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Christians flee eath in a global revolution and are supported by aliens.
Christianity would surely fail when presented with the historically unique problem of a state that is actively trying to discourage Christianity. Really
I don't see how that would change if they were more tolerated? Empire gonna impere
I can see a few aspects of a socialist society that might curb exploitative religions (of any stripe):
- Limits on personal wealth accumulation
- Institutions for investigating and stopping crime that actually care about social good, not just protecting the wealthy
- Media that is actually interested in holding the powerful to account
What happened to the Orthodox Christians in Russia? It's probably going to get ugly however you do it. Long term: Ensure nobody has the bizarre amounts of resources to become a conman. Short term: Snipe the conmen in runescape? Some followers may double down, but what separates a sect from a religion is whether it can outlive its leader, which most don't. It's tempting to try to convince the conmen to come clean in public, but risky. Maybe some of them would accept a big enough bribe (which they could then use to start a new sect...)
What happened to the Orthodox Christians in Russia
The state cracked down on them but Abrahamic religions especially have major themes of sticking through persecution so the Orthodox church is still around and America got to spin communism as Godless. Antitheism in socialism historically has led to nothing but problems
Religious leftists are fine, Christians are too. Televangelists aren't Christian, they're heretics who get the :gulag:
If you'll put no effort into making people understand, how can you complain that they won't?
Yeah church is explicitly supposed to be a community of believers. If you can't know the people there with you it doesn't fit the Bible's requirement for a church
Religion and a communist society are compatible but religion won't serve basically any of the functions it does now in terms of organizing people into communities and serving as social networks.
Religion and Marxism are pretty much ideologically incompatible though. Like, Marx and Lenin and several other theoryheads have all pointed out the stark ideological contradictions several times. Yeah I know liberation theology, but bluntly liberation theology in practice doesn't actually fulfill the social mechanisms religions fill in our society, and its not like there are fifty million hardcore liberation theologians out there that are actually serving as a counterweight against religious reaction in practice.
but religion won’t serve basically any of the functions it does now in terms of organizing people into communities and serving as social networks.
I strongly push back on this. Religious ritual and practice is a process of social creation for communities all over the globe and has been as far as we can tell. There's a good reason people tie together their sense of meaning in the world and their social networks.
Nah dude, religious rituals and the hierarchy associated with them is as far as we can tell a post-neolithic invention. Humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years without priests telling them how God wants them to act, whether ritually or in social settings, and we could go the next hundred thousand years without them and it wouldn't be a problem.
You mean back before the agricultural revolution and people started living in societies. I think ritualised religious social groups will be fine
You're crossing some lines here between worship of a deity, priesthood as a social role, and religious rituals themselves, all of which can be found very independently of each other. The existence of religious rituals does not necessarily imply priests, gods, or hierarchies.
Is there any real reason to keep the old religions though in this scenario? It feels like this is just kind of a pragmatic antitheism where the ones that are "too big" are tolerated cause its too difficult to remove.
If the early Christians and Jews were after wealth and praise they certainly didn't end up getting it
If there is some higher power worth calling divine out there, I can be 100% sure it's not related to whatever the hell Scientology is doing. It seems like you can be less sure of that if you're talking about the core tenets of stuff like mainstream Islam or Christianity.
If there isn't some higher power, and all religions are just human imagination and grifting, there seems to be less exploitation in at least some major religions than there is in some of these newer movements. Basically, how much pressure is there to pony up cash, and how well are the people at the top living? You can also see some meaningful differences in treatment of former members. If you want to leave, what does that look like?
Scientology was created as a scam and the guy who made it pretty much admitted so. Christianity seems to have started as some kind of legit spiritual movement.
