The average Westerner believes they have attained a form of moral superiority over their ancestors by overcoming proverbial religious superstition—a kind of social secularization where the structural bond between religious institutions and everyday life is increasingly less evident, reduced primarily to hollow customary practices.

However, the conspicuous absence of an infrastructure of common logic and beliefs has paradoxically had the opposite effect: ideological fanaticism, which has replaced the religious paradigm, now occupies an increasingly significant social space. (I start from the idea that man needs to believe in something, be it another person, an idea, a war…)

The sleep of reason is not religion but pure, irrational ideology, which essentially leads man towards a form of self-destruction.

Religions, in fact, as they have always been structured, contained within them a form of common logic: the preservation of general order and the constant fear of death/a higher being.

For while religion fulfills the need to offer unexplainable answers to man, it also has a wholly social function, and it has always been so.

If we were to start from a Hobbesian assumption, this would make perfect sense, albeit with a certain cynicism: not all men are equal, and this requires forms of social persuasion that are more or less conspicuous.

Others, who are generally those who face the abyss within themselves (to put it in Nietzschean terms), naturally do not let themselves be limited by certain religious-ideological boundaries, and seek in the instrument of religion a form of fulfillment through meditation and prayer, from which they draw answers not only for humanity as a whole, but primarily to achieve inner balance for themselves.

Today, rampant fanaticism has had the effect of making everyone believe in everything, increasingly distancing certain paths of thought, which often involve a degree of sacrifice to which the average Westerner is no longer accustomed.

Fanaticism has always been present in any historical era, and for this reason, I believe it is a social characteristic that is part of human nature as a whole.

Religious architecture has always sought to delineate spaces for these aspects; the ideology following secularization focused on turning dangerous crowds into peaceful masses, not to forget Le Bon’s studies.

Today, there is a secularization even of the ideologies known so far, because the predominant belief system is essentially even weaker, even more fanatic, leading to dangerous engines of logic (from my point of view), where man himself represents the enemy, the fear.

No longer a creature to protect, but to annihilate.