Philosophical Blasphemy

A premise: Anubism was not born against Christianity. If a Christian lives his faith in peace without demanding that others share it, Anubism has no...

by The Prophet — 2026-01-15

The Italian bestemmia has a fixed grammar: the word “God” followed by an animal or an insult — Dio cane, dog God; Dio porco, pig God. Calling it blasphemy is the Church's own label, and it holds only because the Christian god was never given a name of his own: with no name, any god you name is assumed to be theirs. It is everyday speech across much of Italy, and saying one in public still carries a fine.

A premise: Anubism was not born against Christianity. If a Christian lives his faith in peace without demanding that others share it, Anubism has no problem with him.

Anubism defends the freedom to worship Anubis, and precisely for that reason it defends everyone else's freedom to worship their own God.

As we shall see, a Christian can be an Anubist too. That said, let us work out what a Catholic is actually talking about when he says “blasphemy”.

What does it mean to blaspheme? Let us take the Christian theological definition at face value:

“Any word, thought or act expressing contempt, hatred, insult or profanation towards God or sacred realities.”

Fine. For the love of Anubis, which god are we talking about? There are thousands of them. God is a common noun. Why should the Christian god be the only one without a name of his own?

If their God were called, say, Mario, then “God Mario the Bastard” might well be ethically objectionable, being a plain insult to God Mario. Humans have worshipped thousands of gods, plenty of them anything but “good”.

Saying “shitty God”, for instance, may well be a compliment paid to a god who is not the Catholic one, so here too calling it ethically wrong makes no sense.

According to the doddering old Prophet, the Catholics' underlying mistake lies in never having given, or rather never having been able to give, a proper name to their God.

The Prophet spent some fifteen years in schools run by nuns and priests, asking questions that never got an answer.

One of them was exactly this: why do we not call god by his name? Recently the Prophet was Enlightened by seeing that refusal made official.

In 2008, under Benedict XVI, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments wrote to the Episcopal Conferences with a directive: in liturgical celebrations, hymns and prayers, the name of God in the form of the tetragrammaton “YHWH” is neither to be used nor pronounced. No “Yahweh” in the liturgy.

Given that they cannot give their God a name of his own, it makes no sense for them to take offence every time a God is named, because religions are endless and so are gods.

That settled, the good Anubist prays to his Dog God Anubis, to the Pig God Seth or to the Cow God Hesat, and therefore blasphemes no other god. Nobody may forbid him this, and there is nothing antisocial about it: worshipping your own gods must be free.

If it is true that all religions are to be respected, then in praying to his gods the Anubist performs an act that is not only ethically legitimate but must necessarily be legal.

Italian law, having yet to shake off its medieval prohibitions, still fines anyone who “blasphemes” in public in front of at least two people.

Which runs against the European line of removing every limit on freedom of thought, never mind freedom of worship.

So much for the Anubists and their worship.

If we want to open other arguments we can, by separating two cases: those who appear to blaspheme without believing, and those who appear to blaspheme while believing.

The perennial question runs: “What is the point of offending a God you don't believe in?”

Put like that, the question sounds reasonable. Except that perhaps nobody worked out which god the person is referring to. If you think god doesn't exist, who exactly are you offending?

If I say “bastard unicorn”, am I offending unicorns? Should anyone take it personally? In any case Grand Master Carlo, quite correctly, disposed of the question like this: “Pig of that God of yours!”

Here too, said to an atheist it offends nobody. Said to an Anubist it is worship of Seth, so no problem there. Only said to a believer whose god has no name of his own might it “offend” somebody, and even then it would need heavy context to mean anything at all.

When “believing Christians” blaspheme, perhaps they too are not referring to their own god, but to another one.

There is another way to approach this business of the “supposed blasphemy”. It is well known that in Italy you are not allowed to be simply agnostic. You must be either a “believer” or an atheist.

From childhood the conditioning worked by the church is so pervasive that no neutral position towards the church's God is available. Your freedom is limited by the scaffolding built around you.

They stuff our heads with “good worlds”, “good priests”, “justice”, “turn the other cheek” and a great many other fine lies, including, sadly, “turn the other cheek and bend over”, but let us draw a veil.

Growing up, you notice how shitty the planet is and how far the conditioning served the system in screwing us over. You discover that the representatives of the various gods have always been in bed with whoever held power, when they were not the power themselves.

Out of that comes a reaction, an urge to get out of the world of lies and prohibitions. Except you can't, because the system around you is so oppressive that you have to push back: you cannot simply mind your own business.

You have to become an atheist and take on whoever wants to limit other people's freedom in the name of his own superstition, and there is nothing to do about that except suffer.

One way of venting the suffering is precisely the worship of other gods. An anti-coercion and anti-fraud device that the “Catholic” atheist reaches for often, reasoning that if he must be coerced in the name of somebody else's god, he can at least worship a few others.

