/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Yes i agree
BUT we always have to put this in the context of a "secular" religion as you say. God is not dead today, he lives and breathes as the spirit of capital. In the past, God was hidden, now he is revealed.
I even once heard a reactionary say that the "invisible hand" of the market is literally the will of god. And strange possessions are overcoming those in the "godless" scene of accelerationism, where justin murphy (a catholic) says that capital is literally God and will preserve the righteous, and even NICK LAND in a relatively recent interview gave credence to the bible as a text which is purposefully being "preserved" by this inhuman power, alluding to a canon in western christianity being affirmed as the world-spirit.
Look at thinkers like jordan peterson too who sees the symbol of God as alive in nature. I read a book once too called "the tao of capital" which talks about how we must allow ourselves to be moved by the all-knowing market. Gambling is the scene of high finance, like the israelites casting lots to determine the will of God.
So clearly God is not dead, he is undead.
This is the same idolatry which leads to sacrifices given to moloch. And its clear today, where we cannot afford to upset "the economy" without inviting its wrath.
Abolishing religion means sublating it and transforming it into a lived experience, like how socrates' "upper world" has the faithful praying to gods who reveal themselves in temples.

But once more we can defer to our livee tradition in Christ by appealing to our "father who art in heaven" otherwise, even as the god of no-god in his fiction, rather than the "real god" of capital. Are we fathful or are we idolators?

Western countries are, on the whole, less religious now than they ever have been in the entire histories of their existence, but that won't stop people from still buying into the Marxist claim that it was religion providing a support to the capitalist order. Even rightoids who claim to be inspired by religion don't buy into it (see: Jordan Peterson). The case for religion providing a support to Monarchies and the feudal order was far more convincing, not least in part because the church actually held legal power and real authority back then.
>There's also the question of if people will have any kind of radical re-evaluation of the world once they lose their religious views, and I would once again say that this has been fairly debunked even as recently as the last decade after the NuAtheists all became a big gaggle of reactionaries. As it turns out, "Nature" can be a perfectly adequate replacement for God in the reactionary worldview. The world and everyone's place in it can very easily be trumped up to supposedly self-evident natural laws rather than divine providence, and in some ways I would argue that this is even more oppressive than the divine order. The order of the world being mandated by Heaven still leaves some wiggle room. After all, Heaven has enemies and who's to say that our earthly powers aren't actually in league with Hell? Nature, on the other hand, is immutable. To claim that the order of the world is natural is to claim that it is as set in stone as the law of gravity, of the wind and the tides, of the setting of the sun in the west. And what's more, not only have the NuAtheists of the Aughts become reactionaries, guys like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher are even massive Zionists. I guess the fact that God doesn't exist doesn't mean He didn't give the land of Israel to the Jews! So what was the the refutation of religion even supposed to change in these people if it doesn't even inoculate them against Zionism?
This is a very important point. Without a common religious frame of reference people are not incentivized towards justice and instead default to some bastardized appeal to nature or might makes right perspective. Bill Maher in his defense of Zionism literally does this by pointing to countries and empires which previously conquered territory and how others should just "get over it" since it's ancient history and "they won".

>>1857995
thats why i say that there must always be the transcendent divinity, otherwise you become a pagan idiot talking about blood and soil
Justice is inherently abstract in its concept. It serves a goodness beyond self-interest. It is the "public" interest. This is whats lost by capital and what can only be saved by a socialist state.

> As it turns out, "Nature" can be a perfectly adequate replacement for God in the reactionary worldview
What you’re telling me is we need to take atheism further

>>1858009
Sounds like a "no true atheist" fallacy

The leftist critique of religion fails because like all modern critiques of religion, it cannot reliably demonstrate what religion is and how it can be distinguished from any other system of thought or belief.

>Is the largest or even significant ideology keeping the masses in line the promise of a better life in Heaven? Do the actively religious actually believe that the world order as it is established now is the product of divine providence?
When has this ever been relevant? Even if you look at the 19th centuries, the overwhelming majority of armed uprisings and rebellions (outside of Europe anyway) all involved systems of belief leftists would consider religious. Even the renegade priest Georgy Gapon led masses of workers to protest the Tsar and mobilized far more people than any left outfit in Russia at the time. The rebellions in the Caucuses, Abd al-Qadir's resistance to the French in Algeria, constant rebellions in British India and the West Indies. The whole "religion is a false consciousness to subdue people" wasn't even true in the days of Bakunin and Marx. The simple reality is that leftist ideologues have always been secular and the leftist critique of religion is just sectarian bias.

Marx's critique of religion is a little different from the gutter atheism of other leftists. For Marx, religion is an inverted consciousness that only exists because of human alienation from the world. In other words, poor material conditions give rise to a kind of abstract supernatural thinking that becomes an expression for genuine suffering and teaches people to look forward to an otherworldly paradise instead of confronting human reality. Right off the bat, he assumes there exists something called 'religion' which is distinct from other forms of thinking and has unique properties that make it the other of rational, secular, progressive modes of thought, and that the latter is superior.

Secularism is like orientalism or racism, it sets up 'religion' as its antagonistic other and projects onto it all kinds of fantasies, negative stereotypes etc. including ideas of religious people being dangerous or threats to public morality who have to be herded, policed, and controlled e.g. French or Turkish headscarf laws. Secularism was instrumental for capitalism and bourgeois liberal ideology. It was intended to free state and capital from any ethical or moral commitments as well as make the earth as exploitable as possible. Native Hawaiians who believe Manua Kea is sacred are not going to allow people to build observatories on top of it. In that case, secularism was wielded as a battering ram against a colonized indigenous people. Its usually indigenous people who are the ultimate victims of secular policies. You can see that in Gaza today. There's a strong bias against Palestinians because many libs deem them insufficiently secular and too religious.

>Religion is in many ways a vestigial and dying institution, at least in the West.
Traditional religions are on the decline but "religious thinking" is not. People nowadays pick all kinds of bizarre spiritual beliefs, new age shit, occult stuff, spirit mediums, cults etc. so its not dying its become neoliberalized and now we have an economy of spirituality that's become just another business. Just look at the far right's obsession with Evola while the left shows zero interest in religious, mystical, or occult ideas they end up giving up ground to the far right.

Standard atheism is doomed to fail or turn into something worse than religion. In a sense, we humans are always deifying or worshiping something, be it money, sex, the nation, power, ideology etc. and so atheism ultimately fails and devolved into a degenerate idolatry. When you look at Bill Maher the guy worships Israel and he is fine if billions die for his precious Israel. Nu atheists worship the idea of the West and the Enlightenment, science blah blah blah and are willing to torture, kill, and genocide people over those things.

>>1858009
Atheism can be salvaged through immanence. Think of Deleuze's idea of univocity of being. But if you take that road your basically embracing an idea that had its roots in religion anyway. You just don't subscribe to a church or rules or have any kind of ritual.

>>1858010
That would require me saying they weren’t “true”. My stance is what their atheism is built on is weak.

>>1858011
It’s all a game of post-hoc taking what is experientially “transcendent” and assigning “divinity” to it. The roots are experiential. You make them religious.

>>1858012
And what is a "strong" basis for atheism?
We are religious animals. That's OP's common sense.

>>1858020
Not replacing god with nature like the noted reactionaries do, for one.
> We are religious animals.
I don’t even really disagree depending on what is meant by “religion”, but not all religions are equal.

>>1858014
>>1858011
think of how dreams are "pure" experience but can only be held in self-relation through a retroactive remembrance. Drug trips are like that too, where they can only be recalled in fragmentary perspectives, because as wittgenstein says, the limits of our language is the limits of our world.
There is no such thing as pure experience, but only its fantasy, which burgeons beyond discourse as a false memory.
"Objective reality" beyond the senses is the same primal fantasy, when german idealism locks our experience into sense perception.
The notion of the dionysian irrational noumenon is just an excuse to be an idiot.

>>1858023
what do you replace god with then?
>not all religions are equal
I like this. So what is the "best" religion to believe in?

>The fundamental leftist critique of religion is that religion lulls the masses into complacency with promises of a better life in Heaven and an assurance that the Earthly order is ordained by Providence
That's certainly a prominent critique, but it's also that religion is literally people treating fairy tales as reality. That has so many problems with it it's not worth listing them all, as if regular idealism isn't bad enough.
>on the flip side, recognition of the falsehood of religious belief will cause the masses to undergo a radical re-evaluation of the world, the way it is organized, and their relationship with their fellow man
santa claus called

>>1858025
Whether the experience is mediated by x, y, or, z doesn't matter much to me. An “impure” experience is still the root. How the occidental mind decided to conceptualize an edifice for it to sit upon is interesting for some, but I’ll just take drugs and climb to see at their level without scaling that Tower of Babel on the brink of collapsing from its own weight. It’s very funny to read philosophers fret over maintaining its infrastructure like we will all lose a common language when it comes tumbling down.
>>1858026
> what do you replace god with then?
Depends, not all religions require a deity in the traditional sense. Christianity is useful in some ways because it sees God in everything. I can’t really say they are wrong in some regards. It depends on the day if I see a “god” in myself, my best friend, family, nature etc. I could see god being conceptualized as more of a psychological phenomenon that everyone has access to.
> So what is the "best" religion to believe in?
I can tell you what is far from the best, but I’ll be completely honest and tell you I haven’t pinned down to a science what the best future secular religion will be. Just my opinion, but I would hope that down the road it’s a religion which allows people to construct their own and allows for creative autonomy to some extent. If you consider philosophy a religion, and I do, then that could help guide people in that process. I’m a critic sometimes but it can be useful.

>>1857980
True. Religion had much more importance a century ago, which is why communists back then used to talk about it so much. Even in Stalin's time, religion fell to the wayside completely and became tolerated because it no longer posed much danger. The same is true of religion today, which is why magacommunist retards and Insarallah can talk so easily - they both really have one religion, idealist multipolarism.

>>1858046
You realize Stirner said a lot of the same stuff, right?

