Within the West the left has a common circular conversation: We need to organize, we need a movement independent of liberal political parties, we need independent working class power. The common response: there's no sufficient labor movement, people are too atomized, they no longer live and work in proximity in ways that makes them easily reachable, existing platforms prevent dissemination of our message, etc.
What if the people need to come together to be reached, and what if they get what they need for their liberation, and what they are missing in their lives under capitalism such as community aid and belonging, in a church?
Consider the conditions under which Christianity arose. The older religions including Greco-Roman pantheon worship had declined. They had by no means lost their popularity completely but the awe of the primal forces of nature and the fatalistic philosophical personification and deification of aspects of human behavior no longer spoke as effectively to the increasingly urban masses where the bronze age conditions that inspired the religion in the first place were increasingly remote and abstract. Major rituals and festival were increasingly done by rote or performatively by elites for their political careers, or for the celebrations more than the meaning beneath them. Christianity filled that void, the thought of taking on the sins and failures and brutality of humanity from the top down and dying to absolve the human soul, the thought of an all encompassing and compassionate architecture to the universe and their place in it gave people more awe than witnessing a lightning storm or an earthquake.
We all know how things went since, there's more to criticize about Christianity's history than we have time to go over. But now we find ourselves once again in similar conditions for something new. Religious membership is declining in the west, the remaining membership are either increasingly secularized and bourgeois or increasingly hyper-reactionary or lumpen. These institutions are not able to speak to the problems of the day or any solution for them on a theological or material basis. If the old church was the theological logic of feudalism to come in the shadow of rome, if protestantism was the theological logic of capitalism to come in the shadow of feudalism, then something new whether christian or something distinct can be the theological logic of what is to come after capitalism and more people feel that need every day even if they don't understand it.
I don't expect we will form a new religion here of course, but we can recognize the void that exists in people's lives currently, the need to fill that void that all humans have, and anticipate that it will be filled by something eventually. There have been many attempts, experiments, to forge an alternative to the status quo on religious grounds in the form of various cults, movements and intentional communities through the ages. We can learn from them when framing the theological vision and logic of what comes next. Many of us are not religious at all to say the least, and producing a new religious paradigm is likely not something that is done intentionally from a place of insincerity. Perhaps we may yet inspire the vision of future figures and movements as they form organically, and find in them the allies we need. It may be that an existing institution will transform into the vessel of the new message that will de-atomize and educate the scattered masses in ways conventional organizing struggles to do, to make them see beyond their PMC jobs and treats or across culture war bullshit. I don't want to exaggerate the merits of the Catholic Church or Pope Leo but as the conflict between him and the Trump administration increases, as Latin America is menaced and the Vatican is told by the Pentagon to "pick a side", there is a degree of potential to be found there even if it's an emerging leftward fringe of where he may ultimately allow the Church to be led.
Engels writes upon the parallels of the worker's movement and the early christian movement here (1894):
<The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome. Both Christianity and the workers’ socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Christianity places this salvation in a life beyond, after death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society. Both are persecuted and baited, their adherents are despised and made the objects of exclusive laws, the former as enemies of the human race, the latter as enemies of the state, enemies of religion, the family, social order. And in spite of all persecution, nay, even spurred on by it, they forge victoriously, irresistibly ahead. Three hundred years after its appearance Christianity was the recognized state religion in the Roman World Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itself a position which makes its victory absolutely certain.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/early-christianity/This is not a novel comparison, since it had already been made by nietzsche decades before, and even before this, early socialists like Proudhon (1848) said that he was inspired from The Bible. Indeed, Jesus is a subversive radical jew who disrupts the social order of Rome, uniting the poor by an egalitarian ethos.
>>2775185Passolini, a communist, made a film about how Jesus was the first revolutionary. The pope at the time said it was the most accurate portrayal of Jesus ever put to film.
t. Jim Jones
nothing will help bring back the real movement until there is total middle class destruction
>>2775185I fucking hate community.
>abandon materialism and relapse on the opium of the masses
sigh
>>2775245materialism serves capital today
>>2775222t. potato in the sack
>>2775245it's not a proposal to abandon materialism, it's a proposal that a whole bunch of people will be motivated in ways we appreciate through means that make sense to them even if it's not materialism. this could happen regardless of our opinion on that matter.
>>2775253It's the peasants who go the fuck on about community though?
