In his latest book,
Make the sky talk
(Payot), my colleague Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher as famous in his country as his opponent Jürgen Habermas, claims that religions can be reduced to poetry.
According to him, "
this urgency coming from below to make the top speak, a phenomenon which is the basis of all religious discourse of the last three millennia, belongs to the register of poetic fiction
".
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Certainly, in the eyes of believers, religion has nothing fictitious, on the contrary it reveals truths higher even than those of science.
To account for this "illusion", Sloterdijk proposes to distinguish two types of poetic discourse, those which admit that they are mythical, like the great Greek myths which present themselves for what they are, and the religions which are only poetry but who "
do not want to admit it and who make themselves understood as revealed truths
".
Is.
But apart from the fact that this criticism of religion is as old as atheism,
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