>>1858035
When i was younger i used to worship eris and dionysus in a syncretic compound i called "dionerisia", but then i found out i was cursed by an idol of a ceramic jar i had bought with the icon of dionysus upon it. One day after an abusive amount of wine i was filled with divine wrath and i humiliated myself and terrified my friends, but afterwards i accidentally broke the vase, and suddenly the spiritual grip was lost on me, and now i am weary of enchanted objects and foreign gods.
>>1858039
>An “impure” experience is still the root
At the most basic level, society requires us to repress ourselves. But this is also necessary for the opening a new sort of infinity, in contradiction. In the end, we always choose to eat from the fruit pr to remain in eden.
>Christianity is useful in some ways because it sees God in everything.
I think this is true for catholicism, but protestantism (my personal tendency) is quite jewish in how it has the "empty cross" of a godless world. To me, protestantism is the beginning of modernity (and capitalism) by positing an infinite "debt" set against man, as opposed to the catholic briberies that they give in the space of purgatory (where for example you can pray for loved ones to leave purgatory quicker as a sort of system of credit, while the reformed position is that we are all irredeemable, or of an absolute debt, which must nevertheless be paid off, and which contributes to the "protestant work ethic").
>If you consider philosophy a religion, and I do, then that could help guide people in that process. I’m a critic sometimes but it can be useful.
To me, philosophy is inherently theological, so is subsumed into dogma. All "pure" philosophy has already had its say, and i feel that the aim of philosophy is always its self-completion (where the critical attitude of aristotle for example is to right the wrongs of past thinking. Every philosopher must be a critic and must have a final statement of things, or must otherwise be a metaphysician - to speak finally of things by a return to their beginnings).

>>1858026
Wicca because hoes crazy or neopaganism because Tukhachevsky gang gang

>>1858052
cursed to party. a fate better than death but a fate nonetheless.

I don't know why people are still complaining about communists being being alleged rabid anti-religion autists in 2024 when most communists today cap for religious demographics all the time. Even when communists get elected in some areas they don't repress religioustard or slow down/defund their construction projects, it feels like a completely anarchronistic complaint.
Even speaking about actual communist countries, the only communist regime who repressed religions for the last 50 years have been China in Xinjang and (maybe?) North Korea. Neither Cuba or Venezuela repressed anyone on religious ground.

>>1858054
while not a sex cult, i hear its members are kinda sex obsessed lol. probably bullshit

>>1857980
>ever since Trump rose up as a political force, I haven't been able to take the religious right seriously as a religious movement
OP, you probably have not sincerely met the real religious right.
They're still around. This is your ignorance of their existence. I bet you have not even met with the Catholic scholasticism nerds or Orthodox traditionalists or Bible Belt Protestants. Or even the Muslim world which is very proactively religious. Lurk around more. You're not looking hard enough.

Your point on the NuAtheists becoming reactionaries is especially ironic in the context of Richard Dawkins, I believe, saying he calls himself a “cultural Christian”. Again you have that cynical deployment of faith as a means of social order rather than emanating from actual belief.

I’ve said stuff in a similar vain before, but at this point I don’t give a fuck, people will listen or they won’t. I think the broader left has this notion that Capitalism dissolving all prior social relations, and this is good because there won’t be a “distraction” anymore from the class struggle. And I think history has proven that notion to be dead wrong. All the destruction of prior social institutions have done is destroyed the basis for collectivity and left atomized consumers in its wake. The world, the collective, it’s getting smaller and smaller. The annihilation of faith has left a void not filled by socialism, but by people consuming Marvel products and fandoms; something that’s engaged with as an observer rather than active participant. The dissolving of the nation has only lead to internationalism of capital, not labor. Western laborers are broadly going nationalist because they can recognize that the costs of global capital are being offloaded onto them: they’re the ones that are dealing with jobs leaving, massive influxes of migrants competing in the domestic job market, and suppressed wages. The rich aren’t.

The places broadly going Right Wing aren’t the richest parts of America or Europe, in fact it’s usually the opposite: it’s often the poorest and most dilapidated parts of the country, the underdeveloped parts. And what do these people do when the jobs have left and the opiates come in? They cling to religion and nationalism because those are the only existing forms of collectivism left. And in comes the Left huffing that they have to give that last little bit of collectivism up for “real” collectivism to be born.

>>1857980
>And what's more, not only have the NuAtheists of the Aughts become reactionaries … Among many secular liberals, religion is used as the sin eater for liberalism's failures. Religion is portrayed as the evil seed from which all reactionary thought grows and is the perennial reason why liberalism continues to fail to live up to its promises
You have a strong point here. I think a lot of the New Atheist (or r/atheism) stuff retains a metaphysical form of thinking where religion comes in from the "outside" to corrupt humanity, rather than something generated from within human minds which are themselves shaped by the material conditions of societies (which seems more Marxist). Your descriptions of religions promising an "afterlife" in the here-and-now in the sleek, modern homes of the rich is also fascinating.

>So what was the the refutation of religion even supposed to change in these people if it doesn't even inoculate them against Zionism?
Well, a lot of early Zionists were secularists, some could've been atheists. This tends to confuse people because how can you be a secularist while retvrning to the holy land of the Bible? But a lot of those guys were thinking in terms of nationalism with the Bible being their national story (albeit rendered by ancient peoples in mythological terms), the superstitious stuff was not necessarily relevant. The kind of critical Biblical history where you go around to archeological digs to see what matched up to what's in the Bible and what didn't also became a fascination to these people in the 20th century. (They also used archeology to legitimize their land grabs.)

I recently learned about the Israeli general, Yigael Yadin, one of the commanders in the 1948 war, who was also an archaeologist and wrote such books (I was flipping through one of his based on ancient warfare in the region) that would try to fit the Biblical stories into a scientific context using modern discoveries. I don't know if he was an atheist or not, but he was a secularist. Isaac Asimov also wrote a book about the Bible that was similar. This is pretty distinct from American fundamentalists going around trying to find some fossilized piece of wood and calling it Noah's Ark, although it wouldn't surprise me if religious Zionists in Israel nowadays do similar things to that.

We don't have to get into the whole history of nationalism but it emerged really with the French Revolution which arrayed itself against the powers of the clergy, among others. The most extreme revolutionaries were atheists in many cases, and the revolution even produced a short-lived, state-sponsored atheistic religion called the Cult of Reason.

>>1858007
>thats why i say that there must always be the transcendent divinity, otherwise you become a pagan idiot talking about blood and soil
>Justice is inherently abstract in its concept.
But I'm not sure injustice is so abstract. Like, injustice can confront people really in the form of a soldier just waylaying them, or the police sending attack dogs after people for demonstrating for the rights that the authority is supposed to protect on paper.

>>1858011
>it cannot reliably demonstrate what religion is and how it can be distinguished from any other system of thought or belief.
I think religion is a form of ideology, and to reliably teach about religion in a materialist way, I think we'd probably have to get into its origins and functions, like why this religious book says to cover your hair and how that relates to the geographical conditions and/or the level of social organization (nomadic / agricultural civilizations) in which that practice emerged, or how the Trinity in Christianity developed out of an attempt to save the declining Roman Empire. I've read the Chinese approach to religious education in schools is like this but I'm not certain.

>Even if you look at the 19th centuries, the overwhelming majority of armed uprisings and rebellions (outside of Europe anyway) all involved systems of belief leftists would consider religious.
Some Marxist-influenced historians like Hobsbawm have written about how proto-bourgeois revolutions like the English Civil War used religious languge because the hard secularism and/or atheism that came later in France just hadn't developed yet (but the scientific / technological discoveries weren't advanced enough yet!). It was also interesting to read about the Second Great Awakening, which was a Protestant religious revival in the United States in the early 19th century, and how that was interrelated with fairly radical democratic and liberal ideas at the same time (it intensified anti-slavery activity), and helping develop social institutions where there had been none in these far-flung, underpopulated frontier areas. So I think it can be logical to be religious in certain circumstances.

But I thought it was interesting that this was being paralleled by people in Catholic countries at the same time, who had similar ideas, but were just dropping out of religion altogether – nevertheless these were related phenomena even if one was religious and the other more atheistic. At the same time, there was a reactionary movement against this in Europe among sons of the upper class who were doubling down on Catholicism (RedScare tradcaths circa 1830s).

>Marx's critique of religion is a little different from the gutter atheism of other leftists. For Marx, religion is an inverted consciousness that only exists because of human alienation from the world. In other words, poor material conditions give rise to a kind of abstract supernatural thinking that becomes an expression for genuine suffering and teaches people to look forward to an otherworldly paradise instead of confronting human reality.
Yeah he was influenced by Feuerbach who saw religion as a projection of human nature onto an other-worldy but human-created entity. I think Marx also wrote somewhere that it sprang from man's feelings of helpenessness amid the blind forces of nature that he had not yet learned to master.

>Traditional religions are on the decline but "religious thinking" is not. People nowadays pick all kinds of bizarre spiritual beliefs, new age shit, occult stuff, spirit mediums, cults etc.
If we apply this same logic to modern political mythologies, it might be added that there are blind forces of modern society that we haven't learned to master. People feel a lack of agency and are confronted with a lot of unrelated bad things happening, which leads to strange and new political cults like Q-Anon and Falun Gong.

>Its usually indigenous people who are the ultimate victims of secular policies. You can see that in Gaza today. There's a strong bias against Palestinians because many libs deem them insufficiently secular and too religious.
There is a lot of that, yes. I think it's really problematic for me to be like "oh, don't you Palestinians know Islam is dumb?" or, like, "I have a better strategy for you" while sitting in America while Israel is acting so barbarically towards them, and it quickly opens the door to those secular people who are biased against them. But it's also, like, yeah Islam does fill in for something that is lacking, namely I think the failure of Islamic societies to industrialize, so they've been logjammed and unable to resist foreign invaders, Israel, etc. and religion emerges as both a cope, but also a protest and a way to fight back. It provides a theoretical basis to demand sacrifices in what looks like an impossible situation (Hamas for example seems a lot more disciplined, down to the personal habits of its members, than Fatah for example).

I wonder if anyone has made comparisons between the most radical Islamic movements to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in China or the Boxer Rebellion which emerged out of the Qing's failures to deal with the problems and resist the foreigners but which also failed. But like, the Jews in Palestine were debating in the 1920s about whether to make the national language of their future state Hebrew or German, because you couldn't do theoretical physics in Hebrew in the 1920s. The defeat of the Arabs that came later created a deep crisis. Then by 1966 or 1967 the Israelis had nuclear weapons. Those were the people who won the 20th century.

This makes me sound like a "might makes right" guy. On the contrary, the disaster of Social Darwinism was to mechanically apply discoveries in natural science to political philosophy, such that the "strong" have an obligation to select the "weak" out, and the strong are like lions, tigers or bears. But there are many examples in natural science of "strong" species going extinct while worms or cockroaches survive because they're more adaptable. (Trying to predict the future has a really bad track record, but this is one reason why I suspect that part of the world isn't finished yet with revolutionary upheavels – that is evolution.)

