Just wondering what everyone's takes are, personally I believe that state atheism is a necessity and anything short of that is a failure. I've seen some communists online be religious and I truly don't understand how that would work. I don't mean a vague notion of a god, I mean like actual religion following a set of ideas. It doesn't make sense to me so I want to hear you guys' thoughts.
>>2463739Apparently sn*gger gets filtered. Smh.
Okay. And Schwarzuyghur too I presume?
>>2463753You do not need to be an empiricist to accept the validity of physical evidence.
Dialectical materialism doesn't reject evidence as a means of supporting claims, it rejects pure empiricism and pure rationalism.
Modern developments in anthropology and philosophy have rendered secularism untenable and Marx's critique of religion obsolete. Since all concepts of modern statecraft are secularized theological concepts, state atheism is redundant because even the atheist state is theological. It simply replaces God with itself, which is far more dangerous than any idea of a transcendent God. Secularism is simply crypto-Christianity pretending to be neutral. All of the fools who push state atheism should go read Marx because he always opposed such an idea and was against making atheism a requirement for membership in the International.
Atheism is trashy even as a personal belief. Why? Because it is fundamentally impoverished. It relies on baggage handed down from Christianity but deletes the God and church part. Not only does it fail to break free of Christian baggage, after all there needs to be a theism to oppose in order to be an atheist, it has no positive horizons of its own. Atheism has no substantive ideas that aren't already there in some version of Christianity. This creates two dangers. First, atheists can't supply an adequate set of ethical ideas or notions of justice that are unique to atheism. Second, because of their Christian baggage, atheists often become chauvinists promoting a kind of Christian heritage idpol and hostility to other religions. You can see this clearly with Zizek on the left, where he claims Christianity was sort of the first step towards developing socialism, while in his view Buddhism or Islam are incapable of this. So the one claim of atheists ("we are not nasty chauvinists") turns out to be false.
So this leaves really two choices. 1. Develop a non-theism that doesn't have the problems atheism has, I guess in the vein of what Nietzsche etc were doing 2. A return to religion. The events in the Middle East and 9/11 have forced us to think differently and value religion as a positive force that is necessary for social justice and liberation. The really radical thing to do is to re-visit religion and re-visit the idea of God. Some might shit on this saying God isn't material, whatever its an idea that moves people to do things. In that sense, its a material force within society. When people are willing to throw themselves at the police, withstand torture, live under bombardment for years, and confront Israeli tanks crying the name of God, then leftists need to radically rethink their positions.
>>2463713Okay, now trying to answer this seriously.
What eventually would happen to religion under communism? Well, all theology would be assimilated (along with philosophy, ethics, and psychology) into a new unified discipline (let's call it "mentalism"). Religous properties of a material nature would be nationalised and repurposed. Customs and ceremonies would be adopted by the communist goverment, or practiced purely for the recreational use. Clergy would get consumed by the communist movement or be destroyed. Would be funny if 500 years rom now, People's Comissar of the Cultural Legacy of the Italian SSR would, by tradition, also hold the office of the Pope even though no one seriously believes in Catholicism anymore.
Wait, are you asking what should be done with religions now/in close future?
Marx already made the point in On the Jewish Question that professing that a State is secular, doesn't make it so, so the iron hand approach doesn't really do much, as even China has a ton of spiritual influence or even ancestor worship at times. The Marxist materialist outlook on religion is that once the social relations of exploitation start withering away, the need for religion will also wither away. You no longer need some Christian idea of a socialistic heaven to look forward to when the desire for it has been eliminated in reality.
That said, the "Marxism isn't about killing religious people" discourse has resulted in this really stupid trend of Islamic/Catholic Marxism, while claiming no contradiction. It's a pure populist appeal that runs contrary to theory because as communists, you represent the most "advanced" section of the working class or in other words, you recognize the materialist causes for exploitation and class antagonism driving society. If you're truly religious, you start blaming this shit on demons and metaphysical evil in opposition to metaphysical good. Christians and Muslims believe God will bring a form of socialism to you in heaven after an apocalypse. This is completely unmaterialistic and most of Marx and Engels work before and during the writing of Capital was in conflict with this type of utopian (religious) thinking, famously in Anti-Duhring. You cannot be a religious Marxist, as it's completely opposed to each other.