>>2775185This video might interest you:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kwakpq3vdEThe video essentially argues three things:
1.What brought down the reputation of online atheists such that even atheists themselves feel the need to distance themselves from the stereotype of atheists or hesitate to identify as such in public spaces
2.Why communism can't be reconciled with Christianity, or most religions for that matter
- The west needs a western revival, and that will require the death of "New Atheism" as spearheaded by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.
For the first point, he argues that New Atheists' attitude towards rampant racialisation and demonisation of Muslims as well as their support for the War on Terror undermined the credibility of New Atheism, which is the type of atheism most westerners are familiar with, and thus demonstrated New Atheism's failure to provide a rationalist alternative to Christian bigotry.
For the second point, he argues that throughout history, Christianity (at least as practiced in the west, especially Europe) more often than not has been a reactionary force keen that upholds hierarchy and undermines class struggle by not only pacifying the prole, but also undermine any revolutionary spirit by giving the prole a strong non-class-identity on which to rest on, causing them to side with Christians no matter how counterproductive that may be based on their class interests. So Christianity (as he understands it) turns the prole into lumpenprole.
Continuing on, he gives another reason as to why communists shouldn't rely on religion for support, by giving the example of the past Christian debate on slavery in the early modern era where he points out that it was essentially literalists that were pro-slavery arguing against non-literalists who made up talking points based on their own interpretations. In other words, it was a quagmire, and he wants communists to avoid that.
For the third point, he points out that Christianity, like other religions like Islam, are reactionary and hellbent on maintaining their hierarchy and top position in society, and undermining class struggle and using lumpenisation to their advantage isn't off the tables for them. It is thus that he argues that, with the failure of New Atheism to prevent the current religious reactionary revival, that he urges leftists to form a new class-conscious atheist intellectual tradition.
>>2775246>materialism serves capital todayhow? my guess is you misunderstand what marxists mean by "materialism" and substitute for dialectical materialism the colloquial "materialism" (the aspirational petty bourgeoisie's love of money, clothes, cars, drugs and sex) complained about by spiritual gurus
>>2775261> people will be motivated in ways we appreciate through means that make sense to them even if it's not materialismreligion is a double edged sword, it can serve both as a motivator or as an excuse for inaction. on one hand you have liberation theologists who believe it is their religious duty to fight the bourgeoisie, and on the other hands you have masses of lobotomized reactionaries who use religion to interpret the world as an irreperably corrupt place that is just a waiting room for heaven. They invoke Ephesians 6:5 which states
>Slaves, obey your human masters with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart, as you would Christ. >>2775484no, i mean that a materialist or naturalist worldview has no imperative to socialism, and conversely, its the capitalists who are heralding science as progressive as the left become luddites.
>>2775197Buddy you forgot the part where Marx and Engels dismissed Christian socialism as Reactionary
>For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeois amounts to this, that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society. What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat. In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour, for traffic inwool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits. As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism. Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these,charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat. >>2775506the capitalists are still idealist tho.
otherwise speculation and credit wouldn't be driving the economy
Every major religion says to not be a greedy fuck. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, even Judaism in it's early years.
Total Religion Death.
>>2775506> its the capitalists who are heralding science as progressive as the left become luddites.it's stupid to become a fucking luddite
>no, i mean that a materialist or naturalist worldview has no imperative to socialismyou can't make correct decisions unless you actually understand how the world works and defend materialism
>>2775261Its a materialist read of history, we put Jesus on the same level as Mao or Lenin - just a guy who freed people from slavery and was a progression away from serfdom and slavery to the next condition of industrial capital.
>>2775185there's no material or social reason to engage with the church for the average person, certainly not the average leftist. you'd have to have hit the ground running before christians made homosexuality and gay marriage the hill they decided to die on. they did that so successfully that even liberals would subtly bifurcate thus
>pro gayfake christian
>anti-gayreal christian, evil.
in an alt history, who knows, maybe some UK type piggybacking on progressive causes could've boosted their relevance. but even then maybe that'd flop as people realized you can have leftism and liberalism without god's help.
every need the church met is met better by some other institution. the reason politics has rocketed in popularity is because it can serve as religion without any of the supernatural nonsense. most brands are minor cults. the number of meaningfully religious people is thus in decline across the developed world. sure, a bunch of people still say they're christian - but ask them: were you at church last week? last month? last
year? no, weddings and funerals don't count. if your belief can't even motivate you to occasionally go listen to a lecture, it functionally doesn't exist.
