In this article, the authors address the problem of the correlation of laughing culture and religious experience. The complex dialectics of the relationship between religion and cultural laughter originates in the ritual activity of early forms of religions. The authors, tracing the main stages of the development of the laughing culture, dwell in detail on the current stage of socio-cultural development associated with the design of the digital space. The main methodological approach in the analysis of religious experience in cyberspace is the hermeneutical-phenomenological method of M. Eliade, implying that every person has religious feelings. The empirical basis of the study was the results of a sociological study of the dynamics of the value consciousness of young people, conducted from 2006 to 2019, as well as the information content of websites, groups in social networks, messenger channels and video hosting. В  As a result of the study, the authors conclude that a special laughing culture is developing in modern digital society: a cybersmech culture that performs a number of important social functions. Cybersmech culture can rightfully be considered popular. It is characterized by genre and style originality: thus, visual genres appear, expressed in comic media objects (for example, memes). Cybersmech culture is becoming one of the factors in the formation of religious experience in the digital environment. This is expressed in the active gamerization of religious relations observed in the Internet space, the production of new myths, "religious making", changing the boundaries of the Sacred and the mundane in a digital society.

Fedorova Marina ORCID: 0000-0003-4750-5981 PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, History and Theory of Social Communication, Dean of the Higher School of Social Sciences, Nizhny Novgorod State Linguistic University named after N.A. Dobrolyubov 603155, Russia, g. Nizhnii Novgorod, ul. Minina, 31 a, aud. 1204 marafed2204@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Rotanova Mira Borisovna PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Tourism, Nizhny Novgorod State Linguistic University named after N.A. Dobrolyubov 603155, Russia, Nizhegorodskaya oblast', g. Nizhnii Novgorod, ul. Dolzhanskaya, 1A miraborisovna@gmail.com

Turning to the problem of the relationship between religion and laughing culture in the digital space, we raise a rather topical topic, actualized by the widespread penetration of new technologies into our daily lives. The main purpose of this article is to analyze the role and significance of laughing practices in the development of cyberreligion. To do this, it is planned to solve a number of research tasks. First, consider the genesis of the dialectical relations of laughter and religiosity. In the context of this article, by the dialectical attitude we understand the way of interrelation, development and contradiction between the two phenomena studied: laughter and religion. Secondly, to determine the functions that laughter performs in cyberspace. Thirdly, to identify the significance of the laughing culture in the formation and development of religious preferences of the modern generation, whose identification takes place mainly in the digital environment.

The main methodological principle of writing this work is the hermeneutical-phenomenological method of M. Eliade, implying that every person has religious feelings. Often they are hidden, subconscious, sometimes even denied by the individual, but it is their presence that determines the dialectic of the sacred and the mundane ^[1]. M. Eliade's ideas about cryptoreligiosity and homo religious, in our opinion, allow us to consider the helotological problems in the context of the sciences of religion.

The empirical basis for writing this article is the results of a study of the value consciousness of young people. This study was conducted for more than 14 years (from 2006 to 2021) in one of the indicator regions of the Russian Federation: the Nizhny Novgorod region. Questions about attitudes to religion were introduced in 2014. In total, more than 10,000 people took part in the study. The results of the study were periodically refined using focused interviewing methods (610 people were interviewed in the period from 2014 to 2021). The results of the study were also correlated with the data of VTSIOM, the Levada Center, the research service "Environment" and other research organizations.

Speaking about the digital space, cyberreligion, cybersmech culture, we cannot do without analyzing the content of social networks (VKontakte, for example), messenger channels (Telegram Messenger) and video hosting. Also, the information content of the websites of a number of religious organizations and atheistic communities became an additional empirical material for us when writing this article.

Instagram Facebook It should be noted that during the preparation of this article for publication, certain changes related to the foreign policy of our state took place: for example, a number of social networks (Facebook, Instagram) were recognized as belonging to the extremist Meta company, banned in Russia, and blocked by the RNC. Therefore, materials from these social networks will not be used in this article

The problem of the relationship between cultural laughter and religious feelings is not obvious, but some researchers turn to it during the analysis of the dynamics of laughter culture ^{[2, 3, 4]}.

Cultural laughter, unlike biological laughter inherent in some animals, is an element of exclusively human socio-cultural space and it originated in ancient times.

Thus, the first form of cultural laughter known to us, called archaic or ritual laughter, is directly related to the ancient mythology and ritual practices of early forms of religion. Researchers of ritual laughter ^{[5, 6, 7]} evaluate the essence and role of this type of laughter in human culture in different ways. However, they all agree that he accompanied a person in borderline situations of his life. Therefore, archaic laughter is closely associated with death, violence, sex and orgiastic rituals.

Here laughter acts as a phenomenon of religious experience, a kind of hierophany (according to M. Ediad) and can be considered along with such metacategories as Sacred, Absolute, numinous, transcendent ^{[4, p. 125]}.

In fact, it is the phenomenological approach to the helotological problem in the context of the philosophy of culture and the philosophy of religion, in our opinion, that is one of the most promising. Although we admit that such a statement of the question may be perceived ambiguously. This is due to the fact that in some confessions (we are talking primarily about the Abrahamic religions), laughter in all its manifestations is perceived as blasphemy. It should be understood that the problem of the connection between laughter and metaphysics, laughter and religion in a phenomenological way is not to look for the facts of ridicule, but, following the words of L. Stolovich, to analyze the "metaphysical dimension of laughter", its "attitude to the root problems of existence – to God and Wisdom, to Life and Death, ... to Good and Evil" ^{[8, p. 244]}.. M. Eliade, whose approach we use in this work, contrasting the sacred and the mundane, introduced the concept of hierophany: "the manifestation of sacred realities" in everyday reality. According to M. Eliade, hierophany is the link that unites the sacred and profane layers of being. The whole history of religions, according to the thinker, is a manifestation of hierophanies ^{[9, pp. 419-420; 10, p. 141]}, which are classified by means of patterns.

Based on the interpretation of religious phenomena and religious experience proposed by M. Eliade, we believe that laughter, sounding in certain situations, can be considered as hierophany. And at the same time, we are talking not only about ritual archaic laughter. The view of laughter as hierophany has already been encountered in the analysis of the USSR's laughing culture ^[11], for example. Below we will try to show that the emotional interactive experience of gamers (not always fun, but always rich and actualizing various forms of comic) can also be interpreted as hierophany, because this laughter (more precisely, the laughter culture at its stage of development in modern digital society) participates in the process of sacralizing the gaming space.

With the development of human society and the complication of the social structure, a variety of forms of cultural laughter appears. There is a differentiation of game behavior (as an element of a laughing culture) and ritual (as a component of religious practices) into two independent forms of conditional behavior. However, in the game space of dionysias, saturnalia, carnivals, one can still observe the manifestation of ritual laughter. The clash of two worldviews (pagan and Christian) is revealed in a special way in the folk laughing culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This made it possible to highlight such a feature of the laughing culture as anti-religion [see 12, 13], expressed in a conscious rejection of accepted norms and contributing to the preservation of archaic consciousness.

In the period of Modern times and the development of secular trends, there is a situation of radical breeding of ridiculous and religious practices. This tradition continued to exist during the period of the birth of mass culture. For a long time, laughter and religiosity are perceived as something completely incongruous. The dialectic of the relationship between laughter culture and religiosity in this period exists in the form of "laughter around the cult" ^{[8, p. 249]}. That is, religion (and its components) are ridiculed (from benevolent jokes to offensive attacks and malicious satire). Thus, laughter, it would seem, ceases to play a ritual function, the function of sacralizing space and objects. Since Modern times, laughter often performs the function of desacralization. It should be emphasized here that we are talking exclusively about the religions of the Abrahamic tradition, primarily Christianity. For Eastern religions, laughter continues to be a part of religious tradition. E.S. Safronova notes that "the laughing, folk principle in Japanese Zen Buddhism became orthodox, it was not just included in monastic practice and liturgy, but as part of Zen behavior penetrated into the highest circles of ... society" ^{[14, p. 73]}. Until now, the image of a smiling Buddha and a laughing Ho Tei are among the main ones in Buddhist iconography.

In Western society, however, since Modern times, laughter begins to perform (in addition to desacralization) entertaining, communicative, adaptive functions.

Describing the modern stage of civilizational development, we note that modern society is defined through many epithets (postsecular society, postmodern and after-postmodern society, mass culture society, global society, etc.). However, one of the most important characteristics of the current state of society is the concept of "digital society". In the format of a digital society, all the phenomena of human social life are digitalized, embodied in a new technological reality, which allows us to consider almost all the phenomena of modern socio-cultural reality as cyber phenomena. Thus, the phenomena of cyberreligion and cyberreligion have been analyzed by religious scholars for some time [see, for example, 15]. There are several approaches to understanding the problem of the existence of religion in cyberspace. The first one tries to consider the specifics of the implementation of the practical activities of traditional religions with the help of digital technologies. The second approach, which is currently becoming dominant, speaks of a certain new stage of religious genesis and the formation of a qualitatively new type of religion in which digital technologies themselves become an object of worship.

The study of the modern (digital) stage of the development of laughter culture is also being conducted quite actively [see 16]. A number of features of cybersmech culture can be distinguished. Thus, the process of digitalization of laughter is largely associated with the active gamification of all socio-cultural phenomena of our time. The game has always been important in human life, but it is at the stage of the information society that it not only performs adaptive or recreational functions, but often becomes a style and meaning of life. In modern society, gamers are a certain social community, and the individuals included in it have a number of clearly distinguished psychological traits ^{[17, pp. 175-177]}

In our opinion, the importance of games and game installations in modern society is largely determined by the specifics of the digital space itself, which is characterized by plasticity, amorphousness, two-worldedness, blurring the boundaries between these worlds, grotesque, and the installation of carnivalization. "Carnival," wrote M.V. Bakhtin, "is not contemplated, they live in it, and everyone lives, because according to its idea it is nationwide…Carnival has a universal character, it is a special state of the whole world, its revival and renewal, to which everyone is involved" ^{[18, p. 12]}. All the features of the carnival, highlighted by M.V. Bakhtin: (universality, ambivalence, informality, utopianism), appear in the digital space in a hypertrophied form. In essence, we are witnessing a kind of digital analogue of a carnival, unlimited by real time and space, in which a funny beginning and a game permanently exist. And the cybersmech culture that we are observing can be interpreted as the next stage in the development of folk laughter culture. Actually, the idea of returning to the spiritual attitudes of past cultures is not new ^[19], and a number of researchers also note that at the moment a special personal type is being formed that has "carnival artistic potential". This personality type is trying to develop, including in the context of informal spaces of youth subcultures and the Internet environment ^{[20, p. 40]}.

In the digital space, another function of the laughing culture is being actualized to the limit. This is a punitive function expressed in special forms of anti-behavior: trolling, astroturfing, cyberbullying.The carnival space of the digital environment, according to A.M. Rudenko and G.I. Mogilevskaya ^{[21, p. 160]} creates the illusion of freedom (despite attempts by the state control of Internet resources), in which there are no authorities, and therefore almost everything can be ridiculed. The very phenomenon of heyting (anti-behavior in social networks) is associated not only with the satirical talents of heyter, but also with the peculiarities of social networks themselves, which have become tools of uncontrolled repression ^{[21, p. 161]}.

One of the reasons for cyberbullying is the opponent's religious views. It has been proven ^[22] that every fourth teenager in Russia has been bullied because of expressing his religious views. Our analysis of social media content has shown that this problem does not disappear with age. Any attempt to declare their religiosity on social networks almost always (98%) meets with a negative response in the comments. It should be noted here that this fact is associated not only with the growth of deviation in the cyber environment, but also with a change in religious beliefs.

