Italian elections

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details: http://www.voisietequi.it/risultato_utente/1a219a96.html

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Why people believe in God

I've been reading an article in the Economist about Scientific Research being financed by the European Union on the relation between religion and evolution, trying to understand why so many people in the world believe in the existence of a supreme being, despite the obvious absence of any support whatsoever. The article was describing some "scientific" experiments that in my view are just ridiculous, but one of the underlying theories was the one of the "natural selection". This point of view, that in some way is hilarious for this Darwinian theory is so uncomfortable for children of God, is more or less consistent with my idea on the matter. I have this belief, that peoples' life is meaningless. When, on top of that, you have to live a miserable life of restraints and despair, either you find a reason to keep going or what's the purpose? And there it comes, God, the heaven, the promises after life, and so on. Faith helps you going on, fair enough. That's also why religiosity is more widespread where populations are poor and uneducated.

A consequence of this is that, at least in my perception, religious people is usually advantaged in finding reasons to be happy and things to enjoy in life. They are less likely to spend Easter day home alone in front of a PC screen, too. This is not exactly the sort of things that help preserving your DNA and your culture. By the way, today it snows.

Delete Junk Messages in Thunderbird

Today I improved the quality of my life. I've been wondering why in the Hell in Thunderbird there is an option to mark the junk messages as "junk", to move all the junk messages in a particular folder, but... there is NO command to EMPTY that dumb folder!

Sometimes the Thunderbird and Firefox (but particularly the Thunderbird) programmers lose a lot for small defiances. Fortunately, somebody else thought about it, and he came out with an add-on, that I found extremely useful: "Delete Junk Context Menu".

The Conformist

I went to see the Conformist at BFI Southbank yesterday. Amazing film, hyperbolic representation of the fascist mentality, with an artistic mixture of politics, ideals, religion and sexuality. And everything so well disposed, every excess so well integrated into the plot... it is definitely a masterpiece.

I was confident since I'd read very enthusiastic comments on the net before, but after having seen it I have to admit that this is one of the films that you have to be Italian to fully appreciate. It is not just a matter of language, subtitles, and so on. It's a matter of national identity: it tells you a story that is part of our history, if it's not your own history, you can still understand it, but you will miss the passion in it. You won't feel it as your own.