>>2775463new atheism already died because it contained two basically incompatible personality types: social justice warriors, and racist debate bros. once neurotics realized there were a whole range of social issues to get worried about, and once assholes realized it's more fun to pick on neurotics than on christians, it was all over. insofar as it relates to god, the main other detail is that god became socially irrelevant almost overnight. (Obama being president instead of Bush helped)
the rationalist alternative to christian bigotry is "wokeism" and, however much /leftypol/ may hate it, woke is/was (we'll see) "70% good, 30% bad"
>>2776028gay new atheist slop post detected
>>2775529"speculation" is literally just insider trading
there is no such thing as a "stock market"
>>2776143video semi unrelated
Liberation Theology accomplishments:
>Anti Theology: The Secret Sauce the Western Left is Missing?
>>2776174>dabbing towards the viewer instead of perpendicular to the vieweran innovation in dabbing
>>2775990
>buy
no
>The Western Left ™ needs MORE spooks, actually!
>>2775521He's referring here to people that used Christianity to oppose the emergence if capitalism in favour of some medieval pre-industrial social formation. That's not the same thing as calling for communism on the basis of Christian moral arguments, using Christianity to galvanize a revolutionary movement, or expressing communist ideas in Christian terms.
>>2775914The social doctrine of Christianity also justified slave revolts and peasant uprisings, and has been deployed by proletarian radicals against the bourgeoisie. The very nature of religion is such that it will always be a floating signifier, which means it can promote socialist and progressive forces if animated by a revolutionary class and thinkers.
>>2776629It didn't work last time though, and was arguably counterproductive since it gave reactionaries propaganda ammunition.
>>2775185They achived even less than the suckdems, 'nuff said
>>2776633It brought many people who were oppressed by the church to the revolution. More arguably the war wasn't lost because of the red terror.
>>2776643Breaking the secular power of the church is one thing. Obviously it wasn't some neutral actor but a very real partisan of the establishment, a major landowner, etc. However this isn't the same thing as anti-theism or repression of religion in general. Liberation theology would accomplish the same thing without driving many otherwise sympathetic or neutral religious people over to reaction.
>>2776228Then at least lose weight and shave your disgusting facial hair, you hideous freak
Liberation theology existed mainly in Latin America, and was violently destroyed by the US. The Church will never call for its servants to fight for and with the poor. They were killed, like Oscar Romero and the 4 American missionary women in El Salvador. This time, liberation theology can only arise from the bottom, not come from the top
>>2776647>driving people to reactionNever happened and will not happen, they will just cope and pretend to not be religious and religion will die with them even of old age
>>2776030new atheism was cringe and pushing on a falling wall.
>>2776974>they will just cope and pretend to not be religious and religion will die with them even of old ageJust like it did in Russia right?
>>2777637To keep them is no benefit, to destroy them is no loss.
>>2777638To keep working class people who happen to be religious is absolutely a benefit. To lose them to reaction is absolutely a loss. If religion can be made to serve socialism then give me a reason why it shouldn't.
>>2777640religion is in freefall across the first world. as this happens, there is a selection effect: those who remain religious are generally the most conservative, because anyone more liberal has already given it up and gone with the flow.
>>2777653>those who remain religious are generally the most conservativeThat doesn't follow at all. You're projecting American/Western tendencies onto the rest of the world.
>>2777653>religion is in freefall across the first world.The first world is also in freefall by every indicator you can think of. Why take notes from a declining civilization? 90% of religious growth is in Africa which will be the next superpower. Looks like religiousoids won again and seething atheists are yet again consigned to the dustbin of history.
>>2777686it follows if you're remotely familiar with the subject matter and the selection effects at play. (and, though not stated explicitly, with religiosity as a sliding scale rather than a binary: a ugandan liberal may be devoutly religious, but he'll be less religious than a ugandan conservative!)
>>2777690>The first world is also in freefall by every indicator you can think of.- meme
- with the exception of the US, religion and economic development are strongly negatively correlated. if the first world is in decline and the developing world is on the rise, you can expect the same tendency to repeat itself.
>>2777693
unlikely: political extremism tickles all the same desires without requiring the same level of boring commitment.
