“Go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
“Go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
I'm about as religious as the cows in the field, but I think leftists shouldn't fight with and alienate religious folks (like many AES regimes have done)
We have plenty of people to pick fights with: the bourgeoisie, the imperialists, their running-dogs, no point adding an extra enemy to the list.
Let's try and build a broad base open to strict materialists and the sort of great christian socialists you see in Latin America
I'm with you that there's often too much alienation of religious folk and maybe there's a better way.
Past and current socialist countries have had to contend with religious organizations not because of the beliefs they hold, but because of their organizational capacity. The Orthodox church for instance previously was a bureaucratic wing of the imperial Russian monarchy, responsible for things like the census and education. There are a bunch of Soviet posters focused on getting young women into schools, whereas previously they would have been made into nuns.
China similarly had to contend with the Catholic church as a vector of colonization and foreign money, which is why China still has no Vatican approved churches, but rather, there's an internal Chinese Catholic church administered by the state. Same thing in Cuba, the churches ran the schools, and that's simply not something a democratic society should have.
I think there's a trap where religious belief and religious organization are conflated as the same thing, when they aren't. Religious belief can't be grasped nor directed, I don't think it's possible to fully extinguish nor should it be. People are gonna find things to worship or find an afterlife to chase, that's normal and part of humanity. Big organizations with ties to state powers is where stuff starts to get confusing.
They already consider us as their enemies
Some of them do. Some of them don't. "Religious" covers everything from evangelical psychos who are still salty about the end of slavery to liberation theology. In between that there is a large group of people who go to church a few times or less a year and say a prayer in times of great personal crisis but who otherwise doesn't think much about religion. I don't think they're any better or worse than non-religious people.
And it's not like non-believers are automatically receptive to Marxism. For instance I don't think Reddit atheist techbros are going to join a vanguard party any day soon.
I mean, it's hard not to despise christians when everyone trying to render my existence illegal is doing it in the name of their christ.