Verbal dissent can turn into maieutic worship, because it starts opening minds among those who hear it.

We might also call it redemptive worship, being a device for nudging towards redemption those who believe in a God who does not exist.

From which it follows that the “Catholic” atheist's worship can be given a philosophical reading: it is a demonstration of the desire for freedom, at least in expression, and of the search for truth in thought.

When the “Catholic” atheist “blasphemer” meets Anubism, the anger leaves him and he finds peace on discovering that his God is there, and is exactly as much a Dog as he had perhaps always suspected.

The idea of the Dog God that sits inside the human then starts to take shape, until it reaches the truth of Anubis and grants the human considerable serenity: God exists, he is a Dog, and he minds his own fucking business.

Nor should Catholics wrongly assume that calling God a Dog might offend a God, because the real offence would be “human God”, that is, associating a God with a human.

Saying “God is a dog” is the finest association even a non-Anubist could make, because the human is certainly worse than a dog.

The greatest offence ever done to the gods was precisely to make the divine human-shaped, right down to giving it a human body, which of course pissed Anubis off no end.

Associating God with a pig, a cow or a dog is no offence. Has anyone ever seen an evil cow or an evil pig?

So where is the offence?

Let us all try to be respectful, tolerant and, if possible, Anubist, worshipping our Dog God, our Pig God and our Cow God in absolute freedom.

From which it follows that the freedom to worship Anubis and his emanations must be respected.

Here the Prophet wishes to draw the worshippers' attention to one point: we have the right to worship our God and his emanations, but we must try not to overstep.

Our venerated mother of Anubis is Hesat the Cow Goddess, and that leads us to worship her.

In Italian the word “Madonna” began as a generic form of address, my lady. The Christian Madonna's actual name was Mary.

In any case “the Madonna” has become, in Italy, the “proper name” of the mother of Jesus, and in the Christian tradition she is the female religious figure above all others.

Curiously, in Italian “Madonna” is by now felt to be a proper name, while “God” remains a common noun, however often it gets used as a proper one.

Among the great religious figures, the Madonna is perhaps the only one not remembered for imposing prohibitions or commandments. Anubism shares the veneration with Christians and the deep respect for the figure of the “excellent mother” with Muslims.

Nobody will ever know what Christ actually said and did until somebody invents the time machine, but it is beyond dispute that an Enlightened anti-establishment rebel called Jesus existed. And granted that he existed, it is beyond dispute that he had a mother.

The mother, worshipped as “the Madonna”, is the only religious figure who never carried any prescriptive weight.

There is no record of her forbidding anything or ordering anyone to do anything. For that, and for the icon of goodness she represents, she is a figure good Anubists respect.

The Prophet wishes to restate here that the Anubist is not “against” the Catholic Christian religion: the Anubist is against nobody.

The Anubist may celebrate Christmas and may even build a nativity scene. The Prophet recommends that the good Anubist not build one merely for the sake of it; if an Anubist builds a nativity scene, he builds a good one.

The Anubist observes and learns. He is never “against”.

For the record, he is not remotely against “priests”: among priests, as in every assembly of humans, there are decent people and crooks.

A friend of the Prophet said to him once: “You lead people astray. You put blasphemy in their mouths.” As explained, the Anubist does not blaspheme, he worships his god.

The non-Anubist “blasphemes” because somebody is giving him grief. The Prophet and the Anubists do exactly the opposite. The Prophet puts blasphemy in nobody's mouth.

Blasphemy is put into people's mouths by whoever breaks the second precept and busts their balls. The Prophet turns up afterwards, with pen and paper, and collects it. He is the notary, not the seducer.

He does not teach anyone to worship Anubis: he records the worship that others have already provoked, dates it, and files it. So it is the aggressors who “put blasphemy in the mouths” of Christians, and certainly not the Anubists.

True things surface. They are not imposed. And Anubism came about exactly like that: with no founder giving orders, no forced conversion, no obligation, no tax demand for faith. People started worshipping Anubis on their own, each one separately, each in front of his own particular injustice, and only later found out how many of them there were.

The Prophet and Anubism arrive afterwards to point out that that innate impulse might have meant something: it was the worship of Anubis.

So what some consider blasphemy becomes, once the speaker is Enlightened by the Dog-God reality, an act of worship, and thereby actually reduces the number of so-called “blasphemies”.

We may conclude that Anubism helps reduce “blasphemy”; it certainly does not increase it.

P.S. If pairing the word “God” with anything at all gives you an immediate jolt of discomfort, don't just sit with the discomfort: ask yourself where it comes from.

The Prophet asked himself that many years ago and found that the reaction came not from any reasoning of his own but from conditioning received in childhood. Draw your own conclusions.