>>2777966>3/4 dead people from a historic period where religiosity was higher and where they clearly prioritized a political cause above a religious one, even if they expressed it in religious terms, and where religious hierarchy generally disliked the figures in question >1/4 political organization in a poor area where religiosity is higher, with strong ties to a foreign country and its foreign policyWow, you sure showed me. The Gerrard Winstanley of 2026 is surely a red state farmer. :)
I feel like people looking for the “Secret Sauce”, whether it be attaching Religion or Nationalism to Socialism, really should just read Sorel’s concept of the revolutionary myth. They’re kind of stumbling on it incidentally, but the point is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be Religion or Nationalism or what have you.
>>2777989Sorel is always interesting but do his ideas prove true in practice? I don't think it's realistic to expect people to 'fall for' a unifying myth in postmodernity. In fact we're living through the collapse of even the most integral mythmaking institutions of capitalist society, like universities, political parties, the Experts, religion, the Nation etc.
>>2777984the "materialist" view of history comes from Marx, who got it from Hegel, who got it from the Bible.
>>2778009For sure, just be describing the materialist verision of history in this accordance leads christians who have been mind poisoned by the deviations away from this understanding, toward the mainstream idealistic WASP apathetic religious rituals where no one really cares or understands the history of christianty but loves to overdose on the mind opiates it provides in service of liberalism
>>2777984>My take is religion theology should be used in order to convert and discuss with religious people on their terms >on their termsEver heard the phrase "give an inch and they'll take a mile?"
In my youth I tried this strategy that you suggest and found that it was lacking because they treat concessions as confessions. You think they are talking to you on their terms, but they think you are slowly admitting that they are right about everything, and that your worldview needs to be abandoned for theirs.
>>2778048☝️ and what I mean by this
is demonstrated here:
>>2778009the religious think that dialectical materialism is a distortion of the original truths they discovered
>>2778048>>2778051I feel what you're saying, its difficult to convert people really this stuff sort of has to rise out organically among their own people. It has been used with sucsess in the past in places like Cuba to sort of act as a vehicle for direction of a more marxist conception of social values but I think individual action here is meaningless, for it to be truely effective it has to be a state program with mass appeal.
>>2776620> expressing communist ideas in Christian terms.expressing atheistic ideas in christian terms is to surrender ground to people who will never ever surrender ground to you, and in fact believe your destiny is eternal torture unless you realign with them.
>>2777988My point is you haven't actually demonstrated any connection between religiosity and reactionary politics. You also haven't shown that those who retain religiosity during an era of secularization do so because they're reactionary. I've given you clear counterexamples of progressive and revolutionary figures/movements who used religion to motivate and galvanize their struggles.
>>2778058Communist ideas are not inherently atheist. As for surrendering ground, that's what you're doing, not me. Religion should be though of as terrain of ideological struggle, just like art, literature, music, etc. Millions of workers and peasants around the world take it very seriously, and if you surrender that terrain of struggle then you guarantee that the only form of religious expression available to them is a reactionary one. On the contrary, class struggle *must* be carried over into the realm of religion.
>>2778103>Communist ideas are not inherently atheist. "liberation theology" isn't inherently communist, and is in fact revisionist in its stance towards the opium of the masses
> As for surrendering ground, that's what you're doing, not me. You have no evidence for this statement.
>>2778078>you haven't actually demonstrated any connection between religiosity and reactionary politics.There isn't a single non-reactionary religion with significant following. I suppose you go could go full gorky and try to build a non-reactionary religion but that just begs the question why religion is needed at all, besides for the particular purpose of pandering to idealism.
>>2778007I’d say that the fervor of belief, even if it’s not capable of unifying the collective whole of a given society, at the very least leads to a great scope of action.
Like the anti-abortion movement isn’t necessarily the majority, especially now. Right wing evangelical Christianity is still arguably a minority belief system that wields power beyond its size. You’ve had schizo Christians murder politicians in the name of God, which isn’t to say that some dude in Minnesota blasting random people is good praxis, but rather despite his class or material conditions, he acts as a willing terrorist for his beliefs.
All this is to say every now and then you see people say “well what if we did religious socialism?” Or “well what if we did patriotic socialism?” And what the subtext of their words are: what if we had Socialism invested with the actual fervor of belief. Because let’s be frank, Socialist fervor pretty much died alongside the USSR. Socialists of yesteryear were convinced they’d see the demise of capitalism in their lifetime. Most socialists today either hold onto some hope that they’re “laying a brick in a long road” or just have given up completely and adopted some “oh it’s impossible in the first world” mentality. Shit just an example, by 2003 Carlos the Jackal went from a committed Marxist-Leninist to claiming “Revolutionary Islam” would be the radical creed of the future.
