(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The most prominent philosophers in the French and German public, Michel Onfray and Peter Sloterdijk, have both published religion-critical works this year. When it comes to the fabrication of the absurdities of Christianity, Onfray's portrayal in Décadanse. Vie et mort du Judo-Christianism ("Dean. Life and Death of Judeo Christianity") in many ways Sloterdijks To God ("After God"), not least in the documentation of the religion's violence throughout history. The brick on over 600 pages is an atheist page turner.
500 years of retreat. For those who believe that Christianity represents a kind and democratic alternative to Islam, this repetition of killings and abuses in Christianity's name is useful: the Crusades, the mass extermination of indigenous peoples in newly discovered America, the Inquisition et cetera.
From the Renaissance, Christianity has lost ground. The resumption of Lukrets' natural-philosophical writings is added to the crucial importance of Onfray. After thousands of slaves were slaughtered on orders of the king's power in 1572, the Protestants began to question whether the king could not be deposed, and that it was not so that the government was deployed by God.
Then Onfray jumps to the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, which also shook many thinkers and made one ask if this could really be God's will. After the Enlightenment, religious criticism comes to Marx and Feuer-
bach. Darwin eventually showed that the world could not have been created in six days and that the earth was not 6000 years old. Step by step, religion has been in retreat since the Renaissance and had to give way to secular science and politics.
But is this not to open doors? Can't those who still believe that Jesus walked on the water, turned water into wine and were conceived at virgin birth, can be at peace? If anyone really believes that God became human and died for us on the cross so that we should not perish, but have eternal life – well come! This is madness, a belief in the power of the absurd – as Søren Kierkegaard rightly called it.
But Onfray also shows how religion continues in other forms with the same violent means of Marx, Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler. The atheist fanaticism of the communists becomes a new religious belief in the coming of the Millennium. If the map does not match the terrain, then the concentration camps create order.
Through the escape in the Rushdie case, the West signed its own death certificate.
Conservative anarchist. Initially, Onfray states that he is politically neither on the right, with a cyclical view of history, or on the left, with a linear and progressive one, when speaking of decadence. In an article in the Le Point magazine on August 17, entitled "Why I am no longer progressive", Onfray's position is even more clearly expressed. The cult of progress is just a new religion. Those who want to revolutionize everything end up being conservative: Lenin in the mausoleum is just that conserved. Onfray sees false progress belief as nihilism. He places himself on the left, but wants to fight this nihilism. His ethical and political role models are Albert Camus and George Orwell. Onfray describes itself as a "conservative anarchist" who stands in the liberal socialist tradition. He dismisses Max Stirner's right-wing anarchism as "selfish" and confesses to Proudhon.
In an interview with Marianne magazine, he claims in Nietzsche's spirit to have made a medical diagnosis in decadence. When the doctor finds cancer, it does not mean that he himself has cancer or is responsible for the patient's suffering. Several have claimed that Onfray is a symptom of what he describes, a cultural-industrial media phenomenon, a mass producer of information. At age 59, Onfray has written over 100 books and is ubiquitous in the French public. This criticism is too easy to buy. Onfray is an explosive thinker, and the book is not clipped by Wikipedia articles, as Patrice Bollon claims in a furious battle in the April issue of Le Magazine littéraire.
Community Resolution. Onfray notes that the glue in society no longer holds it together: "The family, the community, the group, the collective, the state, the nation, the country, the republic are no longer high in price." Paul Bourget's classic essay "The Decadence Theory" from the 1880s – which Onfray does not otherwise refer to – just saw the individual's detachment from the community as a decadent feature.
The Judeo-Christian tradition of the past 500 years has received so many shots for the bow that it is down for counting. This is called Onfray decadence: The religious tradition is replaced by consumerism, the dance around the golden calf – Onfray's nihilism. Onfray writes about Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie: "At this moment, the West had a chance to exist for a while yet." But the opportunity was not used, instead they remained silent. «Dance ce silence, l'Occident est mort»: Through the rush in the Rushdie case, the West signed its own death certificate. This is more rhetoric than history writing. Onfray's lack of self-understanding is evident in his naïve belief that most other French philosophers operate with fantasies and ideas, while he, on the other hand, presents the facts.