This doesn't mean they're inherently reactionary, as the working class will struggle even if they don't profess themselves to a Marxist ideology. The problem is claiming you can combine Marx and religion. You can't without severely butchering one or the other. So secular people will remove everything from their religious books and just reduce it down to "I think God exists maybe" while ignoring everything like the causes of "evil" or the affirmations of private property as a concrete "truth" to the world. For authentically religious people, they completely remove all of Marx's materialist philosophy and just hold his image up as a red flag like a certain youtuber does.
All that said, I don't really care if you still have a hunch that God exists or whatever. The problem is when you start butchering theory or start doing apologia like "the Church is actually socialism" where you are just massacring historical materialism and thus are out of the fold of Marxism, back into utopian socialism. Marx mentioned religious socialism in the Manifesto for a reason, as it's (obviously) reactionary and holds onto the class division of society.
>>2463927>The Marxist materialist outlook on religion is that once the social relations of exploitation start withering away, the need for religion will also wither away. This approach to religion has been completely debunked by modern religious studies because its empirically false and based on assumptions that don't hold up. Secularization theory is dead and buried. Nobody believes in that stuff anymore. Go into any religious studies department and waffle this crap and you'd be laughed at and kicked out. Its false on so many levels its hard to know where to begin when debunking it.
Second point. Marxism claims not to be a religion but you make it sound awfully like one. Just because Marx said something doesn't make it true and Marxists are not scripture bound to follow everything Marx said to the letter. Is Marx a God and his work like an inerrant Bible?
Marxists autistic fixation on face fucking everyone with atheism is one of the major reasons Marxism failed and became unpopular. If you keep promoting this crap, you will continue to get nowhere. Either get with the times or die out. Its up to you. Either adapt to keep up with the latest social science research or keep hugging Victorian era sociology books with your heads in the sand just like those religious fundies you people love to denounce.
>>2463906>What eventually would happen to religion under communism?Well you can look at the historical record to see what happened to religion under various self-described Marxist regimes. The Soviet Union was not able to eradicate religion from Russian culture and the Russian Orthodox Church is still going strong, same goes for Cuba with most of the Cuban population identifying as Roman Catholic.
On the other hand you have communist regimes like China and North Korea which have been much more effective at implementing state atheism and most of their population formally identify as atheist. Why is this? I suspect it's because Eastern religion is more philosophical and less dogmatic in nature than Western religion, and also because China has always been a totalitarian society for thousands of years and if you read Taoist and Confucianist texts you can tell that these philosophies are designed with that type of society in mind - they describe politics in terms of emperors and autocratic rulers in a matter-of-fact way, as if that were the only kind of government that anyone could conceive of in ancient China (because it was) and Eastern thought in general tends to place more importance in the collective than the individual, so I think that all these factors made it easier to eradicate religious dogma from the population in those cultures.