More often than not it’s Socialists themselves smothering revolutionary myths in the crib. They go on about how impossible it is, how we’ll never see it in our lifetimes. Dooming, essentially. So you get some looking to alternative movements to hitch themselves to, ones that actually seem to have some semblance of ideological fervor.
Like say what you will of the global Far Right, but they don’t seem to surrender the possibility of triumph in the face of perceived repression from the establishment.
>>2778078you have missed the point about these things being relative and treat religiosity as a binary.
in personality research, lower openness to experience and higher conscientiousness (rule following) is correlated with: (a) conservative politics and (b) religiosity. given we are talking in the final resort about individuals, that's nothing to sniff at!
(but remember: we are talking about something with a high degree of relativity. that is, a more progressive afghan will be higher openness and less religious than the average afghan, not equally open-minded and equally atheistic as the average westerner, or indeed, as the average western christian.)
>>2778103materialism is inherently irreligious and the only way you could argue otherwise is if you unironically believe in patent nonsense.
insofar as it's a terrain of ideological struggle, atheism has all the big hitters: the US is godless capitalism wrapped in heresy, Europe offers a saner godless capitalism, Japan has reduced religion down to beautifully rote tradition and a handful of cults that make everyone uneasy, China is openly atheist, as was the USSR. There isn't one country in the world you look at and go: wow, i wish i had their level of economic development
and their spiritual outlook.
>>2778190> There isn't one country in the world you look at and go: wow, i wish i had their level of economic development and their spiritual outlook.China.
>>2778139>opium of the massesSometimes the proles need some opium
>>2778227You’ve clearly never been around heroin people
>>2778235this is the extreme of it in excess and is obviously bad, but opium is also used by many people recreational and medicinally without any real long term issues
>>2778237The only reason to keep them around is for pain patients because there isn’t an alternative for chronic pain, in terms of recreation alcohol is far superior to opiates
oh people are still posting in this thread ok. i should preface this by saying that im not sure if a particular religious outlook is strictly necessary. ultimately the left just lacks real new ideas with regards to how to move forward and i think the average person can on some level sense the dead end there. the fact of the matter is that atomization is something that is also proportional to agency and the presence of an actual movement to begin with. im not even sure to what extent the notion of atomization is even that true. in the past year we have seen mass nation-level protests, there was the hippy movement, '68, etc. the biggest issue is that none of these tendencies were really moving towards anything actual. it is all abstract deterritorialization. there has been a pathological aversion to actually building anything substantial. without such a tendency, even if you incorporate religion into it, it might not rise much above impotent liberal sentimentality (perhaps itself an affective homolog of social religious feeling sans the sublimity). ive sketched some ideas on what forms we can territorialize unstructured movements into an organizational form that is actually capable of reproduce itself. most leftists movements have basically halted the attempt at building something like dual power, perhaps getting cold feet from the failure of the soviets. i think this is a mistake. for what it is worth here is one place where i express some ideas regarding this (though as you might see, the scope of my articulation is not quite universal .. nevertheless, it very is generalizable):
https://hidwehproject.nekoweb.org/pages/zine/pisas.htmlwhile i was thinking abt replying the past 2 days it hit me that its questionable whether marx would even call himself an atheist. there are multiple factors which suggest this
<1) he rejected the label in his youth<2) his main influence was feuerbach who didnt see himself as an atheist either. rather feuerbach's thoughts were that religion concerned those infinite qualities in man that he could forever strive towards but never attain completely. he called himself an anthropotheist. it was not abt denying the essence of religion, but rather to isolate it from its theological dissimulation. the point is not simply to deny religious content but to point to the fact that god subsists quite positively in man. the kingdom of god lives within you<3) maybe feuerbach can seem to just be a jordan peterson type somewhat but marx himself has a far more sophisticated materialism. for him, sensuous practical activity was also material and any subjectivity must be subsequent to material relations of production. hence there is a resonating social totality which precedes the individual and is the material. we may combine this w marx's conception of species being so that human nature itself is inseparable from such a totality. transposing feuerbach's anthropotheism, we must conclude that god must no longer be seen as just subsisting in the human organism but rather in material relations themselves. the real movement is that tendency towards the real kingdom of god as a future immanent outside of materialityleftists often say that religion is a "spook" but this is stirnerite ideology. quoting from the german ideology:
>Further, the man who, as a youth, stuffed his head with all kinds of nonsense about existing powers and relations such as the Emperor, the Fatherland, the state, etc., and knew them only as his own "delirious fantasies", in the form of his conceptions—this man, according to Saint Max, actually destroys all these powers by getting out of his head his false opinion of them. On the contrary: now that he no longer looks at the world through the spectacles of his fantasy, he has to think of the practical interrelations of the world, to get to know them and to act in accordance with them. By destroying the fantastic corporeality which the world had for him, he finds its real corporeality outside his fantasy. With the disappearance of the spectral corporeality of the Emperor, what disappears for him is not the corporeality, but the spectral character of the Emperor, the actual power of whom he can now at last appreciate in all its scope.at any rate this was not what i wanted to post initially. in order to grasp the true significance of the religion question we must elucidate what "materialism" actually consists in (not the vulgar form which marx and engels rejected) and how this relates then to religion. i will quote from the two links below
https://hidwehproject.nekoweb.org/pages/blog/posts/2026-03-27-Between-Materialism-And-Aeonics.htmlhttps://hidwehproject.nekoweb.org/pages/phil/terseaeonmat.html<on materialism>We note here that our materialism comes from the dynamics of contingencing that this process affords. For it is entailed here that various forces must have differential expression according to the conjoined circumstances in which they find themselves, and indeed such conjoined circumstances entail a resultant force that is qualitatively distinct from the components. Whereas in idealism form structures content and negativity is a result of a contradiction on the side of the ideal, in materialism there is a disjunction between form and content with the latter being able to effect the former in a perverse procession.<the existentiality of materialism>For Marx, practical sensuous activity was not merely a mechanical process directed to a particular need, but rather an activity which incarnates an existential determinateness. It is only by virtue of this that a base-superstructure relationship is even intelligible in the first place.<the materialist view of religion>Aside from this, there is also the notion that somehow, with the achievement of socialism, religion would at last fade away. This parallels the thought that religion should vanish with the progression of the natural sciences. However, if we look at things empirically, whilst there is some correlation, we have not seen with the progression of natural science the absolute annihilation of religious belief. Even amongst the elite who should be quite materially well off, we have the return of various religious concepts now transposed into superficially scientific forms. I am talking of course of such things as "superintelligence", "mind uploading", "simulation theory", etc. Beyond this, there are also plenty of christians who are also quite scientifically literate, and those who may even be scientists themselves. What we have definetely observed, along with the admitted rise of secularism, has also been an evolution of religious expression in tandem with changing scientific and material conditions.>This last point is crucial, and gives us a clue as to why religion, like Capital, seems to be quite an adaptive entity. At the end of the day, a religion is not simply a set of propositions, but a particular way of relating to Being. It is an existential condition prior to it being an explicit abstraction. As a relation to Being, it must also be material insofar as Being expresses itself in ways contingent upon a given locality. We see that any given religion, for instance Christianity, may have attached to it various different philosophies based upon the same material. This is not a sign of perpetual failure, but rather of the innate productivity with regards religion as an existentiale rather than simply an existent. A given spiritual force may have, according to different conjoined circumstances, different forms of manifestation. Furthermore, a given form may dissimulate its resonance with other forms that are tied back to the same force. In the sublation (aufhebung) of religion, there is the unleashing of this force that it is no longer restrained by counter-forces of reflective anti-production. This, connects, ultimately to the kernel of Marx's critique. The problem was not about the backwardness of religion, but rather its utilization by such institutions as the Church as ways of suppressing the pious and keeping their spiritual feelings in check. Note that, in our currently atomized society not only has religion been forgotten but the abstract individual has been raised above all else. In contrast, we have seen that in the deeply religious Iran, there has been the greatest resistance to imperial power. I would even contend that, following my earlier discussion with regards to the alienation of life-force, with a more social economic organization, we should see the full unleashing of vital potency so that it shall be at last made manifest.i think there has been yet a fully materialist understanding of religion, but academia has made progress on this end by focusing more on practices and material culture rather than mere "belief". this video expresses this latter view:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjrrUZeJMSo&pp=ygUacmVsaWdpb25mb3JicmVha2Zhc3QgZ2FtZXM%3D<abolish religion?