THE CRISIS OF THE RELIGION OF PROGRESS AND THE CRITICISM OF FUNDAMENTALISMS IN THE DISPUTE FOR TIME

Abstract

The article analyses the dispute for time between an exhausted modern religion of progress and religious fundamentalisms. When the modern experience of the acceleration of time, which emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century based on the notion of progress, reached its exhaustion with the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism, Modernity entered a kind of suspended time as no plausible alternatives to the triumphant liberalism could be seen on the horizon. As the material and symbolic needs of the people continued in the midst of suspended time, only the catastrophe appeared in the future. In this context, religious fundamentalism have taken the lead in disputing, among other things, the time of modernity. These groups reject modernity as a whole and present themselves as an option capable of bringing material and spiritual salvation to people. However, they try to unlock time with the temporal structures of modernity: the apocalyptic shortening of time and the experience condensed in the concept of crisis.