>>2463966>Its false on so many levels its hard to know where to begin when debunking it. Contrapoints fans: "you anti-Zionists are debunked (unable to go into detail, because they cannot)"
>Marxists autistic fixation on face fucking is one of the major reasons Marxism failed and became unpopular.Marxists autistic fixation on eating out MILFs is one of the major reasons Marxism failed and became unpopular
>I believe that state atheism is a necessity and anything short of that is a failure.>>2463739>the Marxist scientific system which is a system based on evidenceSinyavsky: "lol we should have told everyone that when Stalin died he 'ascended into heaven and now wages celestial war against bourgeoisie by protecting the humble class warriors on earth' lol…lmao"
https://filosofia.dickinson.edu/encyclopedia/sinyavsky-andrei-abram-tertz/>Sinyavsky exposes the inner contradiction of the method, which attempts to join a teleological element (socialism) with a scientific one (realism). He contends that Marxism is not only teleological but borders on religion, since it formulates an ultimate goal of history and interprets all past and present events in relation to this goal. “The specific teleology of Marxist thought consists in leading all concepts and objects to the Purpose, referring them all to the Purpose, and defining them all through the Purpose. The history of all epochs and nations is but the history of humanity’s march toward Communism… ” (On Socialist Realism 35). Sinyavsky reveals that even the material base, which in Marxist philosophy determines the ideological superstructure, is inherently idealistic, since, in the words of Stalin, “the base produces the superstructure so that it can serve the base” (qtd. 35). Such a presupposition is at least quasi-religious in its congruence with the notion that God created man so that he might serve God.>Socialist realism is logically inclined towards classicism as an aesthetic model, with its orientation toward sublime and idealistic norms of discourse. The realistic component, which is alien to socialism, introduces an involuntary element of parody into Soviet art. “It is impossible, without falling into parody, to produce a positive hero in the style of full socialist realism and yet make him into a psychological portrait. In this way, we will get neither psychology nor hero” (On Socialist Realism 90). Sinyavsky would prefer both hero and parody. He is not only sensitive enough to grasp the inherently parodic element in socialist realism, but he goes so far as to advise the self-conscious exploitation of parody as an enhancement of Soviet heroic art. He regrets that the eclectic mixture of realism and classicism that was officially promoted from the 1930s through the 1950s lacks the genuinely phantasmagoric proportions capable of transforming dull, didactic imitations of life into inspirational imitations of didacticism and teleology itself.>For example, Sinyavsky proposes that Stalin’s death, if presented as a religious event, could have become a theme of great art, intrinsically deeply parodic.<"We could have announced on the radio that he did not die but had risen to heaven, from which he continued to watch us, in silence, no words emerging from beneath the mystic mustache. His relics would have cured men struck by paralysis or possessed by demons. And children, before going to bed, would have kneeled by the window and addressed their prayers to the cold and shining stars of the Celestial Kremlin. (On Socialist Realism 92)>Such a transformation of socialist realism into a religious-parodic form was accomplished more than twenty years later in the Sots Art of Komar and Melamid. The titles of many of their paintings—such as Stalin and the Muses and View of the Kremlin in a Romantic Landscape (both from the series “Nostalgic Socialist Realism,” 1981-2)—suggest an implicit reference to Sinyavsky’s meta-socialist project.>Instead of condemning socialist realism as false, demagogic, or simply bad art, as was done in the West, or praising its truthful reflection of life, as in the Soviet Union, Sinyavsky eliminates the criterion of truth altogether, reinterpreting this canon as a system of interrelated signs which may be used for artistic purposes—not because they refer to some knowable reality, but precisely because they escape it. He was among the first to formulate the principle of parody and conscious eclecticism as a new source for contemporary art, and he opened the way for a highly innovative postmodern assimilation of socialist realism, which in the 1960s was generally considered a dead-end movement both in the West and in dissident circles within the USSR.>In later articles and in his book, Soviet Civilization (1988), Sinyavsky continues his investigation of communism as a unique historical formation possessing its own unexplored, mystical depth. What interests him is “not so much the history of Soviet civilization as the theory and even what I might call the metaphysics” (Soviet Civilization xii). As compared with other researchers in this field, Sinyavsky stresses the theatrical nature of the Soviet system, which was designed as a spectacle by the great directors Lenin and, especially, Stalin; “in his eyes he was the only actor-director on the stage of all Russia and all the world. In this sense, Stalin was a born artist” (98).>the Marxist scientific system which is a system based on evidence >>2463929And? Humans are 200,000 years old. Anon was making the point that religion is human nature. Religion isn't even 1/4 as old as humans. Especially not highly organized dogmatic religion. Reactionaries want to pretend there is an eternal immutable human nature that society must constantly RETVRN to in order to be viable. They use this to justify not just religion, the family, private property, and capitalism, but even highly specific historical forms of them. Reactionaries are so historically illiterate that they often project the highly historically contextual values of their fathers or grandfathers backwards through history.
>>2463931Learning basic survival skills from an older person is not the same thing as organized religion unless you want to stretch the definition of "religion" so much that it starts to encompass everything and can no longer be reliably used to distinguish one phenomenon from another (reactionaries often do this, and even in this very thread you see some of them calling atheism a religion).
