Everything Is Not Permitted

Published on March 13, 2006

13 March 2006 Slavoj Žižek, a rockstar in the world of pop-culture theory and psychoanalysis, tallies the recent results of religious fundamentalism and finds that Dostoyevsky’s moral equation — if God is dead, then everything is permitted — has been reversed, so it is belief in God that becomes the justification of murders, bombings and other […]

13 March 2006

Slavoj Žižek, a rockstar in the world of pop-culture theory and psychoanalysis, tallies the recent results of religious fundamentalism and finds that Dostoyevsky’s moral equation — if God is dead, then everything is permitted — has been reversed, so it is belief in God that becomes the justification of murders, bombings and other violations of “merely human constraints and considerations.” Such a turnabout, writes Žižek, reinforces the need for Europe to remember another of its legacies, the one which once frightened Dostoyevsky, but which also, at its best offers other religious minorities the only alliance which protects their free practice without patronization. It’s atheists these days, Žižek writes, who both defend Muslims’ right to construct new mosques, and who refuse to self-censor in the name of religious sensitivity — a condescending gesture in Žižek’s eyes — and in their challenges to religious justifications of bad behavior are better friends to Muslims than fellow believers fretting over Europe’s changing religious demographics.

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