>Standard atheism is doomed to fail or turn into something worse than religion. In a sense, we humans are always deifying or worshiping something
Well look at Stalinism. Some historians have suggested Stalinism combined Marxism with the traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy, and as a result, the West forgot that Marxism was its own creation and came to treat it as if were an exotic Oriental religion. Marxism in that version ceased to understand the West, and became incomprehensible to the West.

There's a similarity to early Christianity. It started out as a heretical Jewish sect, bent on converting other Jews mainly. But what ended up happening is Christianity moved to a disintegrating pagan world, "whose mind was no longer dominated by the old gods, where Jupiter's thunder no longer made men tremble, and Neptune was no longer able to shake the seas." Then there we go with Christianity taking over the Roman Empire but also adapting and assimilated pagan myths, symbols and beliefs – while also becoming incomprehensible to the Jews. And by converting the Caesars, Christianity also became converted to Caesarism, the Holy See became an imperial court, and the hierarchical habits of the Roman Empire became Christianity's ecclesiastic canons (in Catholic form).

To go back to before Marx. Robespierre sought to supplant Christianity with a revolutionary religion that valorized the poor. It was his demand that Christians live like their savior, if they truly believed, that was viewed as intolerable to right of the Jacobins. Where the left, found it intolerable he felt religion was necessary at some level.

But Robespierre was correct. If religion is the painkiller as Marx saw it then its crime is that of hypocrisy not its sedating effect.
A hypocrisy woven into the very concept of grace and forgiveness in way which predominately benefits those who already hold power. So the answer isn't to destroy religion, its to remake it. Just as Pagans were assimilated by the Abrahamic faiths.

On mission, Georges Couthon ordered the destruction of churches to use their materials to build homes for the poor. In doing so, he provided a window into what true Christianity could have been.

religion is ok actually

>>1857980
What is needed is a clearer sociological analysis of religion, or psychological analysis of man, as the case may be.
Religion is dead, but people remain as religious as ever: You just substitute fandoms, political ideologies, philosophical beliefs, and so on, and take those and put them in the same position. Where some used to dream of the arrival of the eschaton as revealed in revelations, they now know that it will arrive with a Labour government, a Democratic president, the thrilling conclusion of a film or game series, etc, etc.

There is no belief in a higher power, but liturgy, scripture, priesthoods, congregations, ritual, and all the rest of it live on in their own transformed way. where man of old might have prayed for 40 days and 40 nights to show his dedication, the man of today recreates the map of Pokemon Red piece-by-piece in Minecraft.

>>1858126
>I think religion is a form of ideology, and to reliably teach about religion in a materialist way, I think we'd probably have to get into its origins and functions,
Anthropologists, religious studies experts, historians have never been able to reliably define 'religion' as a distinct category of human social life and have consistently failed to explain its functions and origins, assuming it has a function. Then we have to ask, what do we mean when we say religion? What does this term do in society? The first thing we realize is that religion appears utterly arbitrary. What difference is there between Marxist-Leninists and Evangelical Christians in a purely abstract sociological sense? Both are wedded to old books, hero worship certain cults, have a messianic eschatological worldview, appeal to certain transcendental concepts, and are extremely hostile to outsiders. Yet one group is classified as religious while the other is considered secular. Upon closer examination, we find that the sticker 'religion' is typically applied to marginalized opinions and minorities. It signifies an inferior state that has to be abolished, controlled, or at least rendered private. So while the distinction between religion and the secular seems arbitrary, it is actually shaped by relations of power, class, ethnicity etc.

Certain ideas are defined as 'religious' or 'secular' by whoever is the dominant class in society. It is through this process of assignment that ideas and beliefs come to be defined as 'religious' and marked as inferior or dangerous. This process, lets call it secularization, exists to shore up a particular vision of social order through the policing of ideas, beliefs, and social practices as well as maintain the authoritarian power of state and capital. Its a form of repressive power designed to protect a bourgeois liberal worldview. In that sense, secularism is a fundamentally reactionary and oppressive force. It also means that 'religion' cannot be studied in a typical Marxist fashion. It is not something that just exists. It is liberal secularists who define certain traditions as 'religions' and lump them together into one category. Its like "terrorism" or "the black race." Scare words that achieve a certain function of thought policing. You can't provide a materialist explanation of 'religion' because those things commonly defined as religions share nothing in common besides the fact they are all traditions liberals and leftists like to suppress or see as evil and beyond that they share nothing in common.

To study the material conditions that led to 'religion' among Sudanese pastoralists is pointless because there is nothing inherently religious about these beliefs. We call these beliefs 'religion' because we discriminate against Sudanese natives as inferior, less developed, irrational, illogical. and therefore their beliefs can never be treated with the same level of seriousness and maturity as our own. This reflects the power imbalances and class relations between us and justifies our exploitation of their land, bodies, and resources. Secularism, not Christianity or Islam, is the real instrument of oppression.

>Some Marxist-influenced historians like Hobsbawm have written about how proto-bourgeois revolutions like the English Civil War used religious languge because the hard secularism and/or atheism that came later in France just hadn't developed yet (but the scientific / technological discoveries weren't advanced enough yet!).
Historical materialism is garbage and nobody should ever take it seriously. Atheism and secularism were not a predetermined development destined to evolve as technology/society advances. They were products of a specific intellectual history and developments in Western societies not timeless Platonic forms that are unlocked as humans advance up their nation's tech tree. Qing dynasty China would not have spontaneously evolved something like French republicanism, atheism, or secularism even if it experienced its own industrial revolution.

>Islam does fill in for something that is lacking, namely I think the failure of Islamic societies to industrialize, so they've been logjammed and unable to resist foreign invaders, Israel, etc. and religion emerges as both a cope, but also a protest and a way to fight back.
The problem with this Marxist take is it assumes Islam is a cope or a product of failure which is reductive and simplistic. 'Religion' is not a crutch and Islam did not become a religion until we classified it as one as a means of crushing and confing it. What gets me about leftists is have they ever actually bothered to investigate the theology of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas? Have they ever considered that these people have ideas that are intrinsically appealing and intellectually valid? No, we do what secular chauvinists usually do: dismiss them as religious or assume things about them because they are religions e.g. "Islam is a means of resistance" or "they embrace Islam because its the only thing that unifies them" etc. but the ideologues behind these groups are never actually engaged with. The mere fact they are Islamic is enough to dismiss them as obviously wrong. Its shockingly arrogant and ignorant. I remember a Hezbollah leader talking about how a group of Western leftists had come over for a dialogue and when he tried to outline Hezbollah's ideology and liberation theology, they couldn't understand and refused to talk about it because they had zero interest in religion and couldn't really understand it.

There is no reason why the beliefs of an shaman should be treated as less intellectually worthy of debate than those of Marx or Kant. Those beliefs aren't a crutch, a cope or a failure. We call them that because we colonized these people and we reserve the right to marginalize their worldview while jerking ourselves off as the epitome of human evolution. The belief in spirits (immaterial invisible force) isn't some defect that has to be explained away anymore than the belief in gravity or quantum physics (also immaterial invisible forces) is a defect or a product of failure. We have no right to call the former religious superstition and then go one step further and shit on people for believing it.

>>1858099
I live in the Bible Belt.

>>1858272
Dont worry bro, i know what religion is:
What underlies religion is clearly the site of sacrifice. Sacrifice gives meaning by its inherent property. This represents life as a whole, as a system fighting against entropy, where some must be sacrificed for the greater good of the collective. This is the strict cosmology of the hindus, of the god who sacrifices himself to allow creation to blossom. Like the spider-grandmother creation myth of the native americans. Like the creation of the world from the primordial giant in norse mythology. Like the construction of the cosmos from the corpse of tiamat in sumerian mythology. Even by analogy of the crucifix in christianity, where god must sacrifice himself for the world, which is itself mapped from the yom kippur rituals of the jews taken from the story of azazel as the original "scape-goat" offered up by the fallen angels.
Religion is about SACRIFICE, the same as what bataille identifies. That all meaning spawns from sacrifice.
This maps perfectly onto the origins of (class) society, where money is instituted and issued by the rents of taxation, which drag like the forces of entropy against the society. Society must generate a surplus for its own sake to preserve. This is the deity or idol or transcendent object. It is the sum of our labours objectified in the state. The sacrifice is for our own ultimate SELF-SACRIFICE.
We are entered into a series of sacrifices, which is the objective state of life itself (where even muslims will say that animals "willingly" give themselves up to be ritually killed). This is also why religion breeds martyrs and soldiers. It is the cult of self-sacrifice.
But laced within this is the ancient order of human sacrifice (continued today with abortion, war and starvation). This signifies a "surplus humanity" which has always been present (alongside the surplus of the social reserve). To preserve the social product, there must be human sacrifice which maintains the order against the destructive powers of overpopulation. Even in non-human animals there is infanticide and other measures to secure survival in the literal feeding from the mother in her milk and flesh (like how some species of worm willingly sacrifice their bodies to their children to feast on - even microscopic creatures like tartagrades leave a husk of shedded skin for their children to eat and develop from. So much of life is this cannibalism. Thats why christ says we must eat his flesh and drink his blood.

This is a rough outline but a self-explanatory of the *historical* structure of religion. It is directly tied to political economy as the construction of a surplus in the state by self-sacrifice, which must also be ritualised to ensure our integral place in the system. We still ritualise this when we talk about taxes. Our self-sacrifice is done for the "greater good" of public interest. This is crafting the transcendent.

>>1858126
>This makes me sound like a "might makes right" guy. On the contrary, the disaster of Social Darwinism was to mechanically apply discoveries in natural science to political philosophy, such that the "strong" have an obligation to select the "weak" out, and the strong are like lions, tigers or bears. But there are many examples in natural science of "strong" species going extinct while worms or cockroaches survive because they're more adaptable. (Trying to predict the future has a really bad track record, but this is one reason why I suspect that part of the world isn't finished yet with revolutionary upheavels – that is evolution.)

"Might makes Right" is true though, you don't need to be an advocate for it, it's just a fact. If "Right makes Might" held any truth, then Vercingetorix would have defeated Caesar, Spartacus would've toppled Rome, the Spartakid uprising would've succeeded, and ᴉuᴉlossnW would have been shot.

How's the old Lenin quote go? "Without power, all else is illusory"? Point being if you don't have the ability to project or use force, then you're gonna be overcome by those who can. It's just the iron law of history. Which means the role of those subjugated by the powerful should be to develop their own means of power and overthrow them.