>There has been a prevailing conceit amongst many leftists of today that communism and socialism are somehow incompatible with religion. Already we are at quite a strange problem as we must ignore the fact that Christian Socialism pre-existed Marxism. Indeed, Marx's innovation from previous socialists was precisely in his science that comes to provide a concrete praxis towards which the dream of socialism shall be achieved. We should note that, when Marx uses the term "science", he uses the word "Wissenschaft" which has quite a broader range of meaning that is in the English language. This word is the same used in the German title of Hegel's "Science of Logic" and Fichte's "Science of Knowledge". What is described here is not mechanical natural science, but rather a system of knowledge which forms an organic unity. As such, the scientism of many modern Marxists is quite absurd. Nevertheless, it is quite a tragic inevitable result of the impoverishment of the English language in comparison with the German one. Likewise, when Marx talks of the "overcoming of religion", the term he here uses is aufhebung. This is the same term that Hegel frequently uses to mean not simply a negation of something, but its taking up into a higher organic unity. Another tragic translation of this term in many translations of Marx has been "abolish". So, alas, he is made to say that religion must be abolished, the State must be abolished, and so communism would become a quite peculiar form of anarchism. Alas, as we were not all blessed with a knowledge of the German language, political thought has been condemned to being set a century behind. We have forgotten, despite the fact that Marx was explicitly influenced by Feuerbach's 'Essence of Christianity', that the project of "communism" is an essentially religious one; a project to fully actualize the spiritual realities of religion so that it permeates social life, and so that the kingdom of God may shine brightly to all the hungry souls of mankind.<brief excerpt regarding lunacharsky's "god building">Adding on to this, he notes the relation between religion and the bond (religio). Man finds himself in a world of suffering in which he only ever has a limited power. In recognizing his powerlessness, he seeks allies in order to help ameliorate this condition. This takes the individual beyond the bounds of himself, opening themselves up to the world at large. He then repeats a Marxist point that, in proportion to our increased control over the nature and the ability for us to attend to our needs, so is decreased our desire for something from without us for aid. However, in order to increase our control, we must organize into social relations of production so that the world may be turned into an idealized product. As such, the need for a bond is not annulled, but rather it is made explicit that it must be had with our fellow man. Hence, in socialism, the actual recognition that we must all work together in order to attend to our collective needs, we find the realization religio in a form that is no longer dissimulative, but still religious.>>2777989this is true, and the most mythical aspect of christianity in the sorelian register was the matyrdom, not the simply letter of the word
>>2778007no kings protests are a myth. just a very boring one that is not sufficiently "violent". i should probably repeat my thoughts on sorel here as well. the following excerpt is from the 'Between Materialism and Aeonics' blogpost (posting a bit extra than what is necessary to gesture to how i fit it within a broader political context)
>Not only should we support other cooperatives and movements, but we should mount up alternate temporalities within ourselves. Each locality of the greater federation should be taught self-initiative in order to facilitate this and to also prevent external interference. Through this, we would have a relatively distributed mode of governance. From these nodes, various activities that would further aeonic influence such as charities, events, etc can be hosted which are abstracted from the usual logic of capitalist exchange relations. In such activities, there is the presence of Myth. There is often a subtle oversimplification of Sorel's understanding of myth to make it more consonant with idealism than it actually is. We should understand that what he meant by myth was something very much connected to this world's events. To really understand the myth, we must understand that he is not coming from either an idealist or materialist metaphysics, but rather from the vitalism of Bergson. This is a sort of slanted understanding of existence which is somehow in between a dualism and monism. What differentiates spirit from matter in such a perspective is not that of substance, but that of temporal quality. Moreover, for Bergson, intuition is a faculty that we have access to by virtue of being living beings. It results from our capability of entering into the actual duration of other living things that are existent in reality. Bergson often gets accused of being an "irrationalist" but he could just as well be characterized as a sort of radical empiricist. What we discover through intuitive sympathy is a deeper unity in whatever process we are observing. One could compare this to the intuition of Eternity that one reaches after going through all of the different shapes of consciousness laid out in the course of Hegel's Phenomenology, the difference is that this intuition is grasped in experience rather than by working with meta-stable concepts.>This radically empiricist dimension is absolutely crucial because it renders thinkable the idea that the myth is not simply something that is in our heads but something that can be found evinced in the world itself. This was the power of the general strike. The myth was manifested and grew in power by the very fact of the strike itself. The violence which Sorel speaks of is a very sublime form of violence, not the literal fact of destruction, but rather the conflict between different forms of life in their synchronous manifestation within a concrete situation. Unfortunately, few people truly grasp this truly sinister element in the words of Christ:<Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household (Matthew 10:34-36).