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Theism
The conviction that one or more gods physically or spiritually exist independently of Man’s fantasies.
The term religion stems from Medieval French where it signified the strong and heartfelt sense of community that prevails within a collective, a group of people who make up a congregation through establishing this loyalty to each other. This French term in turn originates from the Latin re-ligare: to reconnect with somebody or something, to connect again with those who, for some reason or other, have lost contact with each other but who ought to, and/or want to, belong together. So if we follow this term back to its source, we find that in its original sense religion ought to be seen as a social practice, organised with the purpose of creating strong and enduring ties between people, an affinity that in some cases, but far from always, also includes affinity between people and a set of gods, a theism.
It is important here to make a distinction between religion and theism, that is, faith in the existence of one or more gods. Since most people throughout history have believed that gods in various guises actually exist, it is totally plausible that most of the metaphysical systems that have been developed have also been theist: monotheistic systems are based on a faith in only one god, while polytheistic systems are based on a faith in many gods coexisting in parallel and more or less peacefully. Pantheistic systems, on the other hand, presuppose that the Universe and God in one way or another are one and the same thing, while what we now call syntheistic systems assume that all gods are necessary, human constructs; historically determined projections on existence that engender supra-objects that are shaped by and adapted to the social situation.
If there is anything we can say with certainty, it is that alienation in the new network society will increase dramatically. A growing alienation is the price we pay for every increase in the technological and social complexity that we are experiencing now and for years to come. With the Internet’s breakthrough, it is literally exploding. And there is only one functional weapon against alienation, namely its opposite: religion. Traditional religion’s mistake was to place the name of its longing for another world, God, in the past (theism, belief in a preordained God), when the logically correct and only reasonable manoeuvre of course is to place the object of all human longing, God, in the future (syntheism, the belief in a God that man himself creates).
The atheism that denies longing – between theism and syntheism – has played out its role as the necessary antipole between thesis and synthesis. For in its lack of content, and as pure negation, atheism is completely meaningless as the goal of the dialectical process. This acute lack of essence explains why atheists have never succeeded in building any cathedrals or anything at all except vapid paper monuments to their own excellence. It is like a philosophical temperance movement: you meet and are sober together, totally oblivious of the ecstatic party that is going on somewhere else entirely. Classical atheism can only say what it is not, but not what it de facto is. This purely negative and in essence substance-less doctrine is quite simply a worthless weapon against alienation. It consoles no one and explains nothing.
The sexual revolution under capitalism was followed by the chemical liberation during informationalism (see The Global Empire). The development of a post-atheist religiosity, which is built around the need for a new metaphysics, spurred on by globally collaborative, syncretist and religio-social practices, and not least by the exploding plethora of entheogenic substances, laid the foundation for a resolution of the conflict between theism and atheism which, in a Hegelian dialectics, has grown into syntheism as the metaphysics of the Internet age. This occurred at the same time as the sexual revolution was rejected when its unavoidable flip side, the hypersexualisation of the individual, was exposed as the underlying engine of capitalist consumption society; the sexual revolution ended up being a straitjacket of the superego where the chemical liberation offered a possible way out.
The dependence of bodies on each other is real. We know that dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin hold people together in a collective that accords pleasure to those in the group, and in this pleasure a meaning arises, produced by and for ourselves. Therefore we have arrived at the historical juncture when theism and atheism must be consummated as dialectical opposites, not through some kind of hybrid, but through us seeing and accepting their historically consummated interconnection as a unit and being able to push this unit aside and go forth in history, into syntheism. Today’s fusion between our historical understanding of the fact that when all is said and done our cohesiveness is what is most holy to us, and the exploding, genuinely new virtual connection between people thanks to the arrival of the Internet, interacts with and is creating the foundation for the new era’s syntheist metaphysics. God (theism) and Man (atheism) are quite simply followed by the network (syntheism) as the fundamental event of metaphysics.
If history is viewed as a Hegelian dialectics, we see a clear pattern: monotheism is the thesis, individualism is the antithesis and syntheism is the synthesis. That syntheism is the synthesis in this dialectical process is a consequence of the fact that theism and atheism can never meet; they are fundamentally and definitionally incompatible. Syntheism should absolutely not be understood as a compromise between theism and atheism – in Hegelian dialectics, a synthesis is something considerably more sophisticated than just a banal coalescence of thesis and antithesis – rather, it is a necessary continuation of theism’s and atheism’s combined dichotomy, the only possible way out of the paralysing deadlock that arises when theism and atheism are pitted against each other. As the logical synthesis of this pair of opposites (theism versus atheism), syntheism offers a possibility for the atheist to go further and uncompromisingly deepen atheism. Thus, in a historical sense syntheism is a radicalised atheist ideology. It is even atheism’s logical deepening and elaboration.
Just like all epoch-making ideas, syntheism arrives in history right when philosophy has run aground between a traditionalism (in this case theism) and a cynicism (in this case atheism). Only through perfecting the individualist paradigm can mankind grasp its terrible consequences, and then, and only then, the door to the syntheist possibility swings open. It is only syntheism that can liberate atheism from its logical curse: its inheritance from theism’s negative attitude towards immanent life. Only by going from atheism to syntheism can we open the way for a genuinely sensual and thereby also spiritual understanding of the immanence. Atheism robs the human being of her access to the holy and the divine by first sharing theism’s conviction that the holy and the divine must be synonymous with the transcendental, and then murdering the transcendental and thus reducing the human being to a cold and indifferent immanence, which is axiomatic for atheism. What syntheism does is that it picks up mankind in precisely the immanence where atheism has abandoned him and makes him apprehend the immanent as the truly holy and divine without any nostalgic longing for transcendentalism at all. Through syntheism’s deepening of the very premises of atheism, atheist cynicism becomes syntheist affirmation.