It's why I find the emphasis on "weakness" in the Left as indicative, perhaps, of a shift away from revolutionary politics to a kind of secular Christianity. I got a lot of pushback for my comments on "weakness" with many people saying Leftism/Socialism is "for the weakest and most oppressed in society." Well I personally think back to the quote from Big Bill Haywood:
>"All the workers have to do is put their hands in their pockets and they've got the bosses whipped."
The premise of Marxism-Leninism is that the workers can and will win because they make up the majority of society, not because they're "morally righteous". Yet there's been a broad shift away from Socialismn as the broad interest of the entire working class, to a form of therapy for the most exploited or looked down on segments of that class.

>>1858362
"To a materialist, power is freedom" - engels, socialism: utopian and scientific

Is the US going to need some kind of cultural revolution or secular (un)holy war to purge the country of its psychotic religious tendencies? The reactoids are holding onto this stuff with a death grip and digging their heels in. I can't help but think they are going to be the ones to kick off civil "war" (more like a years of lead scenario). The government has also shown, regardless of who's "in charge" at the time that they are pretty much ok with right wing terrorism even if it's against the interests of bourgeois power. They're going to keep getting away with small scale violence and probably escalate if they don't face any meaningful resistance.

>>1858377
America is literally a puritan colony. You cant separate a land from its history.

>>1858272
>You can't provide a materialist explanation of 'religion' because those things commonly defined as religions share nothing in common besides the fact they are all traditions liberals and leftists like to suppress or see as evil and beyond that they share nothing in common.
One important thing they have in common is that they're all man-made phenomena, so to try to understand them, I think people have to look at these things not just in terms of their texts, but their history, origin, development, and the role of politics in their making, their influence, and their implications with both pros and cons.

>Upon closer examination, we find that the sticker 'religion' is typically applied to marginalized opinions and minorities. It signifies an inferior state that has to be abolished, controlled, or at least rendered private.
What religion is famous for is holding to its own self-evidence as a constant, such as "God/Allah is perfect and the Bible/Quran is true," to form an internally self-consistent logic loop, like "because the Quran is true/Allah said this… women should dress like ancient Arabs and not eat pork" which has seemingly nothing to do with their backward technology regarding productivity and geographical influences when the religion developed. If you want to challenge them, they demand you equalize scientific methods and observations and mathematics with their holy scripts. But once you do that, it's like equalizing Gotham City from the Batman movies with New York City, or Bruce Wayne with Michael Bloomberg. "What right do I have to shit on people who believe in Bruce Wayne?" In this comparison, there's no way that Bloomberg is "more real" than Bruce Wayne because of the insertion of this religious logic virus. Then the believers can claim that science can't defeat religion because Jesus didn't agree (ultra-conservative) nor disagree (moderate/reformed believers) with quantum physics.

>So while the distinction between religion and the secular seems arbitrary, it is actually shaped by relations of power, class, ethnicity etc.
Well, some cunning religious scholars have borrowed from developments in philosophy to demonstrate the existence of an absolute supreme being, whose form is then equalized with the religion's God they would like to refer to. The Catholic Church is known for that trick. To boost up their credibility, they may even frame themselves as being fans of science or that religion is compatible with science.

>Historical materialism is garbage and nobody should ever take it seriously. Atheism and secularism were not a predetermined development destined to evolve as technology/society advances. They were products of a specific intellectual history and developments in Western societies not timeless Platonic forms that are unlocked as humans advance up their nation's tech tree.
I think the intellectual development arose with the development of science – they were interrelated. These superstitious stories were exposed by scientific observations and also philosophy. The so-called meditation/communication with the supernatural is now understood to be chemical and electrical reactions inside the brain. The chance that we live in a giant matrix controlled by a sicko incel video game player or that we live inside a black hole (or Scientology) is actually a more developed belief than old-school medieval religions or even earlier stories, for at least the former has some kind of phenomenon and data to examine. So if these religions really do say they accept and face science, they should adopt a matrix religion where Keanu Reeves is the prophet. But either way, I think religion and philosophy will still exist for a long time, but the period where they could manipulate the crowds with ridiculous superstitions has been rapidly diminishing over the past 200 years.

>Qing dynasty China would not have spontaneously evolved something like French republicanism, atheism, or secularism even if it experienced its own industrial revolution.
I'm not so sure. Atheism and secularism have a long history in China. Or Chinese philosophy may have "unlocked" secularism much earlier than Western societies. I think some well-informed people suggest these frameworks are much older there than in Western societies. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_China

>What gets me about leftists is have they ever actually bothered to investigate the theology of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas? Have they ever considered that these people have ideas that are intrinsically appealing and intellectually valid?
Theology is ultimate nonsense, but the organization it attaches to is not. Generally speaking, rural areas are far more religious than urban areas because of both poor education (hence anti-intellectualism) and organization. In the rural areas, transportation is poor and exchange with the outside world is difficult, entertainment is shit, and food production requires more collaboration, so the people there incline to organize themselves given the absence of a strong government, as opposed to the relatively atomized urban population.

That organization usually takes place through close family relationships, clans, tribes, and religions. In the context of diverse demography and immigration/emigration, religion, especially universal religions like Christianity and Islam are far more likely to be the organization the rural residents rely on. (The catch here is that Gaza and Lebanon are highly urbanized societies, but Gaza has been isolated from the outside world by Israel, and Lebanon has weak governance following a devastating civil war in the 70s/80s, and many of the believers are poor, speak only Arabic, and don't pay a lot of attention to what's going on outside of their immediate area.) There's also a pattern where rural areas – this is almost feudal – are likely to organize the men in a military-like fashion to protect the local population and follow the orders of the elites, given that the latter fund and ideologically manipulate the militias, are traditional, and cherish family values (i.e. making more kids).

So a big church/mosque/temple is a facility in a region that can be the center of information exchange, mating, rituals, networking, hierarchy, etc. In the urban areas, religion is harder to develop, and that's also because the functions have been replaced by other entities. And because of the attributes of the city, like immigration, mixed marriages, cultural exchanges, social/economic changes and political instabilities, it's far more likely to generate a universal and progressive and also aggressive, expansive ideology (like liberalism) as opposed to a particular/seclusive one.

But like I was saying, there are always some hidden variables that can counter this generalization, such as poor infrastructure in a city (typical in the U.S.) to increase the need not just for driving but also self-organization that leads to Christianity, or an island country like Japan that is still rather conservative despite having major cities (though religion isn't the way to organize people there, and they are also "liberal" in some ways like sex), while porn and video games and online dating can digitally downplay the need for Christianity.

After all, history has told us that whenever revolutionary technologies have come out, the old social structure and the relationship between people and the means of production will always change too. This is how we evolved from a primitive tribe to an agricultural society and then a capitalist society. It will be practically insane to suggest that capitalism will stay the same forever regardless of new technology coming out unless the defenders of capitalism have some religious faith in capitalism.

>We have no right to call the former religious superstition and then go one step further and shit on people for believing it.
The mentality in Abrahamic religions is often one way or another, enemy or friend, with me or against me, and dead or alive. If you object, they summon the PC police. Look at Constantine the Great for example. It led to purges and witch hunts on a massive scale to exterminate heresy and heathens within the empire to a crazy degree, so much that people preferred to surrender to the Arabs and Ottomans than being butchered by those "orthodox" authorities. This is not just some old history lesson but also happening in the current age.

For them, believing is not enough, and believing 100% is not enough, so it's necessary to go burn down the other group's churches/mosques/temples. Again, if that happens just once or twice I take it as random or "everybody has done some shit" but when "bad luck" and "human nature" can no longer explain the phenomenon, I consider that there are some sort of structural problem within a particular group, and I trace the origin to their structure.

>>1858377
Yes
>>1858382
Nah

>>1858362
Definitely not beating the fascist allegations

>>1857995
>but that won't stop people from still buying into the Marxist claim that it was religion providing a support to the capitalist order
It does, and it still does. The American civil religion is the negation of the negation of church-state unity.

>>1858499
>Quote Lenin on power
>Quote Big Bill Haywood on the strength of the working class
<"Well those sound like fascists if you ask me!"

We've now reached "Fascism is when you try to achieve your goals". Definitely not beating the secular Christianity allegations.

>>1858496
Yes, literally. America is an american holy land. The new jerusalem. Just ask the mormons.
William blake said england was the new jerusalem in his mystic vision where christ set foot on the island, and now the church of latter day saints reveal the new heavenly dispensation.
In any case, these revelations still affirm spiritual israel, against the lie of the jews as the chosen people

>>1858007
>It is the "public" interest.
No, gods are a tax upon humanity. Civilization is a stage of society to get through.

>>1858510
Yes, people should be maimed and disabled for seeing others as the instruments of their dreams, no matter how big your dream is.

>>1858515
my point is that the state is god and we will always serve it, so lets hope it is at least a kind god and we sacrifice the right people

>>1858517
Without power you can't kill or maim people. So you're just whining.

>>1858523
>my point is that the state is god
Kek
>and we will always serve it
They said the same thing about the divine right of kings, too. Three guesses who made that observation
>so lets hope it is at least a kind god and we sacrifice the right people
Everyone who believes in them can go first and we'll bury whoever's left alive.

>>1858527
Sure you can. It's just harder to get away with it.

>>1858540
Ive yet to see a state abolish itself
All it can do is transfer powers
And powers will always exist in society
This is the marxist point, except without the purposefully undefined bit about the "whithering away of the state" which makes no real sense

>>1858540
>Sure you can. It's just harder to get away with it.

Which is using power. That's the point. You need power to actually be able to kill someone. Even if you're willing to completely throw your life away in the process, you still need to be capable of exercising power: strength, weapons, what have you. A fucking vegetable is incapable of maiming or killing anyone.

Seriously, this "Uhh no one should be used as an instrument in another's dreams!" is a fucking retarded "gotcha". People are used all the time. A revolution uses people as instruments to accomplish its goals. The Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, shit even Hamas just about every successful revolution requires utilizing people as a resource that can, in fact, be sacrificed in order to advance goals for the rest. It's cynical and so people don't like admitting it, but it's true. You've got a problem with that? Then don't be a revolutionary, be a reformist. Hamas fights knowing it's going to get more of its people killed, a lot more, even. It knew the consequences of October 7th and it went through with it anyways.

The legacy of Anarchism in the Western Left has mostly just been whining about thinking in terms of power over "we gotta protect the heckin' smol beans!"

>>1858586
>A fucking vegetable is incapable of maiming or killing anyone.
Some can if not prepared properly.

