In 1974, when I was 13 years old, I heard on a Lima radio station the offer to give a copy of the New Testament to those who requested it. Since I liked to read, I asked for and received the copy and so the giver, who was a pastor, invited me to visit his small evangelical church. It was the beginning of my experience as a biblical Christian believer and thus my departure from the Catholicism that had been instilled in me at home and at school. Due to my inquisitive personality, I remember that when I was already 16 and finishing high school, I sometimes had doubts: “What if this isn't true?” A friend I met at that church and was baptized with me, however, later introduced me to reading books like Erich Fromm's The Dogma of Christ , and we stopped going to there.
The following year, in 1978, I entered the career of human medicine at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (UNMSM), but due to my doubts and concerns about knowing more about sciences and humanities became more pronounced, I read, among others, the work Why I am not a Christian by Bertrand Russell, and I changed to the philosophy school in 1983. While I was a student there, the interdisciplinary magazine Sollertia [2], directed by a biology student[3], published some of my articles where I questioned God and religion. In 1992 I gained a degree in philosophy and entered university teaching at my alma mater.
In 1994 I published my first book Doesn't God Exist? Essays on the philosophy of religion based on those and other writings. Shortly afterward I had epistolary communication with non-believing philosophers Paul Kurtz (USA) and Finngeir Hiorth (Norway) due to my interest in the magazines Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry founded by the former and the humanist and atheist books of the latter.
In 1995 I released my second book Authoritarianism and Humanism according to Erich Fromm. His vision of man, religion and ethics that was the thesis with which I obtained my degree in philosophy.
And we also teach, when possible, this kind of criticism to university students in our country of ancient Andean-Catholic syncretic tradition where, especially in the mountain provinces and even in its universities, natural forces are still worshiped, especially to the hills, the earth and the water, with Our Fathers and Hail Marys.
In 2009, an administrator of the digital group Atheists in Peru invited me to form an organization of non-believers in the country with other non-believers and by vote the name of the Peruvian Association of Atheists (APERAT) was chosen, which was only successfully registered in the public registries in 2011. In its first stage, we were able to carry out various activities such as talks, debates, video forums, etc. Currently, in addition to having changed its original logo and statute, it presents itself as an organization that has secular humanism among its pillars and carries out public activities from time to time.
Since December 2023, through a statement posted on the website and Facebook of the SSH, its founding president and the last one to date, reported that its activities were suspended “indefinitely” and that “both membership and the board of directors were going to be dissolved.” They cited a lack of time and money to dedicate to the organization, as well as “irreconcilable differences on the board” regarding its goals and the difficulty of “agreeing on what activities we should pursue and what positions we should take regarding different incidents on the national scene.” .
But despite the discussions and disagreements that occurred and continue to occur in any of these groups, currently there is a variety of pages, especially on Facebook, both collectively and individually, by atheists and independent secular humanists from various parts of the country,[6] which demonstrates the growth and the presence, at least virtual, of Peruvian non-believers.
[1] Although we can find humanistic approaches in thinkers from ancient Greece and China, humanism itself is a cultural current that appeared in the era of the European Renaissance to once again focus on the human being without yet being a non-believer. At present there is more than one humanism, we can talk about: 1) religious humanism itself, thus there would be Jewish, Christian, Muslim humanism, etc., 2) universalist or siloist humanism, based on the pseudonym Silo of the Argentine writer Mario Rodríguez Cobos (1938-2010), concerned with personal, social and political change in the world, but also accused of being sectarian and messianic, and 3) rationalist, skeptical, non-religious, atheistic or secular humanism that denies the supernatural and divine (there are groups called humanists Jews and “religious” who follow this vein). Traditionally in Western countries when talking about humanism they refer to secular humanism (based on several manifestos that appeared between the 20th and 21st centuries) which is politically liberal although there are also atheistic humanisms such as socialist, communist and anarchist.
Widely understood in our country, we find books such as that of the Peruvian philosopher Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias (1918-2019): Humanism and revolution (Lima: Casa de la Cultura del Perú, 1969), where he does not question religion but in an interview that We made him declare himself an atheist "from an ethical point of view", respectful of believers and open to the possibility of the parapsychological (unlike his colleague and friend, the Argentine Mario Bunge (1919-2020), a clear critic of the religious and paranormal statements).
[2] In Latin, solercia: Industry, ability and cunning to do or deal with something.
[3] There were not yet specialized faculty journals as there are now.
[4] To date, Eupraxofia has 17 issues published: 4 printed and 13 digital, and Neo-Skepsis has 16 issues published to date: 4 printed and 12 digital.
[5] Initially it was called Skeptics on the radio and it was broadcast over the open signal and on the Internet from a station in Lima (I had the pleasure of being one of the first co-hosts).
[6] Such as Peruvian Atheism (101 thousand followers), Peruvian Atheism Reloaded (2 thousand), Official Community of Peruvian Atheism (803 members), Atheists-Peru (2,800 followers), Atheists and Free Thinkers of Peru (3,600), Cusco Ateo (34 thousand), Scientific Naturalist Humanism (593), the Secular Humanist Circle-Trujillo (165 members) or the Humanists of Huancayo (121 followers).
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