The funny part being that they write it as if the ideas are preposterous. Putting religion at the very basis of the operation of the universe is one hell of a drug.
EDIT: Already made it a comment, but I feel it's important before people get that idea that these people are necessarily our enemies.
People write/read takes like this and come to radically different conclusions due to their different base axioms of human experience. For the target readership of catholicculture.org, they are ones that are trying to understand the universe, with the base assumption being the existence of a Christian god. Many an apologetic has attempted to synthesize the real observable world with a just, righteous god. Regardless of their flawed logics, they are at least interested in taking a holistic approach to the human experience rather than an individual, capitalist, exploitative experience. As someone who as a child dove into the catholic theological worldview, desperate for meaning in this clearly meaning deprived society, these people can be radicalized, and are capable of changing their basis of thought. It takes real effort and patience, but they are much more likely to be a devoted comrade to the human liberatory unification experience than a bourgeois hedonistic individualist, who only cares for themselves and the people closest to them, who would rather not ponder their experience let alone the collective human experience, but rather live their own lives in pursuit of illusory happiness in isolation.
Can you still be a Marxist while being a (philosophical) idealist?
Idk I feel like the universe is far too mysterious and complex to just claim that it's fundamentally material. I think it's very possible that what we experience as a material reality is a subset of a larger "ideal" reality - the reality of which is probably something we haven't even conceived of.
I don't think that fundamentally contradicts any of the practical points of Marxism
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Yeah definitely. I don't believe this fully - I doubt its even theoretically possible to prove - but I think that material reality being nested within consciousness fits the way I experience the world.
Obviously the material conditions which drive history are nested within material reality, so yeah there's definitely no major contradiction concerning the important stuff
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Have we not just proven we’re always going to be idealists? [Until that itself transforms]
Yes. Try dual-aspect monism. I’m not sure if it is correct but I think it’s mostly correct. Read it for yourself?
Materialism is everything, it’s how Marxists talk about the entire system. The objects inside the system, the ones that perceive it, are the idealists because they can only perceive partial truths in this system, and then must gravitate towards one of two emotional, libidinal poles that determine their drives because they are still stuck within the dialectical system. Yes, we all are. Together. Or it isn’t materialism. Our pole gives us more knowledge to show us more truth. Theirs covers a mind in shit. Who’s to say which one is better, fellow relativists and art-lovers?
People express themselves through their art. There’s a reason the bourgeois value the work of poor artists so highly! The bourgeois are only class conscious in the sense that they are self-aware. Their myths, about art being created through suffering? This is not a material truth at all! It is half. The other half of the truth is of course the anti-truth.
This is of course the system working to disguise itself through myth. I wish I could write this down mathematically but at this point I don’t think I have much interest in math or science in the traditional sense.
The rich are libidinally driven, through the vast influence and contradictions of financial-artistic system, to frustrate the poor by holding the truth for themselves, against the proletariat, to fool them, to divide them, to make them hate art, and themselves. This is their theft.
The poor don’t like this at all! The masses love art deeply, and want to be free. I am angry about it and trying to be as fair as possible.
Marxism is not just about economics anymore. Marxists should stop over-privileging themselves, in general, because this obviously leads to faults in a true systemic understanding of reality. Lots of Marxists point to large parts of reality and declare it isn’t materialist. It is quite funny
The question of a larger reality above ours, from a physicists perspective, is unknowable and somewhat misleading when some of the more out-there pop-physicists speculate.
Really, we will never know the exact nature of the cause of the universe's existence, to believe that we can somehow look past the genesis point of time's very existence is indeed idealist. However it also results from a misunderstanding of the nature of our own reality. Our perceptions are already proven by physics to be limited by our positions and relative velocity in spacetime, and at the level of particle physics, we are at the very boundary of test-ability; theorized particles of a smaller scale than those observed thus far would require more energy than all of that in our solar system.
There are certainly things unknown to the sciences of today, and there are certainly things that are unknowable. But what we do know is that the universe is material, consistent, and testable. To dispute this is to dispute materialism itself, without which we can have no Marxism.
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