The data of the conducted study of the dynamics of value orientations of young people from 2014 to 2021 prove that the modern religious picture of the digital society is quite motley, including, in addition to traditional confessions, diverse phenomena that can be described by the concept of "religion-like phenomena". [see 23]. These phenomena are amorphous, eclectic, and do not lend themselves to strict typologization. Their formation is often associated with the ideas of spiritual pluralism and freedom of ideological choice.Actually, the feeling of this freedom in the youth consciousness is also largely determined by the specifics of the digital environment. Cyberspace is becoming a fertile ground for the flourishing of mystical cultures and new religious movements, as it is characterized by a low level of critical understanding of information by the average user and minimal control by official structures. (Although attempts to strengthen this control at the state level are present in almost all countries). A lot of poorly identifiable religious-like phenomena accumulated in cyberspace, for which deviation is one of the social characteristics, have led to an increase in clashes on the basis of religious views and ideological positions. The situation worsened significantly during the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus infection, which led to an increase in apocalyptic sentiments. So, in 2021, we noted an increase in intolerance towards dissidents. We also noted the emergence of a sufficient number of groups that exist, as a rule, in the digital environment and promote eschatological ideas loosely related to the eschatology of traditional religions. Often, the basis for the ideological (quasi-religious) constructions of these groups were plots and ideas of mass digital culture ^{[24, pp. 6-9]}. No matter how unexpected it may sound, but in the course of a survey conducted in 2021, it turned out that some part of the younger generation (7.4%) is seriously considering the option of a zombie apocalypse as a consequence of mass vaccination.

Although, as we have already noted above, the connection between laughing practices and religious beliefs is not obvious, but it is present in the space of digital culture. As in archaic laughter, in the cybersmech culture of modernity one can observe "the sensitivity of the individual to collective carnival images fixed in the ancestral memory": carnival archetypes, carnivalized stereotypes of thinking and behavior, archaic festive rituals, a tendency to mythologization in the spirit of tricksterism ^{[20, pp. 40-41]}.

In the process of neo-mythologization of modern digital and mass culture, one can see a complex process of shifting the boundaries of the sacred and the mundane: a new system of myths is being produced, and pop culture characters and phenomena become objects of worship ^{[25, 26]}.

And here we turn again to the ideas of M. Eliade. M. Eliade's concept is based on the idea that the mundane and the sacred consist in an inseparable and unchanging connection through hierophanies throughout history. "All manifestations of the sacred are equivalent as such," the thinker writes, "... the most modest hierophany and the most terrifying theophany have the same structure and should be explained by the same dialectic of the sacred, then we will understand that there is no significant gap in the religious life of mankind" ^{[10, p. 142]}. This position is developed by him repeatedly. But the main thing for our work is M. Eliade's statement about the reversibility of hierophanies: "the dialectic of the sacred makes possible various reversibility ^{[27, pp. 11-12]}." It is also necessary to explain here that the very concept of dialectic used by M. Eliade in relation to hierophany is based on the understanding that the phenomenon as hierophany reveals a certain side of the sacred, and also demonstrates a certain way of a person's attitude to the sacred ^{[28, pp. 30-31]}.

Based on the provision on the reversibility of hierophanies, it is assumed that there are both any hierophanies and all kinds of religious experience, which is carried out regardless of the "historical difference". This approach gives us the opportunity to consider cybersmech in some of its manifestations as hierophany, which defines the connection between the mundane and the sacred. The main question is only what becomes sacred in the context of the new form of religiosity, about which there is so much discussion now: - cyberreligion.

Also, following M. Eliade's arguments about hierophanies and their reversibility, about crypto-religion, we get confirmation of the thinker's thesis that modern man cannot be completely free from religious experiences, since he is the heir of the archaic homo religiosus. ^{[1, pp. 130-131]}.

The religiosity of modern man is formed in the space of culture, in which the dominant attitudes are entertainment and play. Play and laughter become one of the forms of religious experience. This is evident in the activities of some religious movements (Jedaism, for example). There is also a growing number of the use of religious symbols in visual works of modern mass culture, including not only film and cartoon products, comics, memes, but also video games. The use of this symbolism in video games leads to a special perception (representation) of the game space and forms on a subconscious level the attitude of players to a particular religious system. A separate group consists of games that provide an opportunity to play as supernatural beings and even feel like God (Bible Rising, Black & White). These games, in fact, are a variant of religion-making, a very popular religious trend of our time, in which the connection between laughing culture and religion becomes especially obvious. We were able to confirm these data during the study.

