom that must be followed is:

The logic is flawless. Whoever acts differently, I-S-S-O-W-R-O-O-O-N-G!.

And to me, in particular, this educational strategy seems “so wise” that I’d even extend it to everything else that one would like to pass on to their children:

…

It’s clear that I am joking, right?

Good.

Seeing as it is evident that it doesn’t make much sense to take this approach «to an extreme», how to do we set the limits?

It’s simple.

We all set the limits like I said at the beginning:

“In good faith”, in plain terms, means this:

• if you think that baptizing your child is good for them, just as it was good that you taught them to speak, to walk, to say “thank you”, to behave in a certain manner, then it is right that you baptize your children;
• if you think that baptizing your child is bad for them, just as it would have been bad for them if you hadn’t sent them to school, or fed them, or if you had given them a bad upbringing, then it is right that you don’t baptize your child.

This is acting according to conscience.

As Robert Spaemann (1927-2018), german philosopher and theologian, said:

Conscience is an organ because it is something that for us is a given, that belongs to our essence, and not something that has been made outside of us.

And, being an organ, it needs to grow, to be formed, and be exercised.

(Then, sure, just who should be forming it is another issue, along with how and why… but let’s discuss this some other time.)

2 • Inquiries

That said.

I am not a child of the above-cited example.

Not of those who communicate by bleating, but instead, of those who have been baptized.

And not only was I baptized, but since those who educated me judged in conscience that this was good for me, I got the whole package: I attended Church regularly, I scampered around the oratory, got four full years of catechism (two for communion and two for confirmation), and I was also an altar boy.

Some champions of “laicism” think that a person raised this way is indoctrinated.

In my opinion, those who think this make two (very understandable) mistakes.

The first is that they, typically, have some unresolved issue with the Catholic Church and follow the following line of reasoning regarding “religious education”:

The second mistake is that they are (inexplicably) convinced that children will just drink up anything.

Which can be true, until a certain age.

But then, two things happen there in the middle:

• adolescence: in which a young person (usually) begins to think that exactly the opposite of what they were told as a child is true;
• maturity: in which the aforementioned has the desire to inquire, understand, see with their own eyes if there is actual truth in what they were taught when they were little.

So, when I reached a certain age, I started asking myself questions of this sort:

• But does God exist for real?
• And even if so, how could we ever find out?
• And if it so happened that God really did exist, and did reveal himself, then it just so happens that my religion has ended up being the true religion?
• So then, who was Jesus? Did he invent Christianity or did Saint Paul?
• And even if all this were all true, what has it got to do with my life?

…and so on, from the problem of evil in the world to the Crusades, to Galileo, to the Pope (who does or doesn’t wear Prada?), to the need for Sunday mass, etc…

But I did not stop at the questions and doubts.

I started looking for answers.

And I looked for them from people scattered all over space. And time.

I found out what my friends thought.

And what was thought by literature teacher (an atheist and anticlerical) and by Benedict XVI, and then Corrado Augias, then Vittorio Messori, then Christopher Hitchens, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, John Henry Newman, Richard Dawkins, Clive Staples Lewis, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, etc… (for those who might want to read two to three book titles, I put together a kind of bibliography for the blog here at this link).

3 • …and the presentations at the end

Ok, I’ve procrastinated enough.

Just a couple of lines about the author of the blog.

I am twenty-five years old. (*)

(*) (I wrote this page in 2016…)

I live in «the suburbs of the Vatican… which I believe are still called Rome» (quote).

…and (in strictly non-chronological order), starting from the age of three, I wanted to become a notary, a street sweeper, a chemical engineer, a writer, a priest, a professor of literature, a designer of comic books, and a biomedical engineer…

(Spoiler: I ended up doing none of these things as a job!)

Up until a few years ago I used to live a pretty normal life… then something happened: I was bitten by a radioactive Pope.

And then everything changed.

Salesalato (which literally means «SaltySalt») is a blog of apologetics (if you don’t know the meaning of this swear word, you can find out by clicking this link here).

It came about for a variety of reasons (many of which I’m a bit embarrassed to admit).

But amongst which is that of wanting to share some things that have emerged from these “inquiries” of mine…

…keeping, as much as possible, the tone to that of a friendly chat in the pub over a soft drink, best of all, a flat one…

And that’s all for now.

Over and out.

sale

(Fall 2016)