Thursday, October 9, 2025

Peruvian atheism popularizer Luis del Castillo receives Award for Distinguished Service to Humanism

During the International Humanist Conference “From Awareness to Action: Strengthening Open Societies through Scientific Literacy,” held in Luxembourg from July 4 to 6, 2025, Distinguished Service to Humanism Awards were presented in honor of world humanist leaders. One of the recipients was the Peruvian materialist and atheist Luis del Castillo Gamboa, a physics graduate and retired professor at the National University of San Marcos, who for more than 50 years gave lectures, debates, and seminars questioning the existence of God, the Bible, and Christianity. He was nominated for this award by the Rationalist Humanist Institute of Peru (IHURA-PERU).




In addition, Del Castillo Gamboa has published the following books in Spanish:

1.- Materialist Analysis. Nature under dialectical materialist analysis - Society under historical materialist analysis (2025).
Abstract
The source of the creation of this work was the need to integrate a multitude of diverse topics into a single block that would demonstrate the diversity of possible analyses that both Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism are capable of.
Our purpose has been to deploy the formidable analytical apparatus of Dialectical Materialism-Historical Materialism, acting on specific Natural and Social Objects- Processes, showing its Method of Analysis in Action, to penetrate the depths of Nature and Society, revealing its Visible and Invisible Dialectics.
For a thorough researcher in the Natural Sciences or Social Sciences, there is no method more comprehensive, ambitious, radical, and rigorous than that of Marxist-Engelsian Materialism. And when analyses from other schools, which we dialectical materialists accept, arise, they turn out to be spontaneously materialist or para-materialist-Marxist.
This selection of analyses, which in our opinion may continue to grow without limit, has not been divided into a section dedicated to Nature and another to Society, but rather has alternately interspersed a Dialectical Analysis of Nature and one of Society, allowing the reader to continually oscillate between these extremes.
At the end of the book, I have included a master sources section for the analyses, indicating the works and authors from whom each analysis is derived in whole or in part. Readers should consult these sections if they wish to delve even deeper into the desired topics.
Some of the analyses, due to their quality, have been reproduced intact, without being summarized; others have been contracted and reconfigured; and others have been expanded.
Quantitatively, this work consists of fifty analyses, of varying length but generally brief, constituting extracts of the key, essential aspects of each selected topic.
We then present a set of diverse analyses on Objects - Process of Nature and Society from the perspective of Marxist-Engelsian Materialism and that will provide a panoramic view of the colossal breadth of its method of analysis applied to fields such as: Physics - Music - Philosophy - History - Anthropology - Mathematics - Linguistics - Astrophysics - Neurophysiology - Politics - Economy - Literature - Painting - Chemistry - Religion - Sociology - Biology - Logic.

2.- Historical Materialist Analysis of Jesus - Jesus Christ - Christ (2025), 728 pages.
Preface
Jesus emerging from the economic and social formation centered on the Sub-Asian Mode of Production or Sub-Communal Tributary Mode of Production or Sub-Despotic Tributary Mode of Production of Israel integrated into Roman Imperialism.
Jesus Christ emerging from the transition from Jesus to Christ as a response to the crisis in his followers generated by the abrupt, catastrophic end of the master Jesus, the constitution of the Church of Jerusalem, plus the accelerating and catalytic role of the intervention of the Hellenists and the Church of Antioch.
Christ emerging from the economic and social formation centered on the developed Slave Mode of Production of the Roman Empire, in the immense multinational world of the Mediterranean.
This is what this work is about.
Thus, my work has fundamentally constituted an investigation into the scientific researchers, Non-Marxist and Marxist, of the Origins of Christianity, within my possibilities and limitations, since I have carried them out as an amateur in the study of the history of Christian genesis, but not as an academic professional in these matters. My direct or indirect teachers in this work have been: Herman Samuel Reimarus, David Friedrich Strauss, Fernand Christian Baur, Albert Schweitzer, A. Weisse, Bruno Bauer, John Robertson, A. Niemojewski, Hans Conzelman, Julius Wellhausen, Arthur Drews, Paul Louis Couchoud, E. Moutier Rousset, Eduard Dujardin, Alfred Loisy, Archibald Robertson, Prosper Alfaric, Maurice Goguel, Thomas Whittaker, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, J. Klausner, R. Eisler, P. Winter, A. N. Sherwin White, H. Cohn, S. Zeitlin G. S. Sloyan, O. Cullman, E. Bammel C. F. Moule, John Dominique Crossan, J. S. Kloppenborg, B. L. Mack, M. Péres Fernández, Joel Carmichael Hugh Sconfield, G. Bornkmann, Rudolf Bultmann, Y. Frantsev, B. Lapicki, Ambrogio Donini, Charles Hainchelin, Louis Duchesne, Joseph Klausner, Hyan Maccoby, Geza Vermes, Antonio Piñero, Gonzalo Puente Ojea, Samuel G. F. Brandon, I. Iaroslavski, N. Rumiantsev, A. Ranovitch, R. Vipper, S. Kovalev, Michael Arnheim, I. Lenzman, Charles Guignebert, Daniel Rops, Adolphe Lods, Isaac Asimov, Robert Graves, Raphael Patai, Michel Clévenot.
My fundamental non-Marxist teacher has been the great French historian Charles Guignebert, and among the Marxists: Charles Hainchelin, Ambrogio Donini, and I. Lenzman.
I have used their works extensively, within my possibilities and limitations, thus becoming a disciple of such great researchers.
I have trained in their methods of analysis, their imagination, their erudition, using, I insist, their works extensively, which largely inform this effort, which in turn is a tribute to their enormous and meticulous investigative work, to their profound research capacity.
I have been guided, unquestionably, by the formidable method of Historical Materialism, and it could not be otherwise since I come from the field of natural sciences, in my case, Physics. I judge the Marxist-Engelsian historical materialist method to be the only acceptable one for a scientific thinker-researcher to achieve a completely objective view of social phenomena, which gives it, overall, an absolute character.
I have divided this work into three sections: Jesus, Jesus Christ, and Christ. Jesus as a very possible historical figure; Jesus Christ as a historical-mythical figure; and Christ as a mythical construction.
Other aspects that I have added as an extension are:
Evidence against the historicity of Jesus or Parameters of mythicity.
General economic-social-legal and ideological parameters in the genesis and development of Christianity.
Causes that generated Christianity.
Factors and characteristics that made Christianity triumph as a new religion. Equations - Trajectory for Jesus - Christ.
Generator Equation of the Transition from Jesus to Christ.
Field of Contradictions in the Dynamics of the Genesis and Development of Christianity. Here, we have exposed the Field of Contradictions, Conflicts, Antagonisms, and Opposites—Struggle of Opposites and Contraries—at all levels, which generated the dynamics of the first Christian communities, gradually advancing toward their subsequent transformations. Here, the sign [ ↔ ] is the meaning of Conflict - Contradiction - Antagonism - In Opposition to - In Conflict with - Contrary to Christianity as a Conservative and Conformist Ideology.
Jesus Christ. Why has he survived after two thousand years?
We hope that these researched sectors give a reasonable and accurate idea of the characteristics—multiplicity and dimensionsof the Origins of Christianity through a Centennial Analysis.