>>2464625and although you have some of a point, as in most of the people labeled atheists were probably not, there certainly were atheists back then
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagoras_of_Melos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_Zhen and likewise it was well documented in india as well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_atheism >>2464632christians in rome were literally called atheists because they disbelieved in the pagan gods. it was always a relative term until modernity.
>>2464618>socrateshe is accused both of atheism and worshipping foreign gods in the apologia but professes monotheism. the grandfather of idealism being an atheist also seems contradictory
>theodorus<Theodorus was attacked for atheism. "He did away with all opinions respecting the Gods," says Laërtius,[17] but some critics doubt whether he was absolutely an atheist, or simply denied the existence of the deities of popular belief. The charge of atheism is sustained by the popular designation of Atheus, by the authority of Cicero,[18] Laërtius,[2] Pseudo-Plutarch,[19] Sextus Empiricus,[20] and some Christian writers; while some others (e.g. Clement of Alexandria)[21] speak of him as only rejecting the popular theology.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodorus_the_Atheist>>2464625thats when the second temple was destroyed and when the first gospels are reported to have appeared (since the bible includes the prophecy of the fall of the second temple after the messiah, so is reasonably dated current or later from the event):
>The temple with which the book of Malachi is concerned was the second temple. This implies Messiah should have come while the second temple was still standing! The book of Daniel makes it even clearer that Messiah had to come before the destruction of the second temple.https://www.insearchofshalom.com/all/themessiah/mysteries/messiah-came-before-the-destruction-of-the-templethis is when we can say that christianity gains its official basis outside of being an early mystery cult. rome is also identified with being the new babylon in the new testament, so the captivity of jerusalem points to this historical and theological comparison. so we can say that christianity began in 70 A.D.
>>2464635>thats when the second temple was destroyed and when the first gospels are reported to have appeared (since the bible includes the prophecy of the fall of the second temple after the messiah, so is reasonably dated current or later from the event)okay fair enough, i've seen a similar argument before, but that criteria seems pretty vague, the 40s CE is more likely if we go off the evidence, since that's where the earliest letters of paul seem to date back to, and also the point on atheism not predating christianity seems a little obtuse, i've never actually seen historical sources call the christians atheists, but disbelievers or a similar term, the earliest source for the existence of christians that is either independent or not a interpolated source, is pliny's letters to trajan, which you can read in latin and english here
https://www.kchanson.com/ANCDOCS/latin/pliny.html >>2464642yes and if you read paul, he appears to be describing something quite different from the gospel story, and it even has elements of "gnosticism". so i would say the gospels as a canonical myth begins around 70 A.D. while what existed before was disorganised mystery cults.
>>2464643what would be the non-islamist answer?
>>2464649yes and that's because christianity changed significantly not after paul, or even the gospels themselves, but instead changed in the 2nd century, this is based on the fact that any christian text dated to the 1st century is actually pretty different from what paul was saying in the bible, and Mark isn't actually that different from paul, it is different yes, but it is also in many ways just inserting a jesus into the past to make the points of christians then, you can look into this reification of paul and there's pretty strong evidence for it, it only started to actually change significantly with matthew, then luke, acts and john, this is because christianity nearly died by the start of the second century, and underwent significant changes in the mid 2nd century, look at the forged letters of paul for example, many of them are odd in just many ways that they add stuff that doesn't make sense, or actively contradicts his own statements in other letters
>>2464657it's also just obviously mythological nature, if there is anything of historical value in the gospels, it cannot be distinguished from the obvious reifications of paul (and probably other texts as well), it's also only in the second century that a jesus who really did live, really did have disciples and so on (which neither paul, nor clement, nor peter, nor hebrews seems to be aware of at all! truly a remarkable change) is taken to be literally true, even in mark it seems to just be a typical historicization of a myth, common to mystery religions of the time, whereas the "true" belief was one of a jesus who descends from the firmament, is given a body, is captured by samael/belial, crucified and then is deified
>>2465780Apparently first atheists on earth, one of the hundred schools called calculationists, unless the Indian rationalists predate them as the first atheists; should look up the current archeological date – thought ghost stories were false but useful
They were the first to state in surviving text that it was correct to rebel against unjust rule, a conclusion only reached by western inhabitants of the European peninsula only even realised in the 17th century after they recieved it from Native American philosophers
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