Religion as meaning and truth

/.../ the simplest definition of God and of religion lies in the idea that truth and meaning are one and the same thing. The death of God is the end of the idea that posits truth and meaning as the same thing. And I would add that the death of Communism also implies the separation between meaning and truth as far as history is concerned. "The meaning of history" has two meanings: on the one hand "orientation," history goes somewhere; and then history has a meaning, which is the history of human emancipation by way of the proletariat, etc. In fact, the entire age of Communism was a period where the conviction that it was possible to take rightful political decisions existed; we were, at that moment, driven by the meaning of history. /.../ Then the death of Communism becomes the second death of God but in the territory of history. /.../ Today we may call ‘obscurantism’ the intention of keeping them harnessed together – meaning and truth.

Alain Badiou quoted in Slavoj Žižek. "Religion between Knowledge and Jouissance." in: Lacan.com. 2007.

Alain Badiou om längtan efter det universella

  “What is being constructed before our very eyes is the communitarization of the public sphere, the renunciation of the law´s transcendent neutrality. The State is supposed to assure itself primarily and permanently of the genealogical, religiously, and racially verifiable identity of those for whom it is responsible.” […] “The law thereby falls under the control of a ´national´ model devoid of any real principle, unless it be that of the persecutions it initiates. Abandoning all universal principle, identitarian verification – which is never anything but police monitoring – comes to take precedence over the definition or application of the law.” […] “How clearly Paul´s statement rings out under these conditions! A genuinely stupefying statement when one knows the rules of the ancient world: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female´ (Gal. 3.28)!"

Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: the foundation of universalism (Stanford University Press, 1997), 9. 

Jag tar mig friheten att fullfölja Badious citat: "... for you are all one in Christ Jesus".