3.- Materialist Analysis of Critical Scientific, Physical, Philosophical, and Historical Concepts (2025), 400 pages.

Abstract
Like all our works, its title begins with the "Overture": Materialist Analysis, which implies that all our analyses are carried out from the perspective of Dialectical Materialism.
We draw on the contributions of various investigations conducted by Marxist materialists and spontaneous materialists from different areas of knowledge.
We present a set of clarifying analyses of physical concepts, their extension to the philosophy of physics and science, of primary importance, in addition to some historical concepts that play a decisive role in the conceptualization of physical theories and models and that, if not clarified, would greatly hinder the development of the edifice of physics.
This work also constitutes a recognition - tribute to the brilliant explanatory contributions of William Duane and the formidable extensions of Alfred Landé in New Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.
We greatly appreciate all the researchers who have subjected the Cosmogonic Theory of the Big Bang to rigorous analysis with extremely important theoretical and experimental arguments, under the leadership of Paul Marmet and Eric Lerner.
We clarified several physics concepts that are consistently misunderstood in physics textbooks, lectures, and symposiums, including Nobel Prize winners.
In particular, Young's well-known and aforementioned experiment on wave propagation through a two-slit obstacle wall and the associated electron diffraction phenomenon is finally fully explained without resorting to wave-particle duality, but rather through W. Duane-A. Landé's Third Quantum Rule, which is completely ignored by a vast majority of physicists and philosophers of science. We also pay tribute to the great Canadian physicist Paul Marmet, inventor, author, and professor at Laval University in Quebec, another of the great forgotten, who has contributed greatly to clarifying with his criticism many details in Classical Mechanics, Electromagnetism, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Cosmology, for example in his work Einstein's Theory of Relativity versus Classical Mechanics and Absurdities in Modern Physics: a Solution, or, A Rational Interpretation of Modern Physics.

These titles will be published soon:

4.- Materialist-Historical Analysis of the Origins of Philosophy
Human societies are structured according to the Mode of Production or Economic- Social Formation in which they are immersed, according to their evolutionary history. Philosophy emerges in the Ideological Superstructure only when specific conditions for its generation are met in the vision, thought, and ideology of groups of individuals who, thanks to their functioning within the economic-social environment of their Mode of Production, manage to separate themselves from a previous vision, in a critical period of development that provides them with a new panoramic view of nature and society.
When a Mode of Production manages to "separate" Nature from "Society" and separate "Society" from "Nature," philosophical thought begins.
This work aims to clarify something more, to impact with greater precision, the Causes, Generators, Catalysts, and Operator Parameters that led to the birth and emergence of Philosophy worldwide.
I describe the trajectory followed by the Operator Parameters that acted on the Ideological Superstructure to take it from the Ideological Superstructure of the Primitive Community, passing through the Ideological Superstructure of the Communitarian-Tribate Mode of Production, ending in the Ideological Superstructure of the Ancient Mode of Production, where Philosophical Thought truly began.
I have taken the Greek Model as the Fundamental Reference System, since it is the most well-documented one we have.
The only societies that developed, that met the requirements to generate philosophy in the 6th and 5th centuries, were Greece, China, and India. We know of no other society that has achieved this. The societies that failed to do so did so not because of racial incapacity, but because they failed to reach, organize, or enter the phase of the Mode of Production capable of producing philosophical thought.

5.- Materialist Analysis of the Existence/non-Existence of God

The fascinating problem of the existence/non-existence of the Being, God, is approached from the perspective of the Natural Sciences, the most direct and currently the clearest and simplest path, and the multiple path of the Social Sciences.

Book in preparation:

6.- Materialist-Historical Analysis of the Evolution of the God of the Old Testament

For more information, write to: luish.delcastillog@gmail.com