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4:56

(In »Living religion versus deadly alienation«)

It is thus also fully logical that the fundamentalists refuse to listen to and reason with their opponents, but would sooner murder them at the first opportunity. It must be extremely taxing to refute intellectual attacks on a divinity which one does not believe in oneself. Least of all if one has lost all faith in the potential of religion and sees the elevation of alienation to a religious foundation as the only possible way out. For it is precisely when one reaches the point where alienation replaces religion that one starts to execute those who do not agree with, or who quite simply just deviate from, the pattern of one’s own fantasies – without remorse. Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union functioned according to these same mechanisms. The actor knows that he is lying, but tries to convince himself that everyone else also must be lying, as if this mutual lying and a contest in murdering each another was the only reasonable response to hyperalienation. But as it happens, syntheists refuse to participate in this lying. Their reply to the dead religion of the fundamentalists is the living religion.