The Defects of Creation | Enzo Martucci | SA1340

"A God who creates in order to make suffer is not a good God: He is a monster." Written in Florence in 1957 and first published in Italian only in 1964, The Defects of Creation is Enzo Martucci's coldest assault on the Christian God — here in English for the first time. A single chapter from Il diavolo ha vinto (The Devil Has Won), the Satanic collection Martucci left unpublished at his death, it takes the oldest weapon against faith — the problem of evil — and hones it to a razor. A creator truly omnipotent and truly good, Martucci argues, could have made his creatures self-sufficient, or spared himself the trouble of making them at all. Instead He built a world where every living thing survives only by devouring another — its emblem the cow driven alive into piranha-choked water, lifting "a gaze full of pain and reproach to the sky." Reading scripture itself as a ledger of the defects of its own Creator, and flattening the apologetics of theologians and popes alike, he concludes that a God who creates in order to make suffer is no loving Father but a monster. What begins as theodicy ends as revolt: Against divine injustice Satan has risen, Martucci writes, closing with the demon's cry from Dante's Inferno — Papè, papè, Satan aleppe. Translated by the Union of Egoists, edited and designed by Kevin I. Slaughter. A companion to Banner of the Antichrist, The Red Sect, and History of Philosophy: From Thales to Stirner.