I do not believe that atheism is a substitute or can fulfill the same function as a religion, any more than I believe that violence can become a substitute for authority. But if we follow the exhortations of the Conservatives, who at the moment have a fairly good chance of being heard, I am quite convinced that we will have no difficulty in producing such substitutes, that we will use violence and claim to have restored authority or that our rediscovery of the functional usefulness of religion will produce an ersatz religion — as if our civilization wasn't cluttered enough with all sorts of pseudo stuff and nonsense stuff.
Tag: hannah arendt
Hannah Arendt on human life
Modern theories whose raison d'être is to blur the nature of man and thus give him a superabundant belief in his person maintain this permanent blurring. This permanent jamming uses the thought of Simone de Beauvoir on human life. Permanent scrambling, uprooting, infantilization… Man must be told that he is strong in order to weaken him, push him to succumb to all his desires in order to enslave him. Uproot him to allow him to believe himself sole master of his destiny. Vanity and pride will do the rest of the work.
"It is only insofar as he thinks (…), that he is a 'he' and a 'someone', that man can, in the full reality of his concrete being, live in this gap of time between the past and the future. »*
* Hannah Arendt, The Crisis of Culture .