Philosophy does not deserve its name unless it aims for truth: a sense of what is happening independently of the needs of the human psyche; in this respect Greek ‘sophists’, ‘cynics’, Epicureans and others deserve more respect than allowed by Platonists or Stoics. By contrast, all religions cater to these needs of human consciousness, offering, above all, metaphysical postulates and cosmological axioms embedded in cult images and rituals as an affective basis for blind inter-subjective trust, thus alleviating the problems of the lie and the alternative faced by the linguistic animal; certain strands of philosophy, notably the heirs of Platonic idealism, and all successful religions, such as Christianism, offer seductive amounts of consolation through a mixture of truth and blind trust. Occidental Christianism, with its mixture of religious postulates, neo-Platonism and neo-Aristotelianism, still conserves the notion of a truth that makes the difference; although this is equally, if not more true, of all other religions – each with its own special blend of truth, blind trust and consolation – the fact is that most non-Christian religions have by now, and for very real reasons, lost almost all connection between their affective or cult side (the ‘iconomic’ as well as the liturgical sense) on the one hand, and any conceptual, ‘philosophical’ sense on the other. Thus, for one example, in Islam, there is no premodern historical precedent for seeking and receiving fatwas mass-produced by, say, Egypt's now state-run al-Azhar University or by dedicated internet sites. In fact today, all religions that cause anxiety do so because of attempts, especially in the postcolony, to harness their affective power (their symbols and emblematic images, etc.) in order to fight Christianism within the latter's conceptual game; fundamentalist Islamists, for example, use sophisticated social networks to seduce disaffected youth with such old Islamic slogans as ‘there is no sovereignty except in God’, in order to recruit the youth in crusades aimed at bolstering the sovereignty of an ‘Islamic state’ in which the ‘correct’ interpretation of Islamic law takes place in a pyramidal hierarchy, as it is in the Catholic Church, and applied on a territorial, rather than personal basis (thus, quite unlike the situation in the classic mediaeval Islamic era to which fundamentalists rhetorically hark back).