>>1858545
>Ive yet to see a state abolish itself
<Cahokia, Late Maya, Rome…
Well, of course not. That's what revolutions are for. It's hard not to exist as a state in a community of states without surmounting some rather nasty communication problems, as the various Internationals well recognized.
>All it can do is transfer powers
Powers are a spook. Tainter's law of collapse proposes that a society can collapse only to the extent that it can remain legible as a society to its neighbors and hold its boundaries.
>And powers will always exist in society
"Powers", to the extent they "exist", can be lost, otherwise revolutions wouldn't happen. You sound like a reactionary European kid trying to create an origin mvth for himself.
>This is the marxist point
Whatever "Marxism" you are smoking takes no account of actual history of the New World, or of the past 150 years of archaeology. Your history is an idealization.
>except without the purposefully undefined bit about the "whithering away of the state" which makes no real sense
Playing dumb is an important operation in reproducing bourgeois societies. You don't understand it because you're motivated to avoid understanding it by your petit-bourgeois class interest. No capital, no power.

>>1858586
>Which is using power
Those aren't "power". Those are conditions. "Power" is a fetish of impotent middle-class children raised on mythology. r/stupidpol called and they want you back.

>>1858590
>Power isn’t power
If you’re capable of killing someone and willing to, you have power. Anarchists are trying to play some silly game where you think pointing a gun in someone’s face and threatening to kill them unless they do what you want isn’t “authoritarian”

Power is literally all that matters. Without it any movement is toothless.

>>1858007
>there must always be the transcendent divinity, otherwise you become a pagan idiot talking about blood and soil
because the christian conquistadors genociding indigenous pagans were definitely le historical progressives owning le brown nazis

>>1858011
> it cannot reliably demonstrate what religion is and how it can be distinguished from any other system of thought or belief.
the contemporary academic field of religious studies hasn't even come to a concensus on this. vid related.

>>1858586
uygha, you are on leftypol. Saying this kind of shit here is hypocritical, none of us are actually in parties that can reasonably demand anything from the people. The thing about proletarian parties is, they have to lead by example. If you don't see yourself as a tool, you can't say that other people are tools.

you have to be materialist

>>1858465
>they're all man-made phenomena
So are political ideologies, philosophical systems, medical knowledge etc. these are all man made yet not considered religion. How do we cleanly separate what is religious from other man-made phenomena? In order to investigate an object I must know what it is. I must have a logical definition of that object which clearly distinguishes it from other things in order to investigate its particular features. There is no logically valid or consistent definition of 'religion' that is universally applicable. This is a well known problem in sociology, religious studies, and anthropology.

>What religion is famous for is holding to its own self-evidence as a constant,
All philosophical systems, in fact virtually every system of thought, rests upon some fundamental statements which are taken to be a self-evident starting point. e.g. Marx takes the existence of matter as self-evident, Jefferson's famous "we hold these truths to be self-evident" Descartes famous "I think therefore I am" etc. is Kant religious? Is Hegel? If you impose a standard whereby all statements must be proven, then you will find constructing any philosophical or theoretical system utterly impossible as you will end up chasing an infinite regress of arguments.

>some cunning religious scholars have borrowed from developments in philosophy to demonstrate the existence of an absolute supreme being, whose form is then equalized with the religion's God they would like to refer to.
This is just sheer anti-intellectualism at its best. Religious scholars construct arguments for their beliefs, you dismiss them on the grounds that their beliefs are religious and of course prior you told me that what defines religions is that they hold to their own self-evidence. So which is it? Do the evil crafty religious scholars make arguments or do they just claim self-evidence? By your own definition of religion, they wouldn't even be 'religious scholars' since they provide arguments for their beliefs.

>Atheism and secularism have a long history in China.
>Cites wikipedia
Within the academic field of secular studies, religious studies, and intellectual history, its pretty much an agreed upon consensus that secularism developed in Western Europe, is a highly specific ideology or set of ideologies that evolved out of the Western philosophical tradition, and that it had no counterpart elsewhere. See Talal Asad or Tomoko Masuzawa's work in this regard.

>Theology is ultimate nonsense, but the organization it attaches to is not
If theology is nonsense what have Ernst Bloch, Deleuze, Badiou, Derrida, and Zizek been doing all this time? All of them leading philosophers of the left who more or less engage with theology despite being atheists and Deleuze's atheism looks a lot like a form of medieval theism. People who claim "theology is nonsense" often can't cite any genuine theologian they've ever read. Its just secular fundamentalist anti-intellectualism.

>People become less religious as they become more urban, more industrialized, more educated, less tribal, less dependent on religious networks
In sociology this is called the secularization thesis i.e. people gradually move out of the darkness and into the light and become more like liberal rationalists as they become more modern. The problem is that this thesis has basically been debunked already. Its not supported by the overwhelming majority of sociological and ethnographic data. In fact, one of the leading proponents of secularization thesis, Peter Berger, ended up abandoning it and openly called it false and mistaken.

>After all, history has told us that whenever revolutionary technologies have come out, the old social structure and the relationship between people and the means of production will always change too.
They do change but there is no fixed pattern that determines how a society will change or what shape it will take.

>This is how we evolved from a primitive tribe to an agricultural society and then a capitalist society.
This social darwinist theory of human societies evolving from primitive tribes to modern industrialized nation-states as part of some pattern of social evolution has also been largely debunked. You won't find an archaeologist or anthropologist who takes it seriously anymore. Tribes are a type of kinship structure, you can find tribal models of kinship in developed highly urban societies. You make a false distinction between agricultural and capitalist societies, when its perfectly possible for agriculture to exist within a capitalist economy. Peasants in India and Bedouin nomads don't live in some bubble that insulates them from the global capitalist world system.

>The mentality in Abrahamic religions is often one way or another, enemy or friend, with me or against me, and dead or alive. If you object, they summon the PC police.
Let's say for the sake of argument that this is true, how does it refute anything I've said? Secondly, as Carl Schmitt famously pointed out, all forms of modern politics depend on strict friend vs enemy distinctions. In Indonesia, people were massacred by liberals and right wingers for being communists. When South Koreans retook Seoul during the Korean war, they massacred people for thought crimes. The Nazis and Soviets executed and imprisoned dozens of people for the same reason and the US threw people in Guantanamo for thinking the wrong thing. To claim this kind of behavior is the mentality of Abrahamic religions is pure projection.

If Man A believes the world was created by an all powerful creator and Man B claims it emerged spontaneously from a single event, what really is the difference between these opinions? Both are valid statements that make metaphysical claims that can be evaluated according to the same logical methods. Yet, the schizo secular fundamentalist will have you believe that Man A's claim is somehow qualitatively different and inherently inferior. Why it is so is something the secular fundie can never really demonstrate. It simply offends their deep seated cultural biases so they shit all over it and whine. Yet, both these claims are not dramatically different in substance and should be treated equally. But why aren't they? Why is Man A seen as a delusional religious christcuck whereas Man B is accepted as normal and rational? Of course, its about power and class. Our world is defacto run by secular fundies who have established their worldview as hegemonic and marginalize beliefs and ideas they find inconvenient by labeling them "religion."

When you put secularism and atheism in a broad historical context, you'll see that both rose to power with the onset of capitalism and the European colonization of Africa and Asia, both regions earmarked as religious and backward. It doesn't take a genius to see what's happening here. Secularism, anti-religion, atheism etc. are really not that different to racism and classism. Its an imperial ideology meant to legitimize capitalism and colonialism and it serves that purpose today.

>>1858593
>ill-defined mysticism is the point of departure
Mesd

>>1858596
yes, the founding of america is progress in the self-movement of the weltgeist. Progress is a dialectical and historical notion which is devised from objective relations.
>>1858590
You talk about revolutions, but revolutions is just power changing hands like i say. Youre just being difficult. In History, the state is primary, whether its a small or big state. But many naive thinkers also imagine that a "communal" existence can permeate beyond our responsibility to that community itself - but anyone growing up in these "traditional" forms know how oppressive "community" can be, as a totalitarian mechanism. Thats why people rightly vilify cults. In the end we all drink the koolaid.

>>1858614
>You talk about revolutions, but revolutions is just power changing hands like i said.
You see power everywhere. Are you sure you don't have a reactionary fetish?
>Youre just being difficult
You're just being a mystic.
>In History, the state is primary
History is a bad movie that can be turned off. In economic terms, that looks something like a debt amnesty or jubilee and would probably coincide with one.

>>1858632
>you see power everywhere
Uh, yeah. Thats how things work.
>History is a bad movie that can be turned off
haha. Well maybe if you shoot yourself in the head you can escape history, but thats a one-way street.
>In economic terms, that looks something like a debt amnesty or jubilee and would probably coincide with one.
I think the only way to cancel private debts is to nationalise the debt by entering industry into the state. But this only sublates debt in the form of taxes rather than eliminates our mutual dependence. We still pay the cost of life, but share the burden.
I think the idea of debt cancellation is an interesting eschatology on the lolbert side here too, where they say that the only way to fix things is to end the fed, and so literally to cancel the national debt by reinstating the american dollar on a proper credit system. But credits and debts create eachother, so its a depression sought in vain.

>>1858650
>Uh, yeah. Thats how things work.
Bichler and Nitzan fan?

>>1858655
from the beginning of historical and social thought, people have known that life is a series of conflicts that resolve themselves one way or another. This is also a staple of dialectical thinking, even present in heraclitus who said that "War is God" and who has been celebrated by many communist writers as being prescient.

>>1858659
No, you're presentizing Darwinism. Reactionary mysticism rejected. You're not demystifying anything. You're reifying your ability to hide behind a screen as "power" because you know that the "ungovernable" are immune to your enchantments. Yuor fear turns me on, keep coping.
>War is God
All gods can be killed if you're brave enough. Enforcers are not mystical agents. They are conditioned by the humans who assist their reproduction from day to day. Sacredness can be desecrated right out of existence.

>>1858669
So believing in power is "darwinism"?
But your flag suits you well in this case

>>1858377
>Is the US going to need some kind of cultural revolution or secular (un)holy war to purge the country of its psychotic religious tendencies?
What do you mean by "psychotic religious tendencies?"

If you mean religion, I actually don't think it would change anything. That's what this thread was about.

>>1858672
"Believing in" is mysticism, regardless of the object.
>perform actions that make me happy
No

>>1858678
I think it would. When people aren't being steadily hypnotized by media drama, they start to lose interest in the game. The existence of an arena for cultural conflict only conditions that it will happen.

