QAnon as an American Quasi-religious Formation

In the past decade, through the formation of Web 2.0 architecture, researchers pointed out novel ways of social involvement: newfound frontiers have opened for challenging the verification systems of former metanarratives. This situation allowed the existence of parallel “truths.” Combined with the contemporary American societal environment of distrust and uncertainty, alternative narrative movements, such as QAnon, emerged around 2017. The anonymous online forums of 4Chan and 8Chan offered ideal incubating spheres for a series of vivid conspiracy theories, which after a time, appeared on more popularly used social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. In my paper, I will argue that these conspiracy theories function as quasireligious systems for a certain segment of the American population. The “pickand- choose” systems allow these individuals to find greater meaning in their lives while joining a thriving online –and in the past years, even offline– community. These formations adopt certain, highly visible elements of traditional forms of religiosity – especially resembling the structures of new religious movements – such as the aims for a higher/hidden truth, for a higher/hidden truth, for a higher/hidden truth, character of an all-knowing prophetic leader, the Us vs. Them attitudes, etc. Using Ninian Smart’s system, one with a keen eye may find structural and functional similarities between religiosity and fanatical conspiracy beliefs. Keywords: conspiracy theories, conspirituality, QAnon, new religious movements, new social movement

Reconsidering Theoretical Approaches to New Religious Movements and their Surrounding Phenomena

In his dissertation, the author aims to refresh and revise the Scottish phenomenologist Ninian Smart's 1996 morphology of religion. In doing so, the author extends Smart's multidimensional framework to contemporary emergent, new, alternative, quasi-, and para-religious phenomena, which he treats collectively under the umbrella term 'new religiosity.' Taking the social processes of the 1960s in the West as a point of departure, the author analyses them from philosophical, historical, social-psychological, and phenomenological perspectives and points out the factors which - in his opinion - could have led to the fundamental transformation of contemporary postmodern religiosity. The author also draws on the contexts and critiques of theories of religion, such as the secularization paradigm, the religious market model, pluralism, the culture of individualism in opposition to collectivism, and the crisis of meaning and identity of spiritual statelessness to support his argument. He also outlines five strategies that have emerged in the sphere of the new religiosity to address this crisis. Using elements of Foucault's discourse theory, the author also points to unresolved questions concerning the terminology of New Religions Studies (NRS) and takes a stand on the methodologies as well as conceptual tools he considers appropriate, thereby also defining his own - inter- or even transdisciplinary - viewpoint. Applying the seven-dimensional model to new religiosity - interpreting each dimension as a pair of interacting "lenses" - the author highlights the basic morphological features of the phenomenon under discussion and, on the basis of these, refines Smart's otherwise outstanding framework. He illustrates the validity of his observations with brief case studies and concludes by pointing to the inherently religious character of the cultural anthropological construct of homo religiosus. Defining religiosity as an anthropological constant, he concludes his dissertation with the thesis that, for the disciplines dealing with religiosity, new religious phenomena are just as essential subjects as their 'historical' counterparts and the two seemingly separated fields shall be examined as a whole

Effect of the disorder in graphene grain boundaries: A wave packet dynamics study

Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on Cu foil is one of the most promising methods to produce graphene samples despite of introducing numerous grain boundaries into the perfect graphene lattice. A rich variety of GB structures can be realized experimentally by controlling the parameters in the CVD method. Grain boundaries contain non-hexagonal carbon rings (4, 5, 7, 8 membered rings) and vacancies in various ratios and arrangements. Using wave packet dynamic (WPD) simulations and tight-binding electronic structure calculations, we have studied the effect of the structure of GBs on the transport properties. Three model GBs with increasing disorder were created in the computer: a periodic 5-7 GB, a "serpentine" GB, and a disordered GB containing 4, 8 membered rings and vacancies. It was found that for small energies (E = EF ± 1 eV) the transmission decreases with increasing disorder. Four membered rings and vacancies are identified as the principal scattering centers. Revealing the connection between the properties of GBs and the CVD growth method may open new opportunities in the graphene based nanoelectronics. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved