måndag 23 januari 2012

Alain de Botton, Slavoj Zizek, and the ideas of a New World Religion

Dear Friends

I have some very interesting news to share.
The Swiss-British philosopher Alain de Botton has a brilliant new book out called "Religion for Atheists".
You can hear his presentation of the book at the latest TED conference here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html
Interestingly, it seems Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek's new massive "Less Than Nothing" - 1 200 pages of Hegel applied on contemporary society, argues along similar lines to de Botton: What society needs today is a new world religion which is monist and denies the existence of the supernatural but which in every other aspect acts as a religion-proper. And Zizek is probably the world's most reknown and influential philosopher today.
But isn't this precisely what Zoroastrianism already is and has been for 3,700 years? At least this is what I argued with my co-writer Jan Söderqvist when we wrote "Det globala imperiet" in Swedish in 2002 (this book is finally out in English later this year as "The Global Empire").
Maybe we should now seriously consider marketing Zoroastrianism as "The Religion for Atheists" in contemporary society as a radical departure from the Irano-centric presentation of an "ancient philosophical faith"? An alternative is of course to join and work towards a Religion for Atheists first (an "atheology") and then connect it properly to Zarathushtra's philosophy afterwards. After all, there are quite a lot of dualists and panentheists among Zoroastrians too, and they would disagree with RFA on basic fundaments.
I truly believe this is the big opening to present Zarathushtra's philosophy to the West that I have been waiting for for over two decades!!!

Ushta
Alexander

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