Our analysis of the dynamics of the value orientations of young people who identified themselves with Orthodoxy shows that only 6% of young people regularly (that is, once a month, which no longer corresponds to the principles of Christian church formation) go to church, in 2021 this figure fell to 3.3%, which is a consequence of measures to combat the pandemic. The block of questions related to the knowledge of dogmatics also revealed a complex of problems – most young people absolutely do not know the basic tenets of the Christian Church's doctrine. Many respondents find it difficult to answer questions about death and retribution. Thus, 16% of respondents who identified themselves as Abrahamic confessions believe in the rebirth of the soul, the existence of many gods or supernatural entities with the properties of God. There is also an increase in the number of those whose religiosity we define as "non-church" (they choose the answer "I believe in God, but I don't go to church") from 14% in 2014 to 17.6 in 2021. Thus, we see that the religious identity of modern youth is an eclectic, freely assembled construct.

One of the basic questions was about the source of knowledge about religion and its cult. There is a noticeable decrease in the influence of the family in the process of forming religious values. Thus, only 14.3% of respondents chose parents as the answer options to the question "with whom do you discuss religious issues" (in 2016, this figure was 31.3%), but more and more young students began to choose the answer "with older comrades" (from 7% in 2014, this figure rose sharply to 61.1% in 2021). When specifying this answer during a focused interview, it was revealed that most of the "senior comrades" are comrades in online games or groups in social networks.

One of the main questions that was asked during the interview in 2021 was the question of the source of the formation of images of specific faiths. So, telling where they get information about the attributes and rituals of different traditional religions, young people referred to works of cinema or computer games. That is, for about 78% of respondents, digital technologies (and they now include television and communications, that is, smartphones, etc.) are becoming the main source of socialization and identity formation, including religious. Whether we want it or not, but digital society is an objective reality, the processes of digitalization have affected all spheres of social life: we clearly see this on the example of education, internal communications, etc. Religion is no exception.

It is also necessary to realize how important games have become for the modern generation. For people whose socialization took place outside the time of the large-scale distribution of video games, this problem may not be perceived as fundamental, since many people think that games have only a relaxation or entertainment effect. However, for people (gamers) who spend a sufficient amount of time playing games, they become important tools for identification and socialization. Even for those users who are only occasional players, the context of video games has a powerful impact.

At the moment, as we said above, there are a large number of games that either use religious themes (symbols of religions), or produce new religious cults: Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Age of Mythology, Assassin's Creed, Gothic and many others. A. A. Gusev and O.V. Smetanina conducted a study of the influence of The Gothic series of games describes the transformation of a person's personality, his moral attitudes, religious views and came to the conclusion that the structural element of the virtual reality of the games under study is religion, and the games themselves are a powerful tool of manipulation ^{[29, pp. 185-191]}.

However, it would be wrong to say that the new religiosity is exclusively of a playful nature.

We conducted a focused interview of individual representatives of students aged 17 to 22 years, as a result of which we can conclude that most young people do not see a connection between laughter and religion, and the only possible attitude they allow is to ridicule traditional confessions and religious beliefs, as a rule, in a special way Internet memes.

That is, it is obvious that laughter in modern digital culture continues to perform the function of desacralization of religious ideas. The analysis of the content of social networks (VKontakte) also confirms this thesis.

The study of public sites and groups that self-identify as atheistic shows that the bulk of the content is of an entertainment nature, and only 30% of the information has an educational and educational orientation.

We also note that over the past year and a half, the number of groups of believers, including youth groups, has increased, due to the growth of apocalyptic sentiments caused by both the pandemic and the tension of the external political situation. The main materials posted in these groups are far from any entertainment installations, they clearly show an increase in the level of anxiety, a demonstration of the seriousness of religious beliefs, thereby categorically emphasizing the incompatibility of laughter and religion.

We also note that it is in atheistic groups that there are more protest moods. It can be concluded that for modern youth, ridiculing the religious values of traditional confessions (according to L. Stolovich, "laughter around the cult") is a form of protest not only against religion, confessions, spiritual elite, but also against political leaders and political regimes.

In today's digital society, meme-making is becoming the most democratic type of creativity. Internet memes have long been a part of modern culture. As we believe, they can be considered as a new genre in the development of sequential art. W. Eisner, the author of the term "sequential art" ^[30], applied it relatively to comics. Although elements of sequential art can be found, for example, in cinematography ^[31], its origins are found in rock art, splint and even icon painting (stamps on the margins of icons).

