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2:61

(In »The three dramatic revolutions of the Internet age«)

It is of the utmost importance here to distinguish between living religion and dead religion. Quite irrespective of whether a metaphysical explanatory model is in any way true, or just merely functional and relevant for its own time, it is either living or dead in its practice. The modern human being is under the impression that previous generations really believed. The myth of the classical faith is incredibly tenacious, not least as a backdrop to the myth of the modern human being’s non-faith. The Austrian, syntheist philosopher Robert Pfaller shows in his book Illusionen der Anderen that this is a double falsification of history. It is the modern human being who really believes, and this, in contrast to previous generations, without any distance whatsoever. Therefore, it is only in modern society that fundamentalism is possible. Religious fundamentalism is based on the conviction that God is dead, that God is active only in the past, which is why the fundamentalist must act without God’s help and so to speak force life back to the time when God was still alive. Syntheism’s response to fundamentalism is of course as brilliant as it is self-evident; it instead runs in the opposite direction, towards the God and the religion that has never existed, but which we only now are able to create. You could not get further away from religious fundamentalism than syntheism.