Onfray responds to modern concept art. He finds nihilism in art with Piero Manzoni (1933-63) who made 90 small canned boxes, each containing 30 grams of his own excrement. Box # 54 was sold at auction at Christies London in 2015 for £ 182. It was Duchamp's piss that made this nihilistic development possible. Like the art historian Tommy Sørbø in the witty novel Garbage (2007), Onfray straddles such examples. The art is decadent.
One-sided demographics. Onfray says in an interview with Niels Ivar Larsen printed in Class Fight 14.10.14: "When two civilizations confront each other when one is dying, surviving and materialistic and only understands money and power, while the other is conquering and spiritual and has the demographics in turn, the latter always wins. It shows the story. ” The same argument is repeated at the end of Decadence.
The Judeo-Christian worldview has lost to Islam. The argument is demographic: Islam encourages many children, while the weakening of Judeo-Christian morality causes the population to decline. A strict moral regime that keeps women at home, forbids homosexuality and sex outside of marriage, causes the population to increase dramatically. A similar downfall in Germany, Theo Sarrazin, used similar demographic arguments in Germany abolishes itself (2010)
One grows a son who is also a father. With the help of the Holy Ghost, this doubt is born of a virgin!
That the Judeo-Christian tradition has become less dominant and fundamentalist, is that a sign of decadence? Onfray pretends that a non-fanatic supporter of democracy, freedom of speech and a secular state will lose to a fanatic who demands a religious foundation for politics, has many children and will die for his conviction. This premise is never examined. Neither are the demographic consequences of integration / assimilation over time. How, in a way, Onfray's conclusion becomes a matter-of-fact variant of Houellebecq's novel: The Fiction Submission (2015) now appears as a philosophy of history.
However, the strange link of demographics and the weakening of religion as a model of explanation omits a number of perspectives: Census figures themselves do not decide who dominates. It does above all economics, technical-scientific education level and political and military power. But these aspects of society are hardly mentioned by Onfray when he considers the West's strength in relation to Islam. The US decline as a world ruler is not due to the Judeo-Christian worldview being replaced by a consumer religion, but to other countries outperforming the United States financially. Thus, the whole basic premise of Onfray's decay theory really coincides as a house of cards.
Onfray's atheistic philosophy may be welcomed, but he is not asked, in the wake of the terrorist attacks that France experienced after the Charlie Hebdo massacre on January 7, 2015, to overstate the role of religion.
As an atheist, Onfray is a good man to join, but the problem may be that he takes Christianity too seriously. To criticize its absurdities can be to throw gasoline on the fire: Suddenly the Christians get the idea that they are important, since some people bother to fight them.
To criticize the absurdities of Christianity can be to throw gasoline on the fire: Suddenly, the Christians get the idea that they are important, since some people bother to fight them.
Missing cultural progress. Perhaps it would have been better to hold on to Nietzsche's understanding of Christianity as decadent in itself, more so than it is decaying as a historical process: You raise a son who is also a father. With the help of the Holy Ghost, this doubt is born of a virgin! The deeply unnatural and paradoxical nature of these dogmas – the perverse core of the Christian religion – is already decadence!
Onfray does not see how secularisation through technological change of production and economic and social structures, creates new bonds and new social glue – these phenomena are only dismissed as expressions of nihilism, worship and consumer ideology. Thus, Onfray paradoxically accepts the premise he is fighting against as an atheist, namely that only a totalitarian religion can hold a society together.
In Le Magazine littéraire's thematic issue about the Judeo-Christian culture from April this year, philosopher and former Minister of Culture Luc Ferry (b. 1951) writes that the Judeo-Christian culture is not threatened from within. On the contrary, he highlights tremendous progress in poverty reduction, prosperity development and, not least, life – phenomena Onfray does not mention.