>>1858606
You do not understand history in a materialist way. There are clear material reasons for why religion, or traditional beliefs if you want to call them so, fell in prominence in most societies. Traditional societies were swallowed by capital whole, all of them. Traditional superstructure cannot endure in a non-traditional society. If anything, crackers prolonged its existence by propping up reaction in so many colonies.
For the bourgeois, the new superstructure can only be centered around pure idealism because of their class nature. There is inherently nothing holy to them, the pope is too fucking woke because he said to help the poor. They can assimilate traditional beliefs and make Jesus concerts out of religion or they can reject religion outright, it doesn't matter because all but the most surface-level trappings of it evaporate anyway. This is how we ended up in the situation where so many people think that religion is just a tale about a guy in the sky with no relation to how you live your life. It can't be anything else under capitalism.
For the working class, the whole superstructure has to be tied to practice at every single point. There are few things less practical than the last trappings of religion we still have. It doesn't offend me, the churches and stupas are all nice, but they can only exist as historical landmarks.

Also, when the hell did people think of Africa and Asia as religious? The enlightenment happened by the time India and Africa were colonized, religion already lost to liberal idealism back then. This is why we see talk of the "civilizing mission" everywhere when we read about this period of colonialism. It's on its own, naked. It was directly tied to muh catholicism when Spain was colonizing the Americas. European intellectuals were already soyfacing over muh oriental enlightened spirituality when Africa and India were colonized. Karl Marx died before the Berlin Conference happened. The unironically religious people still left at that point went in and converted half of Africa and a few places in Asia.

>It doesn't take a genius to see what's happening here. Secularism, anti-religion, atheism etc. are really not that different to racism and classism.
Gem
No, it's not. You are being a liberal idealist right now, ironically enough. You are looking at things through a moralistic lens that has nothing to do with practice and appeals to ideals that have nothing to do with god.

>>1858681
Like in the OP, the belief in the ascension to an earthly paradise would simply replace the belief in a heavenly afterlife (if this hadn't already effectively happened) and "nature" would simply replace God in reactionary thought and, once again, this has largely already happened.

>>1858684
Damned if you, damned if you dont! Like all things in life.

>>1857993
>>1857995
Jordan Peterson actually does believe in God, but in a weird way. He doesn't believe in God in the sense of being a primordial and all-powerful creator of the universe or a transcendent celestial being or spirit, but in a God that is essentially a Jungian archetype that lives in our heads. Apparently, in Jungian psychology, you have several of these "archetypes" which are real personalities who live real lives within the collective unconscious of humanity, and God (or "The Father" as Peterson calls him) is one of them. So God is real and He lives in our heads.

A fun fact is that he also thinks the Biblical Cain is an archetype too, and is worshiped by the left (knowingly or not) and serves effectively as our god, and can take spiritual possession of us.

All I have to say to that idea is:
PEACE THROUGH POWER
KANE LIVES IN DEATH

>>1858684
It's quite common for Modern Era occultists to tail the terminology of the cutting edge of science of their time. For example, aether was a leading scientific theory of physical space and motion, which was soon incorporated into occult cosmologies and shortly went out of fashion as a scientific paradigm.
The bottom line question for anyone downstream of Marx is: how to prevent reactionaries, and their reaction, from reproducing?

>>1858377
>Is the US going to need some kind of cultural revolution or secular (un)holy war to purge the country of its psychotic religious tendencies?
Yes. The Religious Right as a movement must be as thoroughly discredited and destroyed as the Nazis. It has been obvious to anybody that looks at American politics and history that fascism in America will be an explicitly Christian movement. They have longed to kill Communists and other "degenerates" literally for decades.
>>1858499
In your own words, define "fascism".
>>1858465
>The mentality in Abrahamic religions is often one way or another, enemy or friend, with me or against me, and dead or alive.
>For them, believing is not enough, and believing 100% is not enough, so it's necessary to go burn down the other group's churches/mosques/temples.
In essence Abrahamism and fascism have a very similar mentality - the "Saved" have the right to subjugate and rule the world while the Other is a threat to be exterminated. To me, there is a line from the Great Commission to colonialism to the present "Rules-based International Order".

>>1858683
>You do not understand history in a materialist way.
>You are being a liberal idealist now
Your just throwing around big buzzwords words without really knowing what they mean.

>There are clear material reasons for why religion, or traditional beliefs if you want to call them so, fell in prominence in most societies.
I made it pretty clear in my post that secular hegemony is tied to the rise of capitalism and the modern nation-state. Secularism is simply a set of ideas embraced by the elites that rose to dominance in this time period. It was and still is instrumental as a tool of social control and spread throughout the world is thanks to imperialism. This is not an idealist account of secularism at all. I do not claim secularism is some transcendental concept or timeless absolute that manifests itself in a society when that society reaches a certain point in its evolutionary history. That right there is idealism.

Empirical evidence done in the social sciences over the last 30 years does not support the idea that religion declines or falls away as a society modernizes. This has been debunked already.

>There are few things less practical than the last trappings of religion we still have.
Ironically, to measure the worth of something by its practicality or what utilitarian use-value is peak bourgeois capitalistic thinking. And what right do we have to tell religious people their deeply held beliefs are impractical or have no value? Its an extremely arrogant and chauvinistic position. Liberals and far too many leftists love nothing more than abolishing and destroying the things other people find precious because it serves the grand architectural plans for society which they've mapped in their own heads. But do we really understand or appreciate the life worlds we seek to destroy? Its easy for people to sit here and make nasty moral judgements about the culture of others they barely understand and at that point your really not too far removed from a right winger.

>No, it's not. You are being a liberal idealist right now, ironically enough. You are looking at things through a moralistic lens that has nothing to do with practice and appeals to ideals that have nothing to do with god.
What exactly is "liberal idealist" about the claim that secularism is an instrument of social control? Racism is an institution for population management and social stratification. Secularism is pretty much the same. In each case, its a form of policing the public sphere through legal institutions, soft power, and the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state.

>>1858687
>In essence Abrahamism and fascism have a very similar mentality
Pure secular fundamentalist projection with no basis in empirical evidence as usual. There is no such thing as "Abrahamism" its made up buzzword created first by antisemites and later embraced by liberals after the Holocaust to mend relations between Jews and Christians. The fact you can't distinguish between Christianity and Islam reveals just how moronic and illiterate you are. Fascism is nationalistic and racialist at its core. Neither Judaism, Christianity, or Islam have any concept of a racially pure nation.

>>1858853
Who said anything about forming an alliance with fascists?

>>1858937
(And where does it suggest that the Enlightenment failed, for that matter?)

>>1858775
>Empirical evidence done in the social sciences over the last 30 years
And yet, Gallup surveys do. You're telling yourself lies to make your mental illnesses and imaginary friends okay. You need to stop promoting mental illnesses that help class, money, and the state reproduce.

>>1858941
>And yet, Gallup surveys do. You're telling yourself lies to make your mental illnesses and imaginary friends okay.
NTA but your telling on yourself more if you just going to call that anon a liar and trying to avoid the topic(btw if you look at the Gallup international polls it back up what that anon was saying).

>>1858945
And I just want to add that people who advocate for religion almost always do so without any material basis, in order to generate hype and false enthusiasm for their institutions.

>>1858678
>What do you mean by "psychotic religious tendencies?"
uh like banning healthcare because you're "pro-life" for example

>>1858947
That's not the point. The US is a developed country already. The statement was "Empirical evidence done in the social sciences over the last 30 years does not support the idea that religion declines or falls away as a society modernizes". So a country that is modernizing not a modern country. Many of those modernizing countries are also coming out from imperialism and are not going to follow the same developmental model as the West.

>>1858775
>Secularism is simply a set of ideas embraced by the elites that rose to dominance in this time period.
This is exactly what's meant by "you don't understand history in a materialist way". It is not "simply" a set of ideas. It is unavoidable in bourgeois and classless society, even if proletarian and bourgeois secularism are much more different than bourgeois secularism and traditional religion. You try to weasel out by saying that it has reasons, but these reasons are ultimately random to you if other societies don't have them as well, if secularism is simply an instrument of "class" - you do not use that word correctly - and national oppression.
>I do not claim secularism is some transcendental concept or timeless absolute that manifests itself in a society when that society reaches a certain point in its evolutionary history.
An amazing strawman. There is nothing transcendental or timeless about it, secularism is simply one of the results of society developing the way it does. It represents the bourgeois class' worldview.
The same is true of bourgeois democracy, and yet there are plently of monarchies and dictatorships. The bourgeois' position is self-contradictory: their own tools inevitably turn against them, which is why you are here. You have a liberal position, and yet the carnage capital creates is just too inexcusable even in idealist boundaries. Capital itself regularly needs to fall back on the superstructure of previous ruling classes and they often have to take elements of proletarian consciousness, even if to bastardize it. Understanding this is vital to being a communist.
>And what right do we have to tell religious people their deeply held beliefs are impractical or have no value?
You can't build a communist party without doing this. The task of changing society consciously requires you to look at your own consciousness as a set of concepts that formed in the process of history and as tools, not as essential holy eternal truths. If you don't do that, if you don't take inventory and understand what to toss out, your own mind will betray you. There is no use for all too widely spread patriarchal thinking, for instance. Trying to approach the world from a position of men having an eternal holy unchanging right and obligation to lead, which is enshrined in most popular religions, will make you fail not just in changing the world, but in basic socialization. The only reason why religious people can still talk like normal is because they don't actually follow what they believe consistently, they just get that it's not a good look to say it round these parts. They shove this contradiction barely out of sight, only for it to come out in unexpected moments. The working class can't have that. We have to change the world based on what we believe to be true, that's the whole fucking point of taking control of societal development. The task of the communist party is to elevate the entire working class to the highest level of class consciousness possible, to make everyone able to change history consciously. If the existence of religious people is tolerable today, it is only because the party failed to lift people up to the needed level at this point in time.

>>1858465
Asian so-called secularism doesn't really vibe in exactly the same way that the Western societal liberal sorts of secularism traditions of do, because much of the activity that might be considered in the West to be technically religious, probably isn't conceived of as specifically so as properly religion, but more like really really important traditional practices, like Confucianism and the sacred duty to do the rites. https://x.com/Ezra_EX/status/1711912877999988788

>>1858953
>The US is a developed country already.
Except large parts of the US were essentially semi feudal (sharecropping in the south) until the mid 20th century as previously enslaved blacks were turned into indentured tenant farmers for the next 100 years after the civil war. And if you look at where reactionary politics and religiosity is the highest, its in the exact same place: the south. So while the northern and western US has been capitalist for a long time, the South has arguably only been fully capitalist from the 1950s/60s onwards.

