Marx: capitalism is so bad that it makes people turn to religion as a last resort just so they can tolerate their miserable lives
Dumdums: Marx says religion bad
Ideally yes. But we both know that isn't how it goes for most people most of the time
Someone on here once said "the war on drugs has ruined that quote" and I've been thinking about that ever since.
Marx's quote is actually about 2-4 years after the first opium war, so he was likely thinking of it while writing that line.
That and China had famines due to land being given over to opium production and the drug selling triads were violently anti-communist during the civil war
Yup, the misunderstanding of the quote is due to internalized racism / classism.
I can't remember the exact text or where I heard it, but someone summed up that most of the members of the New Atheist movement have now either moved on to socialism, or are going after Middle Easterners with callipers.
going after Middle Easterners with callipers
:smurf-cursed::astronaut-1:
or are going after Middle Easterners with callipers.
how are they going to extricate themselves of the ~50% Middle Eastern ancestry they carry? Maybe we can have a new CRISPR for wignat folks, "wash out your Anatolian farmer DNA"
well all religion is wrong unless its worshipping the sun so jot that down
Yeah idk as a recovering/former opiate addict, they're pretty fucking amazing (few years clean now)
MFW I've made two references to "in this moment" in the last few days and now another one is in the front page:
:stalin-feels-good:
He was making the claim that religion is a structure people build to calm uncertainty over their role in society and the universe at large. In his view, religion may be false, but it is a function of something real. It functions the way opium does in a sick person by easing their troubles without actually addressing the root cause and fixing it, making it counter to the goals of revolution.
It is a state of, fake thought? Synthetic understanding? False coincidence?
You can still be religious and be socialist, but you can't use your religion outside your personal life or use it as a tool for understanding the conditions of the working class under capitalism. Otherwise you just get weird protestant work ethic shit tied to a romanticized ideal of the worker.
I guess it's kinda like personal property and private property.
This is where liberation theologists break with Marx. Yes, it can be used as an opiate, but synthesised with a proper understanding of Historical Materialism, it can also be a great driver against oppression. Jesus came bearing a sword, after all.
you can’t use your religion outside your personal life or use it as a tool for understanding the conditions of the working class under capitalism. Otherwise you just get weird protestant work ethic shit
Hard disagree. You wind up with prosperity gospel shit when you value capitalism more than your faith.
there is genuinely useful information in the Bible about how to combine theory and Praxis.
If you're going to be against religion for it being a distraction from poor conditions you should be equally against alcohol, drugs, video games, escapist media etc
Absolutely none of those things are as deeply intertwined with capitalist power structures and ideology as religion is. A sober analysis of religion's function in our current, actual society shows it to politically be a rallying cry of violent oppression and culturally to be the great bastion of reaction. No one is using their belief in video games to throw their children out onto the streets. No one is rallying support for their anti-abortion laws because the masses support them due to a pro-life brand of alcohol.
she has a serious carrot addiction problem. It's gotten so bad she can see in the dark so well she is stuck in a hellscape of constant daylight and cannot sleep
:jesse-wtf: Why is this site so anti-atheist, I legitimately have never seen leftists anywhere, online or off, so consistently eager to defend religion's honor
Is it a phase thing? It must be a phase thing
For the record, I'm an atheist myself, and I generally agree with the idea that religion is more of a coping mechanism for living in hellworld than anything else.
I was also heavily involved in interfaith groups and religious studies in college, and I know a great many religious people who were also very progressive-to-leftist that would be alienated by a lot of the rhetoric around the place/status of faith in communism. I admit I've probably posted shit like this one too many times, but also some of the responses it gets are extremely dismissive and off-putting. The good news is that I've seen less of that here as time goes on. This site's done pretty well with purging a lot of the Reddit brainworms that a lot of us (myself included) had initially. I'll shut up about it now.
edit: Someone else also posted about how religious texts (specifically the Bible) contain some actual rhetoric and tools for combating the powers that be that could be useful for bringing people of faith into the fold. I think it'd be unwise to ignore that.
spoiler
also dunking on New Atheist nerds is extremely cathartic for me :sicko-blur:
Churches have functioned as spearheads of political repression and reaction since humans first invented priestly castes, but an atheist was being rude to me online so who can really say who the real bad guys are??? :shrug-outta-hecks:
The church as an institution of political power (and in general) can fuck all the way off. That's not what I'm referring to.
I'm in full agreement with the Lenin quote posted below.
I also see it a lot on Twitter.
The anti-atheist backlash eclipsed the actual Reddit fedora atheists a long time ago. I can't remember the last time I saw someone express any atheist sentiment online without someone else invoking the word "fedora".
And yet I'm lead to believe that these Iraq War-era New Atheists are just swarming around everywhere.
No, it's actually that a lot of the folks on this site are so extremely online that they've either gone through an obnoxious Reddit atheist phase or are MUCH more likely to be mistaken for a Reddit atheist than a Christian, so they develop a sort of Revulsion of Small Differences to make it very clear there's a lot of air between them and the Reddit atheists they totally don't have anything in common with, as they type on their ideologically-based Reddit spinoff using the tone of that place in a lot of their posts.
Hmm I think this is a misuse of the format because I'm not supposed to agree with the bottom text.
Maybe, "is this an epic atheist dunk?"
I want to know where people live where atheists are more insufferable than religious fundamentalists.
"So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideo logical and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat.
If that is so, why do we not declare in our Programme that we are atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our Party?
The answer to this question will serve to explain the very important difference in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois democrats and the Social-Democrats.
Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work. We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.[1]
But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an “intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods. It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.
That is the reason why we do not and should not set forth our atheism in our Programme; that is why we do not and should not prohibit proletarians who still retain vestiges of their old prejudices from associating themselves with our Party. We shall always preach the scientific world-outlook, and it is essential for us to combat the inconsistency of various “Christians”. But that does not mean in the least that the religious question ought to be advanced to first place, where it does not belong at all; nor does it mean that we should allow the forces of the really revolutionary economic and political struggle to be split up on account of third-rate opinions or senseless ideas, rapidly losing all political importance, rapidly being swept out as rubbish by the very course of economic development.
Everywhere the reactionary bourgeoisie has concerned itself, and is now beginning to concern itself in Russia, with the fomenting of religious strife—in order thereby to divert the attention of the masses from the really important and fundamental economic and political problems, now being solved in practice by the all-Russian proletariat uniting in revolutionary struggle. This reactionary policy of splitting up the proletarian forces, which today manifests itself mainly in Black-Hundred pogroms, may tomorrow conceive some more subtle forms. We, at any rate, shall oppose it by calmly, consistently and patiently preaching proletarian solidarity and the scientific world-outlook—a preaching alien to any stirring up of secondary differences.
The revolutionary proletariat will succeed in making religion a really private affair, so far as the state is concerned. And in this political system, cleansed of medieval mildew, the proletariat will wage a broad and open struggle for the elimination of economic slavery, the true source of the religious humbugging of mankind."
Lenin, December 3rd, 1905, Novaya Zhizn, No. 28 https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm
