The fact that religion is such an enduring thing in humanity across the world shows how it's intertwined with human cognition. At least from what I know, anthropologists for example associate religiosity signs with advanced human like thinking in some species of humans for example. People need purpose meaning community and religion provides them that. And for atheists we usually have something replace religion too. I guess that's just how humanity evolved.
How should religion and modern social values be balanced? For people within religions it can be hard to balance it. Religions tell you how things work and how they should work, and once you're in that headspace communicating with secular society on social issues becomes fundamentally contradicting sometimes. From atheist perspective it's easy to say "don't be a bigot" but you have to see how things look from literalist readings of religious texts like Bible and Quran. The answer is simple from a religious persons perspective. But it makes modernizing the way things are handled in religion a slow and arduous process. But I think they have to be, Christian Nationalism and Islamic extremism (caused partially by colonialism) are serious problems without simple answer. And no, forcing Atheism isn't an answer look at how well that worked out for Soviets and China. People will resist and besides, forcing atheism is anti freedom. Eastern Europe is becoming more religious by the year too.
>>2265739We are calling "religion" early attempts at science. Basically, explanations of where is thunder coming from, who's blowing the wind and such. It has nothing in common with modern religions, as in, "haha sure science explain stuff but it doesn't know everything". Early attempts at science are natural to human condition, modern science is just an atavism, degenerate cultish behaviour, at the sight of which religious god-fearing medieval philosophers would blanch, of how stupid and purely FAITH, not REASON based it is.
Faith is not human condition, but reason is
>>2265724so? wtf is the point of this thread.
BTW i don't actually buy eastern europe is actually becoming more religious, this is just rightoid BS of oh russia is a based orthodox anti LGBT society when in reality Russia's culture is just an agnostic version of 19th century europe
>>2265805Religion in the form of spiritualism predates class. Class society has its basis in the differentiation of labor during the transition to a sedentary lifestyle and urban living. Religion has its basis in the continuous human effort to develop concepts and methods which provide explanations of the material world. Hence why modern scientific thought and methodology oftentimes has roots in experimentation and investigation by adherents to various faiths seeking to investigate the world, just as modern Marxist materialism emerged from Hegelian idealism. We'd also be fools to think materialism is the final stage of human thought. In socialism and communism, we will certainly see the emergence of higher forms of thought beyond materialism.
The issue with a lot of the comments here is that folks have forgotten that religion, like all other things, is molded by class society. People here, under the guise of a "materialist" outlook, push an idealist conception of religion where it is responsible for all the ignorance and idealism in the world. The reality is that this ignorance and idealism is the product of the rotten capitalist system clinging to life with its decaying arms. So long as capitalism remains this ignorance and idealism will be maintained. Hence you have atheist so-called "scientists" and "materialists" like Richard Dawkins or Sabine Hossenfelder (or the majority of Anon's here, if we're being honest) who are ultimately more idealist in their thinking than Ernesto Cardenal or Frei Betto. The problem is capitalism, not religion, and religion is not capitalism.
Religion will again change under socialism and communism, and this doesn't necessarily mean its total negation. In recent decades we've not only seen the rise of idealist and materialist forms of atheism/agnosticism, but also materialist forms of monist and pantheist spirituality. Likewise, the old established religions have all become (for the average believer) eclectic mixes of idealist and materialist ideas. It's telling that all of the major religions (and atheism) have likewise seen overtly fascistic reactions to this increasing eclecticism and materialist trends. This is an expression of class struggle, and if all you have to offer is "religion is idealist and bad read Marx" or "you can't have morals without religion" you have objectively taken the bourgeois road.
>>2266485It is right to view religion through the lens of class, but you've come to the wrong conclusions here. Religion is bad and idealist, it is completely incompatible with Marxism (not saying you can't be religious and a Marxist but you would have to make a concerted effort to reconcile the two). Religion is a product of class society. Once class society is gone, why would there be religion?
I don't understand how you can think religion can be materialist. The closest it gets is mechanical materialism, that the universe runs by clockwork and everything is ordained by god since the start of time. This is not materialism in the way Marxists understand it. It's just another form of idealism really.
You are falling for liberal idealism when you say religion won't be totally negated under communism. You're implying there are parts of humanity that can't or won't be changed. But communism will be a complete transformation of everything. Religion won't survive it. Certainly, in communism religion might spring up again here or there, because of the qualitative differences between people. But there wouldn't be the material basis for it to take root as a mass thing.
It's interesting you said materialism isn't the final stage of human thought. I mean, you're correct in that there isn't an end-point of science. We can only speculate what that next stage might be. But I think what you're insinuating is a rather post-modernist idea, that materialism is not infallible and it is not worth more than any other school of thought. Materialism will be superceded by something that rejects idealism even more thoroughly, just like how socialism is even more anti-feudal than capitalism, because it is not its direct child.
>>2265724The instinct (for want of a better word) that leads to religion is intertwined with the human condition. This does not mean that religion per-se is.
The communist solution to religion is to do nothing. Religion cannot compete with entertainment in the long run. With social pressure to go to church removed and TV providing something much more interesting to do on Sunday, western societies became majority atheist. The religious instinct wound up sublimated into politics, fandoms, sports, etc.
Most "communists" today have, if you like, a "communist religion" where a revolution will bring salvation, but only if they
post online enough. This is not because Communism itself is a religion, but because in the absence of religion and the presence of social media, the religious instinct interacts with the idea of communism in a superficial way to create such a hybrid. This is true of every ideology - even today's YIMBY neoliberals are more a religion than a politics.
>>2265724By the way, I'd be very sceptical about anthropologist's and archaeologist's thoughts on religion. Archaeologists call anything we don't understand as for a religious / ritual purpose. But the fact is that in prehistory there was no 'religion'. There was not a distinction between spirituality and daily life. Right now our methods are limited so that we don't exactly know what they did believe, but projecting spirituality, idealism etc. into the mesolithic is a massive leap, and an issue i have with lots of archaeologists.
Before the 17-18th centuries there was no such thing as materialism. It is a modern invention. This is why we need to be skeptical about the idea that idealism / religion is human nature or whatever. Spirituality was born from the daily activities of hunter-gatherer's, early religion was born from spirituality in agricultural class societies, organized religion was born from that early religion, enlightenment religion came from that and then materialism was born from this modern religion.
Religion is no more human nature than feudalism is. It's no more endemic to human thought than being a hunter-gatherer. It is idealist to think of religion as anything more than a stage in human history which we are quickly moving past.
>>2265801still waiting
>>2265752Engels tears up bourgeois charity in his wearly work The Condition of the Working Class in England
>>2265724If people had more personalized/localized religions you could make the argument for their usefulness.
But why the FUCK are people worshipping entities invented thousands of years ago thousands of miles away?
Why doesn't the USA have an eagle god for example? That loves liberty and capitalism? Why some manlet from the Middle East? Who teaches you to give away all your possessions which 99% of his modern "followers" ignore anyways. It's nonsense. Modern religions are based on generations of indoctrination and violence, not practicality.
>>2265990 has it right. Early religion was an attempt to understand the world based on limited information. Modern religion is the opposite, it's a rejection of the information we have available in favor of mental illness. This was true even of Islam, they had access to the knowledge of ancient Greece/etc so the Quran is more scientifically advanced than the Bible. But instead of further developing from there religion has stagnated due to enforced orthodoxy. It's unnatural, perverse. It must be destroyed. What is rebuilt from the rubble may not be pure rationality but it would be a superstition more in tune with the modern world.
>The fact that religion is such an enduring thing in humanity across the world shows how it's intertwined with human cognitionEvery religion are fascist collaborators with the satanic plot against the human race to transform people into domesticated NPCs. Look at how your own post uses the neoliberal buzzword "cognition", you'd fit in perfectly with Jeffrey Epstein's degenerated friends who called themselves "cultural Christians"
>People need purpose meaning communityWHITES ONLY GATED community for patriotic bible reading settler bugmen, you should go to Israel
>>2265764>human sacrifices and ritual suicide, riiiight, and what are your degenerate leftoid friends doing to rationalize their collapsing empire by the way?
https://truthout.org/articles/capitalism-is-to-blame-for-how-quickly-us-covid-deaths-reached-1-million/soulless Red Scare Podcast neoliberals: "Zizek is wrong, we need individual freedom for consumers, we must SMASH the STALINIST STATE for the INVISIBLE HAND OF THE FREE MARKET to bless us!"
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