>>1859489
* and needless to say the slave society of the antebellum south was not based on capitalism but rather chattel slavery.

>>1859447
Liberal secularism isn't ritualistic in exactly the same way, but the sensitivty movement sure is trying.

>>1859491
>* and needless to say the slave society of the antebellum south was not based on capitalism but rather chattel slavery.
Is there any difference but that the wage slave formally "owns" themselves? Wage labor and slave rental are closely linked throughout history, and are made of the same elements in a different arrangement.

>>1859489
>So while the northern and western US has been capitalist for a long time, the South has arguably only been fully capitalist from the 1950s/60s onwards.
But the religiosity of the north and west weren't that different from the south back in the former half of the 20th century. The difference was that those specific regions had more catholics and non-christian groups like Jews in the Northeast and Buddhist in the west. The US was an anomaly for how long it stayed religious under secularism but I have a few ideas that the US is a protestant nation with no state church. To have cohesion between regions, secularism was needed to ensure that one church did not overwhelm another. It wasn't the south that kept the US religious so long but the entire country. It's just that the south retained its religious character due to its economy and post-civil war culture. The north and especially the west are leading the decline of religiousity in the country. The "native" population are declining in religiousity and non-Christian groups typically head to the west and north first.

>>1859548
>is a protestant nation with no state church
It could also be said that the state itself is the church and all other gods are demoted to franchisees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_pluralism
>but I have a few ideas
ASL? You sound like you haven't had a US history class yet.

>>1859569
>ASL? You sound like you haven't had a US history class yet.
I only said I had a few ideas to talk about the protestant make up of the US. Of course I took a US history class

>>1859498
slaves don't produce surplus value? plus slave owners don't economize on their slaves time and have therefore less an incentive to automate which is why the Romans never had an industrial revolution, a ton of their labor was free already.

>>1859576
>slaves don't produce surplus value
Of course they do. Everything they produce on top of their costs of ownership and reproduction are produced (from society's perspective) by the master, and quite a bit more of it than people who have to be given the trappings of society in order to encourage their reproduction.
>plus slave owners don't economize on their slaves time
Wut, if anything, slave owners extract the most possible time from the slave, just as capitalists do. One difference is in the lesser reproductive needs of the slave, whose production is separated from their (usually accelerated) consumption as labor power by the slaver, but the worker has been given the additional task of not only reproducing himself as a worker from day to day, but also producing his replacement. After Britain closed the Atlantic slave trade, US slavers tried breeding their own, but it wasn't profitable.
>therefore less an incentive to automate
That's a presentist take. Also the steady improvement of the cotton gin over the period suggests otherwise. Automation doesn't need an "incentive" (that's just a a word neoclassicals use when they want gibs). It needs material conditions, and bourgeois finance is not material. Neoliberals are the ones who like to talk about "incentives" and all that crap.
>which is why the Romans never had an industrial revolution, a ton of their labor was free already.
Or, lacking precise time-keeping equipment, they just didn't appreciate the particularly capitalist idea of surplus time?

>>1858718
When someone says "i dont believe in god literally, i believe in voodoo archetypes and symbols" theyre saying they dont believe in god. Peterson has said before that god is the ideal fiction and that the logos is what kant would call "the understanding" (the transcendental preconditioning of our subjectivity by Reason), but "god" forbid peterson read any popular philosophy to make his points clearer.
Someone asked him once, "if every human dies, is there still a god"? And he couldnt answer it. A christian rebuttal would be about providence, that such a hypothetical couldnt happen in the first place, which i find acceptable. But peterson's open-mindedness is his own closed-loop of obscuranist excuses.
His life-mate jonathan pageau has basically identical feelings on the matter, as do many so-called "orthodox christians", like scott mannion. Its all fluff.
>cain
he is borrowing from the masonic temple legend, where all "masons" (craftsmen) come from the line of cain, which is recoded biblically. But this is giving too much credence to "the left" in the first place. Cain represents scientific progress, but are the left "scientists"?

>>1859640
Slaves dont produce surplus-value since they themselves are commodities. They are like machines or animals so are fixed capital, not variable capital, which is what makes surplus.
To marx also, machines dont produce Value since tautologically, they only produce as much as what they cost to produce. The property of machines is to make human labour more powerful by expanding commodity-production, but this has the hidden side-effect of lowering the rate of profit, since profits are the surplus divided by the cost of production (s/C). This is part of why capitalists cant just enslave people, since it would be converting all of their variable capital into fixed capital, and thus eliminating profits.

>>1859695
>This is part of why capitalists cant just enslave people, since it would be converting all of their variable capital into fixed capital, and thus eliminating profits.
You're absolutely right on the economic details. Mea culpa.
>why capitalists cant just enslave people
I suppose they have generally shifted from chattel slavery to penal slavery instead.
<Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

>>1859489
>large parts of the US were essentially semi feudal (sharecropping in the south) until the mid 20th century as previously enslaved blacks were turned into indentured tenant farmers for the next 100 years after the civil war.

can attest, my mom's dad was black/indigenous and grew up sharecropping in North Carolina in the 1940s. It was so miserable he ran away from home when he was 15 and joined the military with the help of his uncle by forging documents. He ended up in the Korean war and got PTSD.

>>1859715
>>1859489
>sharecropping means semi-feudal, duh!
When Marx referred to large English estates as 'semi-feudal' was due to them being monopolized by aristocrats rather than sold freely as commodities, plus the backward means of cultivation, even when wage-labor was utilized. Yet English capitalism was still fully developed, even back then.

>>1859719
> being monopolized by aristocrats rather than sold freely as commodities
the planter aristocracy kept the majority of their land after the civil war

>>1859723
Again, the term is related to productivity and scale. Even Lenin's address to the Second Congress of the Communist International mentions the prevalence of 'semi-feudal' forms of cultivation in large parts of 'highly developed' capitalist nations such as Germany.

>>1859715
>>1859489
>>1859719
>>1859723
>>1859727
Taking this opportunity to also bring up that countries that back then were much worse off than even the shittiest countries of today got called 'developed' and even 'imperialist' by many socialists, including Lenin.

Bulgaria was called a 'land of small production' in the ComIntern reports, dominated by peasants and petit-bourgeois elements. Clearly, if such a backward country was already termed imperialist by Lenin (that too not just once, he said it again in 1915) it should make those who think imperialism is something special that only a handful of countries are involved in reconsider their stances.

In addition, Lenin also termed Japanese capitalism 'equally predatory' as American capitalism, despite genuine feudalism still existing there which was removed only in the 1950s after the American occupation, labor productivity in Japan being very low, being an agrarian society. E Varga in 1924 even calls Japanese capitalism 'fully developed', while Voytinsky just two years earlier in 1922 had reported it as being a semi-feudal society dominated by an aristocrat clique.

>>1859732
So, politicians don't stop being professional liars under any color of political economy?

>>1859739
thats why we need direct democracy

>>1859740
It is far more effective when voters are properly informed in the first place, however.

>>1859825
This is what every lib says.
>you should only be able to vote if you agree with me
I agree, but i also dont pretend to be a democrat

>>1859826
I don't know about direct democracy as a first resort. The less that social decision making operates like a contest, the better decisions will be made and the less opportunity for division will arise from them. The plebiscite is definitely an important backstop, in those cases when no other satisfactory resolution can be reached, but generally I prefer something closer to unanimity criteria wherever the people are developed enough to handle them.
As for political structure, I like councils where councillors or delegates are commissioned for the duration of the session, and have no power to act outside the instructions duly given to them by their constitutents.
Anyone who supports bourgeois competition as a truth device should face the wall for that alone.

>>1859830
How can a national issue ever be unanimous?

>>1859834
Nothing worth fighting over is worth fighting fair over.
And besides, the less superfluous production of commands in the world, the better.

>>1859654
As far as I'm aware, Peterson (and presumably other Jungian psychologists) believes that human psychology is largely driven by these "archetypes" that are real personalities with real lives that live in the human collective unconscious and largely form human psychology. I'm pretty sure they believe that these archetypes (like Cain and "The Father") more than just ideal fictions, but are essentially real people that live in our heads and are expression and form through things like popular fiction and religion and mythology.

So, once again, I'm fairly sure he believes God is "real," but that he's essentially a "real" person who lives in our heads.

>>1859732
>Japanese capitalism 'equally predatory' as American capitalism, despite genuine feudalism still existing there which was removed only in the 1950s after the American occupation

Japanese Feudalism mostly died with the sakoku period and the meiji restoration corresponded with an industrial revolution.

Japanese capitalism developed differently than british because it was mostly state driven as whole industries were developed by the state and then sold off to the feudal lords/daimyos who simply became the new capitalists. In that sense the old Daimyos kept their wealth but that doesnt mean it was feudalism.

As for the american occupation breaking up feudalism the closest thing I can think of that you're referring to is them breaking up the Zaibatsu/megacorps but thats not anti feudalism its anti trust.

TLDR, for the most part Japanese feudalism was done by the late 19th century already.

>>1860006
Right, so God didnt create the world, he is just a symbol.

>>1860301
It's a slave mark.

>>1859335
Dogmatic Marxoids assume that history progresses in stages each characterized by a mode of production which acts as a base for an ideological superstructure. This Darwinian model of human social evolution has long been debunked. You won't find a sane archaeologist or anthropologist today who'd support it and it contradicts all the empirical data we have available. Historical materialism is idealistic because dogmatic Marxists always put the cart before the horse and never work their way back from actual empirical evidence.

We're told tribal relations are characteristic of primitive modes of production but then how does the Marxoid explain the fact there are tribal structures in developed capitalist economies? We're told that modernization leads to secularization (the secularization thesis) but how does the Marxoid explain new ageism, cults, the rise of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism in America, or the "spiritual but not religious" trend? Orthodox Marxists traditionally claimed that things like religion and art can't exist in hunter-gatherer economies because there is no surplus and no property, but there's a wealth of ethnographic data on hunter-gatherers that contradicts that. Marxoids (and fair number of us anarchists too) used to claim religion was a tool of subjugation that stifles revolution but you only need to look at the last 40 years to realize how flawed that line of thinking is.