It is modern memes that become the main object of cybersmech culture. For a long time there have been disputes about the definition of a meme. This is due to the fact that we owe the introduction of this term to R. Dawkins, who in his concept of memes considered them as a unit of cultural information by analogy with the gene, but not at all as an element of visual digital culture ^[32]. It is the viral nature of modern media objects, their rapid spread in the Internet environment that has led to the fact that the concept of an Internet meme has become fixed behind visual, verbal, mixed objects that find a quick socio-emotional response from Network users.

Actually, according to R. Dawkins, any religion is already a memotic organism consisting of hotel memes (symbols, cult elements, individual ideas). The scientist compares the memocomplex of Buddhism with a group of herbivore genes, Islam with a group of predator genes ^{[33, p. 284]}.

Modern cyberreligion has also included viral media objects on religious topics, also called memes.

An analysis of Internet memes affecting religious issues to one degree or another has shown that about a third of these objects are text memes imitating dialogues between some faceless believers and atheists (as a rule, these are collective images, and their reality is imaginary - avatars and nicknames are carefully erased, but their use in memes suggests that the authors of these dialogues claim that they look like valid ones).

It is in these dialogues that the features of trolling and cyberbullying in the network are clearly revealed. As a rule, atheists ridicule believers. We present an example of such a dialogue below (spelling and punctuation are preserved by the authors of the article – M.F., M.R.)

Believer (Q): I believe in God. You can't see it, you can only feel it with your heart

Atheist: Which nominal god can you feel with your heart?

Q: In the sense of what God is One

A: What kind of Unit? I've never heard of such a god.

Q: I mean, there is only one God

A. Well, I will believe in Odin

The totality of the remaining memes are creolized memes, among which the main part is also aimed at desacralization of religious views and ridiculing the cults of traditional religions.

The heroes of memes are representatives of different faiths, as well as legendary personalities, symbols and founders of religions (Moses, Buddha, Christ, Mohammed). Most of the memes are associated with Jesus Christ, which is due not only to the fact that Christianity is the most widespread religion in the world, but also to the fact that the processes of secularization have affected Christian countries ^{[23, pp. 67-72]}.

There are a number of resources for creativity in the Runet space (pinterest.ru for example), which even offers original ideas on the topic of "memes with Jesus". VKontakte has a number of groups promoting the creation of memes on this topic. However, in December 2021, the administrator of one of them was given a court decision on part 2 of Article 5.26 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation: "deliberate public desecration of religious or liturgical literature, objects of religious veneration, signs or emblems of ideological symbols and attributes, or their damage or destruction."

However, this did not reduce the number of memes on a religious topic.

It should be noted that the peculiar rise of memplexes related to religion falls on the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The analysis of memes of this period clearly shows how the pathos of the tragedy of apocalyptic consciousness acquires a comic sound ^{[24, p. 49]}, expanding the boundaries of desacralization and turning the apocalypse into one of the replicated brands of modernity.

Although there is another point of view among researchers, which gives Internet memes that create a "playful laughing element" the function of relaxing and healing effects ^[34].

Thus, we see that the laughter of modern digital culture is becoming an important component of cyberreligion, deforming a person's idea of the sacred. This was reflected in the new image of the divine (and God himself), as well as in the idea of the supernatural. The images of God, the devil, angels and demons in the modern media space are anthropomorphic, sensual. They are often depicted as comic characters (for example, in the films "Dogma", "The New Testament", etc.), and therefore are perceived by people as close, accessible to dialogue personalities. One of the problems of the philosophy of laughter in Christian ethics and aesthetics was the problem "did Christ laugh?". This question can be interpreted as the question of what is "more divine or human in the God-man" ^{[29, p. 46]}. Within the framework of modern digital culture and the religious beliefs that it forms, this issue has been resolved unconditionally in favor of the human.

It should also be noted the phenomenon of comic or parody religions, which have become the quintessence of postmodern sensibility. The phenomenon of these quasi-religions is connected not so much with their appearance (they arose from the conflict between religious and scientific types of worldviews), as with their transformation. Having arisen as an attempt to show the inconsistency of religious dogmas, parody religions soon began to have adherents themselves, fitting into the motley eclectic picture of modernity. In Russia, the Russian Pastafarian Church was registered in 2016 as an official religious group with the right to conduct missionary activities.

