Ellul

Quoting from Ellul’s “The New Demons”

The remarkable thing is that, “while excluding the existence, the essence, the name and the reality of God, Jainism and Buddhism very soon become authentic religions.” The religionizing power is so strong that Christianity (which I am deeply convinced is antireligious) is finally engulfed and is progres­ sively transformed into a religion. Then the movement of scientific rationalism, extended by Marxist, materialistic rationalism, winds up recreating the religious in the world. Religion even inserts itself into militant atheism. Marx, in his famous passage in German Ideology, longed to see the disappearance of atheism at the same time as that of religion. Moreover, it is common knowledge that, in his view, Voltaire’s anti-Christianity was nothing but a form of religion.

I find the above truly puzzling. I am still not sure what he means by religion. Superstition? The Church? Thinking in absolutes?

place. They are at last having a part in serious worship. The moment an artist is “committed,” he becomes a hero. Joan Baez, Melina Mercouri, Yves Montand are beginning to acquire a dignity superior to Hollywood stars. They are having a part in man’s struggle for man. They are not yet model heroes, but they have already entered the religious sphere.

Mercouri I tend to think of as a minister of culture. The book was published in 1975, so I guess the author had something else in mind :P

moment when one claims to be freeing Christianity from the religious hodgepodge which has burdened it for twenty centuries, and from such religious mistakes as the belief in miracles, or the unconditioned authority of Scripture, or the formulation of the name of God, one reintroduces religion. This is not done in the traditional idiom but, as always, in the contemporary idiom. Thus the theology of the death of God is, above all, a theology of the modem religionizing of Christianity.

Ellul Vs Zizek and Altizer.