>secularism is simply one of the results of society developing the way it does. It represents the bourgeois class' worldview
Indeed, secularism is linked to capitalism as well as the rise of the West and colonization, but was this a necessary outcome? There was of course a Christian bourgeoisie that promoted a kind of Protestant pietism. So why secularism? Why did secularism win out? Why did the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia embrace this ideology? That's less of an evolutionary question and more about the power struggles and intellectual battles that shaped modern Europe. Secularism is instrumental for capitalism and a key component of a bourgeois worldview, but such a worldview emerged in a specific place (Western Europe) at a specific time and under specific material conditions.

Societies do not naturally evolve towards secularism. There is no real empirical evidence to support this view but quite a lot of evidence suggesting it is totally wrong. e.g. at the turn of the 1800s significant parts of China and India had industrial economies with capitalist economic relations yet these regions never spontaneously developed a secular culture or anything resembling secularism. So no its not an inherent consequence of how societies developed. Its man made and has a history like all man made ideas.

>not as essential holy eternal truths
Marxists claim class struggle is an essential and timeless truth.

>Trying to approach the world from a position of men having an eternal holy unchanging right and obligation to lead
Like a vanguard party? Lenin, Mao, Stalin?

>The task of the communist party is to elevate the entire working class to the highest level of class consciousness possible, to make everyone able to change history consciously. If the existence of religious people is tolerable today, it is only because the party failed to lift people up to the needed level at this point in time.
Replace 'communist party' here with 'the church' and you get a sentence that sounds very religious.

What human society doesn't have fundamental beliefs it holds to be true? What human society doesn't have a concept of authority and leadership? To claim things like timeless eternal truths or looking towards leader figures is something particular to religious people is a joke, especially coming from a communist who rambles ML schizo babble.

>>1858947
The problem with gallop polls is that surveys don't allow participants to express their actual opinions. They can only pick from a set of fixed questions. So a self-identified Buddhist who thinks Buddhism is a scientifically valid philosophy and not a religion will answer 'non-religion' on a survey even if he has spiritual beliefs that are clearly not secular or atheistic. I've talked to Christians who will insist Christianity isn't a religion and that mainstream churches are false. On surveys, these people will end up being accidentally counted as non-religious. Even if traditional institutional religions are on the decline in America, you see the rise of non-denominational spirituality, individualistic interpretations of Christianity, Buddhism, and new age bullshit. Religion has changed but it hasn't gone away.

>>1858009
Nature worship arguably could is fascist.

>>1860818
Did you mean that nature worship is fascist or that it could be fascist?

>>1860301
No, I don't think you're getting what I'm saying. According to this worldview, God isn't a symbol, he's a person, but a person who lives in your head. In fact, he lives in the heads of all humanity and influences our behavior.

In the book Children of Dune, one of the characters explores their genetic memory and meets a bunch of their ancestors who live in their genetic memory and winds up getting possessed by one of them. It's kind of like that except you have multiple personalities and they don't live in genetic memory, they live in your unconscious mind. To my knowledge, that is what Peterson and the other Jungians believe. Peterson believes in God as a real person, not just a symbol, but a real person who is essentially a psychological phenomenon that resides in the collective unconscious, not as an actual omnipotent creator or great cosmic spirit.

>>1860440
>You won't find a sane archaeologist or anthropologist today who'd support it and it contradicts blah blah
Show me some examples contrary to historical materialism plox.
Tankyoo

>>1860818
Fascists ultimately believe in standing apart from and rejecting nature, however selectively and conveniently. Even in Darwinism they seek only to emulate it and reform it.

>>1861211
Peterson is, of course, engaging in reification, and (like all worldbuilders) constructing "reality" solipsistically.

if ur not anti religious ur not a scientific socialist, ur a social-pacifist liberast

fag.

sage

>>1861214
Just pick up any beginner level textbook on anthropology or history. Marx puts forward an evolutionist stage theory of history e.g. primitive communism -> ancient -> feudal -> capitalist etc. The vast majority of modern anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists reject evolutionist models of human history and the idea of progress
http://openanthropology.org/progressivism.htm

>>1861493
>Dogmatic Marxoids assume that history progresses in stages each characterized by a mode of production which acts as a base for an ideological superstructure. This Darwinian model of human social evolution has long been debunked. You won't find a sane archaeologist or anthropologist today who'd support it and it contradicts all the empirical data we have available.
The "evolutionary model" most archeologists and anthropologists reject is the idea that ideas and institutions improve and become more "civilized" over time. They reject, for instance, the idea that religion "evolves" over time from animism to polytheism to monotheism and finally to scientific rationalism, as was widely held in the Victorian Period.

This is not the sort of thing Marx is proposing. He's not claiming that ideas or social institutions improve over time, but rather that production improves and becomes more efficient over time with better materials, improved methods, more efficient organization of labor, new labor-saving inventions and so on. His claim is that human society and its institutions largely form around this mode of production and consequently the mode of production is the most important factor in how a society is organized.

>Historical materialism is idealistic because dogmatic Marxists always put the cart before the horse and never work their way back from actual empirical evidence.
Idealism doesn't mean "bullshit." Its the philosophical position that reality of a product of consciousness, and all the various positions that follow from that (like holding ideas and culture as the most paramount driving force for society)

>We're told tribal relations are characteristic of primitive modes of production but then how does the Marxoid explain the fact there are tribal structures in developed capitalist economies?
What the fuck are you talking about? There is nothing like ancient tribalism in the modern day. If you're talking about a tendency towards cliquishness or clannishness, that is not the same thing as the social organization of ancient tribes.

>We're told that modernization leads to secularization (the secularization thesis) but how does the Marxoid explain new ageism, cults, the rise of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism in America, or the "spiritual but not religious" trend?
Society HAS secularized. Secularization doesn't mean all religion and spiritual beliefs disappear, but that they have an ever-reduced authority in social life and governance, and they have. The Industrial Revolution has absolutely decimated the role of religion in society. I know that to some secularists, religion practically existing at all is intolerable, but it simply cannot be disputed that modern religion is a pathetic shadow of its former self, at least in more advanced capitalist countries.

>Orthodox Marxists traditionally claimed that things like religion and art can't exist in hunter-gatherer economies because there is no surplus and no property, but there's a wealth of ethnographic data on hunter-gatherers that contradicts that.
Who said that?

Even if someone did say that, it's just a dumb take, not the natural conclusion of historical materialism.

>Marxists claim class struggle is an essential and timeless truth.
No we don't. Class struggle is only an essential part of a class society. Class struggle is the fundamental driving force behind class societies, but did not exist in societies without economic classes (such as in primitive communism)

>>1868572
Sorry, this post was meant for >>1860440

>>1858949
I don't really believe that the "pro-life" movement is genuinely driven by religion except maybe among Catholics (who are a minority and less influential than Protestants). Instead, I would argue that the pro-life movement is driven primarily by petty bourgeois resentment, and justified with religious talk because talking about the souls of the unborn sounds better than saying that you think your lessers have it too good and need to be put back in their place.

Marx mentioned this tendency.
>By counting the most meagre form of life (existence) as the standard, indeed, as the general standard – general because it is applicable to the mass of men. He turns the worker into an insensible being lacking all needs, just as he changes his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. To him, therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need – be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity – seems to him a luxury. Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave.

Sex is something that most human beings enjoy and is free, and so in consequently enjoyed equally by the rich and poor alike. And this makes it intolerable to the petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie are squeezed between the proletariat and higher, proper bourgeois class and one of the consequences of this is that they are made vaguely aware of the general exploitative, zero-sum nature of capitalist society, but they have a tendency to internalize it as essentially "Emodynamics" from Xavier Renegade Angel and literally believe that the pleasure of their lessers is somehow had at their expense, and stamping out the illicit pleasures of their lessers becomes something of an obsession for their class. It's what drives them to make employees do pointless busywork instead of relaxing during downtime, or insist that prisons be stripped of even the most basic of creature comforts regardless of actual practicality.

And they're fairly open about this. In the immediate aftermath of Roe v Wade being overturned, were they celebrating God's law finally being honored? No, at least not as far as I saw. What I saw was people celebrating the lower classes and people they had social resentments towards (like PMCs and the intelligentsia) no longer being able to freely have sex and if they did, being forced to deal directly with the supposed natural punishment of their transgression. Its only afterwards when they sobered up that they started mumbling about God and baby's souls again.

It's also worth noting that the Bible doesn't actually say anything against abortion. In fact, there's a ritual in the Bible meant to induce a miscarriage.

>>1868585
If the rightoids want to eliminate recreational sex, then we will engage in recreational destruction of everything they have ever loved.

>>1860297
>As for the american occupation breaking up feudalism the closest thing I can think of that you're referring to is them breaking up the Zaibatsu/megacorps but thats not anti feudalism its anti trust.
It's hilarious that American Market Anarchism gets to pretend to be anti capitalist. Rather than letting productive forces and coordination develop to its highest levels they just break everything back up into a mess and reintroduce "small competition" which they fetishize. Lenin always made the point that nationalizing monopolies was a precursor to socialism. American anti-trust legislation actually saved capitalism from itself just as much as its New Deal. A bunch of scheming oil companies that used to be Standard Oil get to pretend they're no longer fucking up the public just because they go by 12 different names.

>>1868592
That's the spirit

>>1868739
>Rather than letting productive forces and coordination develop to its highest levels
Actually, I think we'll rape these capitalist stalinfags to death

>>1861943
They reject the idea of civilization becoming "more civilized" over time, but this is not what Marx was proposing.

I was just reminded of this old subnormality comic that depicted the "Four Horsemen" of nuAtheism apparently coming to save liberalism and like three of them wound up becoming arch-reactionaries.

>>1873911
hmm, was that richard dawkins, jc dennet, sam harris and chris hitchens?

but yeah pretty cringe in retrospect, I too remember when I thought atheism would solve our problems lol

>>1873912
daniel dennet apparently, he's the only one who stayed 'progressive' I guess and turned into an uber radlib

>>1873919
lol yeah probably where my mind got mixed up.

>>1873917
Yeah, as far as I can tell he mostly broke into politics to complain about Trump during the last years of his life.

>>1873922
well AFAIK he was one of the primary splitters who wanted to create atheism+ and the backlash was too much and he became a hate figure. in retrospect maybe I have a little more sympathy of atheists+ than I had at the time but they were still rampant idpol libs.

>>1873923
now what we NEEDED was atheism☭!…

>>1861493
Marx wasn't exactly anti-religious himself. He expressed views very sympathetic towards religion, but ultimately believed that rejecting religion would cause people to reevaluate the world around them and reject their current circumstances.

>>1873927
>the state as god
The True Atheists™ are way ahead of you.

>>1875754
I don't believe that implied the state as god.