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1:22

(In »Everything is religion«)

A religion that, in a similar way to Abrahamic monotheism’s many variants, largely rests on contrafactual fairy tale material may choose to either water itself down to the point of self-annihilation and proclaim that all the old dogmas and convictions that are in conflict with accepted knowledge should be seen as historically conditioned parables that are meant to be interpreted allegorically and not literally; or else walk down the path of complete denial and fight real knowledge by any means at its disposal in order to safeguard its own survival. The latter alternative becomes considerably easier to carry out if the individual not only wields religious but also political power, which of course is the case in many countries rule by Islam where religion and law go hand in hand. But even in the democratic USA, where freedom of speech is protected under the Constitution, many Christian communities successfully choose the path of denial and the destruction of knowledge, which probably, and paradoxically, is something that is being facilitated by the network dynamics that have developed on the Internet.