From our point of view, one of the features of postmodernism has clearly manifested itself here: the "game of irony", when the boundaries and frames between real and virtual phenomena are erased.

Summarizing what has been written, it becomes clear that the laughing culture in modern society is receiving its further development, becoming a cybersmech culture. The connection between laughter and religiosity in a digital society, which is not obvious to most religious scholars, still persists, but is undergoing dialectical changes. One of the features of the digital society is the change in the ratio of the sacred and profane, now considered in the categories of digitalization. Laughter is an important tool for desacralization, first of all, of traditional religious phenomena and ideas.

It should be emphasized once again that desacralization is by no means reduced to ridicule. "Laughter at the cult", directed, as a rule, against the clergy, that is, specific people, existed in various epochs. Desacralization is the process of transforming the sacred, translating it into the realm of the ordinary. As examples, we can recall the main meme of modern society that arose back in the 90s of the XX century: "My Friend Christ". Or the idea, firmly rooted in the works of modern mass culture, that angels and God himself are anthropomorphic, are among people and even experience human feelings (it is enough to recall several examples of modern film productions – "Supernatural", "Angel-A", etc.). M. Epstein even introduced the concept of "angelism" ^{[36, p.40]}, describing this phenomenon, which he called "a hypothetical state of the religious mind."

At the same time, cybersmech culture participates in the sacralization of the mundane through game elements. So, there are cults of brands (for example, Apple), famous people (Steve Jobs, Diego Maradona), parody religions are formed, the space of computer games is sacralized, etc. Of course, it can be assumed that the glorification of "earthly idols" is a temporary process caused by socio-cultural factors, but the cult of Diego Maradona (the Church of Maradona) has existed since 1998 It has more than 150 thousand adherents and is not going to disappear yet. One can observe the gradual sacralization of Bob Marley in Rastafarianism, the growth of the number of adherents of Jedaism, the worship of frescoes with Neo in the White Temple in Thailand. And there are plenty of such examples. A huge number of religious-like phenomena produced by the processes of neo-mythologization have become a distinctive feature of our time. M. Ediade, characterizing homo religiosus, noted that he "regardless of the historical context ... believes that there is an absolute reality, the sacred, which not only rises above this world, but also manifests itself in it and makes it real." However, modern man "shapes himself, and the more he moves away from the sacred, the more completely he desacalizes the world." At the same time, the modern non-religious person comes from homo religiosus, therefore, has all the hidden mythology, as well as a lot of degraded rituals" ^{[1, pp.125-126]}. Each person's religious experience is unique and cannot be reduced. At the present stage, this experience is being implemented in the context of the digital environment, and we have tried to give examples in our work of how individual elements of the digital space are beginning to be sacralized. The most illustrative examples here are those related to video games.

Of course, the functions of sacralisation and desacralisation are not the only and basic ones for cybersmech culture. Compensatory, communicative, adaptive, integrating and disintegrating, punitive and, of course, entertaining – these are the main functions of digital space laughter.

We also note that the experience of a modern person, his socialization and self-identification are determined by the factors of the digital environment. Several generations have already been formed, which are called "digital aborigines": they have their own idea of the world, ways of communication, values and norms. This has led to the fact that all the phenomena of modern society have now become accepted to be considered with the prefix cyber or digital. The phenomenon of cyberreligion has been studied for several years, the phenomenon of cybersmech has been considered in scientific thought relatively recently, but the problem of their correlation is a new look at the problem. Of course, we do not claim that cybersmech becomes a kind of return to ritual archaic laughter; the laughing culture has acquired different forms, types, nuances over the entire existence of mankind. Cybersmech can also be completely different, however, in some cases it can act as a factor in the formation of religious (quasi-religious) views. Thus, the activities of some communities and personalities in social networks (Internet trolling), which can be defined as anti-religion (an important component of the laughing culture), certain topics of memes, plots of video games, films, and even some emojis participate in the formation of attitudes towards confessions, religious figures and even sacred images.