We're in this "2.0" thing together

We're in a 2.0 World, that's for sure. You've got Web 2.0, Business 2.0 (altough I would qualify this one as being in its very early alpha stages), and my current favorite, Identity 2.0 (that's how the community named what I used to call formal nakedness) which leads directly to my hypothetical 2.0 wet dream : Religion 2.0 (I'll come back to it in just a sec.). And however biased my opinion might be perceived, I'd also say that Montreal is the epitome of the 2.0 City. That's the impression one gets, I think, when one sees things like Expozine, a show of independent publishers, and the fine folks you find there, perfect examples of long-tail æsthetic engineers : La Pastèque, 106U, Andres Miranda, La conspiration dépressionniste, le FAS, Geometry Press, Lickety Split, Madame Edgar, Cinq Un Quatre, Drawn & Quarterly, Les Éditions Rodrigol, Bree ree, Le Quartanier, Arthur Desmarteaux, and the beautiful Oie de Cravan and Seripop. You know. The generation X world of apathy is dead, long live the era of 2.0 paradigm shifts!

Religion 2.0 : an introduction

I've been asked a couple of times recently where my interest with religion comes from and the answer to that is threefold, though simple :

• whether you want it or not, we'll soon be done with this teenage positivist intellectual crisis;
• we all consume religion on one form or another, and we will seemingly consume more and more of it as we come to realize that we miss its bedtime stories;
• if, as Marx said, religion is the opium of the people, being a religion pusher certainly has its advantages. (What's wrong with opium, anyways? and what's wrong with giving one what she wants?)

Before you think it sounds too Machiavellian (as some have a tendency to interpret everything I say), please coldly put yourself in the mindset of a business analyst whose job is to scrutinize, from a product specialist point of view, one industry in particular : religion and its derivatives. You will then be in the mood necessary to objectively study the the socio-economics of belief systems on the macro and micro levels, and have the required perspective to appreciate what follows.

First, for simplicity's sake, let's define religion as an opposite to science : where science is all activities driven by what we want to think reality is (ie. activities that can be justified, as Laplace said to Napoleon, without God as a necessary hypothesis), religion, on the other hand, is the category of actions we make in the name of what we want reality to be (ie. where God or god-like concepts are usually helpful). By the way, one has to realize that because every proposition -scientific or otherwise- is subject to interpretation and is dependent upon the subjective semiotic media it is conveyed upon, everything can be considered religion, and thus, the noblest empirical "truths" really are "beliefs", like any others. But let's not get lost in this nominalist sophistication and let's stick to our previous model of the intuitive difference between religion and science. This is just to say that no matter how you see it, a lot of things are religious as far as epistemology is concerned.

As with the computer industry, where everything revolves around the treatment and transport of information, religion addresses our need for one essential "good" : the myth. A myth is a set of fundamental postulates that are at the periphery of the episteme (in Michel Foucault's sense). The episteme is constituted of the mythos (the mythological, religious propositions) and the logos (the scientific propositions). The mythos serves as a wrapping to the logos to make the whole episteme consistent and complete. We know since Gödel that 1rst order logic is not sufficient to get that and therefore, we need a fuzzier axiomatic system, such as those within which religion is usually expressed.

Next, Religion 2.0 : what's in, what's out.