Excerpt with comment:
My reflections on war, on what everyone can see by watching the television news (our daily spectacle), have therefore led me to a new interest in religion as a historical factor. Observing the consequences of the disappearance of religion in the present day has even opened up a completely new field of research for me. When I describe the history of the disappearance of religion, I now distinguish three stages: active religion, zombie religion, and zero religion.
Active religion is when people believe in their god and worship him. I am talking here about religion in a Western, monotheistic sense. I am thinking of Christianity, I am thinking of Judaism.
(Editor’s note: Why did the author leave out Islam? Is it because the Islamic world has avoided the worst effects of the “disappearance of religion”?)
Then, the second stage is the zombie stage, when belief in God has disappeared, when worship has disappeared, but in a social world where the moral habits associated with religion are still alive. Individuals remain bound by a system of values, they remain capable of collective action. Religion is replaced by substitute ideologies, such as national sentiment, class sentiment, and all kinds of ideological groups that replace the original religious affiliation.
And then there is the third stage, the one we are in now, the stage of zero religion, in which the values inherited from religion have disappeared. We are entering a world where the individual is truly deprived of fundamental values; they are now alone, deprived of the capacity for collective action. They are weakened individuals because the values instilled by religion, and later reused by ideology, were a source of strength for their personality.
This state zero of religious beliefs is not experienced by the individual as true freedom. Human beings find themselves confronted with the very common problem of the meaning of life. What are they doing on earth? What is the purpose of their existence? In this kind of context, we see the emergence of what I call nihilism.
