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14:2

(In »Syntheist temples and monasteries in the global empire«)

Religion is often accused of preaching the destruction of knowledge and for obsessively combating people’s will to learn and reflect on new ideas, and unfortunately this is the way it has been during certain periods, which naturally is deeply reprehensible. Not least Christianity and Islam have a bulky register of sins in this respect. But from this one cannot conclude that every form of religion by definition is to be regarded as a kind of intellectual escapism, a form of social anaesthetic or perhaps a sedative. When Karl Marx claims that religion is the opium of the people, it is a generalisation without any appreciable precision. Moreover religion is much, much more for people, and serves a host of different and complex societal functions. In addition, there are religions and religions. Syntheism is – to take an example that is close at hand – in its capacity as a deepening of immanence rather than dissolution into transcendence – in fact the direct opposite of all forms of escapism. Rather, syntheism’s pathos lies in what British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in the 19th century calls inscapism, a quest for a stronger and deeper sincerity, a journey inwards and not an escape outwards or away in relation to reality. And inscapism not only wants to know, it also wants to give full expression to what it learns.