French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux analyses classical atheism’s dilemma in his book Après la finitude. According to Meillassoux, atheism’s problem is that it inherits the tragic remains that are the leftovers from Abrahamic religion when it retires, but does not succeed in building any independent platform of its own. That is, classical atheism retains the Abrahamic idea of the world as destroyed and lost, but without preserving Abrahamism’s faith and hope in the possibility and reality of the utopia. It is literally just an a-theism, a negation without any own content of its own. Classical atheism quite simply bases its world view on a false premise, namely the idea that existence without God must be mere chance, when life is in fact a necessity if we fully think through physics’ basic concept of contingency.
By thinking of God as something created rather than something creating, and thereby as something that only shows itself in the future rather then something that precedes and brings forth existence – that is, Syntheos, the created God – for the first time God can be regarded as internal and not external in relation to the utopia, that is, as the utopia personified. This is in contrast to traditional theism’s creating God, where everything in the world that is created by Him comes down to an indifferent arbitrariness that is perfect for Him, and which therefore cannot have any personal connection whatsoever to the utopia as the dream of another world unless the illogical fall of Man is introduced through the back door. For example, Christianity must not just kill the Son within the Trinity; it must also sooner or later kill the Father in order to rescue its credibility concerning the utopia. Thereby, the God of Christianity is incompatible with the possibility of the utopia. The God of Christianity must die completely for the utopia to be possible.
Syntheism is the Hegelian synthesis of the deadlocked dichotomy between theism and atheism. When we left theism for atheism, we threw the baby out with the bathwater. We became anti-religion rather than anti-theism. But having lived through the atheist paradigm and having come out on the other side, we are ready for the syntheist paradigm with its grasp of the human being’s constant and basic need for a functional metaphysics. Syntheism stands out as the only credible metaphysical system for the intellectual human being of the third millennium. Which means that the only alternative to syntheism is to settle for a subconscious and tacit metaphysics, and such a metaphysics can of course be as ill-considered and destructive as anything, since by definition it is not conscious and thus hardly very sensible either. And how intelligent does this alternative, on closer inspection, appear to be?
Barad’s role-models Michel Foucault and Judith Butler also take a thrashing as she constructs her universocentric onto-epistemology. As post-structuralists, Foucault and Butler are, in Barad’s eyes, still too anthropocentric. Post-structuralism is wedged between Einstein’s Cartesian representationalism and Bohr’s agential realism: it has not gone the whole hog and left Cartesian representationalism behind. Kant’s ghost lives on. Post-structuralism has, to use Barad’s own wording, still not transported itself from antihumanism to posthumanism. Therefore, post-structuralism still in fact dances around the Cartesian subject that it both claims to and believes it has dissolved. Barad does go all the way however and leaves post-structuralism’s antihumanism behind. The Hegelian dialectic between humanism (personified by Descartes) and antihumanism (personified by Nietzsche) is consummated in Barad’s appeal for posthumanism; a parallel movement to the dialectic between theism and atheism, which dissolves into syntheism. It is not just objective reality that returns in a surprising new guise through agential realism. The same thing also applies to theological truth, which returns with full force as syntheist process religion.
In accordance with the reasoning above, if we regard atheism as an emergent phenomenon in relation to theism, the fundamental dismissal of the concept of God no longer appears as such – that is, that which gives the position its name – as its most important theological achievement. No, atheism’s most substantial achievement is its summation of all sorts of theist positions as a uniform and cohesive alternative to repudiate, that is, atheism’s dialectical construction of theism as an idea. Seen as an emergent phenomenon in relation to atheism, as the historical and intellectual intensification of atheism, syntheism in turn is a metareligion, a faith that its practitioners unabashedly practice as a pure religion in itself. Thereby it also confirms and supports all other art forms’ freedom to act from the metaperspective: art as art for art’s sake, literature as literature for literature’s sake, philosophy as philosophy for philosophy’s sake, and so on. And therefore syntheism instinctively rejects all of individualism’s calculations of utility. What syntheism seeks instead are the place and the time for itself as an event. This event is manifested within love, art, science, politics and religion: syntheology’s five generic categories.
The sought-after sexual liberation under capitalism if anything gets its follow-up in the chemical liberation (for a more exhaustive treatment, see The Global Empire) under attentionalism. The development of a post-atheist religiosity founded on the need for a new metaphysics, spurred on by globally collaborating syncretistic, religio-social practices, and not least the explosive flora of entheogenic substances, lays the foundation for a dissolution of the conflict between theism and atheism; a conflict that, in a Hegelian dialectical process, transitions into a synthesis in the form of syntheism as the metaphysics of the Internet age. At the same time, sexual liberation is displaced when its underbelly, the hypersexualisation of the individual, is exposed as the capitalist consumption society’s underlying engine: sexualism ultimately became a straitjacket of the superego where chemical liberation offers the only possible way out. We do not lose liberated sexuality by returning to some kind of asceticism or abstinence with old-school religious overtones. We only gain access to means and ceremonies that finally enable us to start domesticating and mastering liberated sexuality to our long-term advantage. Indirect desire at last has the chance to balance the direct, vacuous, repetitive drive.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58