The cultish behavior of the first could be compared to like....paying for condolences before the reformation or something, but that came later.Oh yeah those early Christians and their sweet sweet persecution by the Romans. They got it made
You will note that throughout this time Christians had little power and were actively persecuted by the Roman state. So while he was arguing in favour of the legitimacy of the church the church was rather than being a wealthy powerful political force a group facing violent persecution from the most powerful empire on earth Paul was also very influential in promoting the Christian ideal of racial equality and was not one of the apostles
What kind of scam artist tries to get someone long after his death rich. Where's the motive and also I would ask what resistance
It's about how easy it is to evaluate the truthfulness a very new story vs. a very old one. Assume a divine being at least could exist and could turn water into wine. There's one story about turning water into wine from two years ago, and another story about turning water into wine from two thousand years ago. Isn't it easier to draw a conclusion about the truthfulness of the newer story?
Now say we conclude the new story is bullshit. We have living witnesses who say it never happened, there's no physical evidence despite the ease of preserving it, and we have all sorts of fresh information about the proponent of the story that suggests he's a con artist. Doesn't that mean the older story is more believable, if only because we're assuming it's at least possible, and we can't firmly conclude it's bullshit? We don't have living witnesses to question, it's extremely unlikely to have any sort of physical evidence after millennia, and the story's proponent is a legend, not a living guy we can go talk to get a read on.
If you start with the premise that it's almost certain no god exists, sure. A fantastical story in the ancient past is only technically more likely than one from yesterday.
But take seriously for a second the possibility that some god might exist. Say we have ironclad proof of some beings worth calling gods. They've appeared, they've done interviews, they've given divine revelation, they've performed godlike miracles. They've told us other gods exist, but they didn't give us a list or anything and we don't know what those other gods might be capable of. Wouldn't that significantly raise the probability that some fantastical ancient story is true? Take the story of Jesus and all the associated miracles and revelations. If we're seriously entertaining the possibility that godlike beings might exist, would it be unreasonable to say there was a 10% chance Jesus was a god? Maybe 15%?
We don't know if god exists. It only makes sense to say that an ancient water-into-wine story is virtually as unlikely as one from two years ago if you assume turning water into wine is impossible, i.e., that god does not exist.
I'm saying to assume that god might exist, because we don't know for sure either way. The hypothetical is to make it easier to assume this. In the hypothetical, we don't know if a god was responsible for the ancient story, but we at least know that's possible.
"It's exceedingly unlikely but technically possible" isn't really taking the possibility seriously. That's what I'm trying to get at -- if you do take the possibility seriously, then you can't as easily dismiss an ancient fantastical story as virtually impossible simply because fantastical stories are virtually impossible. And there's really no way to estimate how likely it is that god exists, anyway, at least not beyond "maybe, maybe not."
There's no way to estimate how likely it is that some divine being exists, and we certainly can't conclusively say that no such being exists.
"There are definitely no divine beings" is an ideological position, not a rational or empirical one.
it is however possible to do a preponderance of the evidence and come to the conclusion that the evidence against any specific god of any specific religion existing is less likely than existing.
It's not, especially when you consider that there may be more than one god, multiple religions may be worshipping the same god, etc. The whole concept of divine beings is that they can do things we belive to be impossible.
"Communism begins from the outset with atheism; but atheism is, at first, far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction"
They'll lose a bunch of members as the underlying need goes away. Different people get different things from the same religion, and need it to different degrees, so the people who still need whatever is left over will still cling to it. The religion will fragment, as different parts of what's left over are meaningful to different people. These fragmented versions will recontextualize the core beliefs and texts to whatever the different flocks of believers need. During this entire process, the religion (and its offshoots) will hemorrhage members, while the remaining ones appear to become more and more devout in their belief, because the wishy-washy ones leave more easily than the diehards.
They'll evolve in some way. That's just what happens to a defeated faith. The most blatantly capitalist aspects of them will die, but some part of them will live on in some way. Probably a lot of the more fringe Christian ones will just fall back into whatever church they came out of.
Idk if this is a hot take or not but a lot of the time it feels like the disdain for new age or modern religious beliefs(Outside of groups who are specifically abusive) is just a more permissible antitheism, because theres this inherent idea that the age and size of conventional religions means "you have to respect them", not because you respect peoples right to faith and beliefs, but because otherwise you look bad or you might get consequences. It doesn't feel like theres any specific reason why you would accept one and not the other, or suppress one but not the other.
Not intending this as like a direct response to the OP post, just got me thinking.