>Western Marxists have committed an error in diagnosing the myth as the origin of fascism and hence we have an entire strain of thought that has simply dismissed it as a sort of irrationalism that must be discarded. As we shall see, the fascists very much were not irrationalists. Reading Gentile would quickly illuminate the contrary to be the case. Rather, the success of the fascists partly lay in recognizing myth and actually capitalizing on it. In contrast, the Italian socialists at the time were reformists who could not match the ferfour on the ground. Marxists have conflated the tool for the very essence of fascism itself, an error that has been fatal.>This is one of the places where I believe, to the chagrin of many leftists, that in the American Communist Party we are capable of seeing a positive step forward with regards to praxis. Their choice to make community work a routine event will quickly prove to be decisive as they will make manifest a pro-social myth that would sell the idea of communism to the average reactionary member of the MAGA base far more effectively than any abstract "education". This is because, the entering into the duration of the real movement would promote a pathic connection that would cut through the propaganda that has been propped up by bureaucrats. In all actuality, if we are honest with ourselves, party organization only focused on educating the masses is far more idealist, privileging discourse over action. This is also one of the reasons why Christians have been far more effective at actually spreading influence. It is not simply about the preaching of the gospel. In the helping of communities they evince a christic ideal for people to emulate.>>2778240weed is even better than booze
>>2778251I agree but I compare opiates and alcohol because they’re both depressants, cannabis is in its own family. Last time I did a morphine pill it just felt like a shot of alcohol but I was itchy during comedown.
>>2778249>Religion is how we relate to being>It exists prior to abstractionMarx in his commentary upon James Mill (1844):
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/sees that money as "medium of exchange" is the means by which abstraction socialises people, and so takes the place of religion (with money originating in Temple banks which recorded accounts). For this purpose, Marx calls money man's "real god" for its universal properties. He speaks further upon this in Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 1, Sct. 4, that the "fetishism" of commodities places objective social relations in communion by the medium of trade, and thus religion is "true", but not factual. Its for this reason that Marx says religion changes with material conditions (making religion the Zeitgeist; "spirit of the age"), but as yet, the cause of Spirit is material, or social. Marx further sees that exchange as an act is inherently abstract, so the idea that social relations "precede" abstraction is false. Marx does see atheism as the socialist ethos however, as he writes:
<The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm >>2778220well, yes. but that's atheism with a handful of traditions derived from dead faiths. basically, what we've got here with style.
>>2778249the problem with the left is that it primarily appeals to a personality type that cannot and does not build things: low agency neurotics who're bad at making plans and sticking to them. it appeals because it offers an explanation for why they feel the ways they do, even if their diagnosis of the problems of the world is mostly correct.
the exact opposite personality type of a leftist is not a committed rightoid (who may share neurotic traits, or be very rule-following but not very task-finishing), it's a business founder. leftists are infinitely better people with an infinitely better diagnosis of the problems of society but - as a rose flag used to regularly say - you couldn't rely on them to run a lemonade stand, and until they
can run a lemonade stand anything they say about more complex organizational tasks is mere fantasy.
this isn't some permanent state of affairs (personality is very malleable, and as you touch on, we're only getting more malleable with time), but it's a challenging problem because many of the obvious solutions are dead ends. (e.g. if you just demand "more discipline", the rhetoric of discipline will put off the overwhelming majority of actually-existing leftists, attracting only a weird subset of people who really want to be in a cult or lead a cult.) one must learn, in short, to herd cats.
>>2778249Hmm, I often wonder why it is that any time some leftist brings up “religion” into communism, it’s always Christianity rather than Islam, Judaism, Druze, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, the Chinese folk traditions, the various animist beliefs of Polynesia and Africa and the Americas, Greek and Roman polytheism, etc…
I don’t have anything against using Christianity per se, but I always find it weird how even Asian communists (whether genuine or just race hustlers) bring Christianity when the topic of religion comes up, considering how:
- The Bible affirms private property among its 10 commandments
- Christianity is a LARP and on terminal intellectual decline as the only people who genuinely believe in it are Africans, Asians, and Latinos who don’t really believe in the faith as much as seeing it as another way to have access to white people and their resources. Basically, a pod for those pursuing aspirational whiteness. Indeed, no one would have converted to Christianity if the first missionary they saw was black or Indian LOL
- see >>2775463
Basically, to speak in materialistic terms, it’s unclear to what extent it is necessary for us to integrate what essentially is a theological faith that exists as a LARP outside of non-shithole places with shitty people (e.g., Copts and marojeets, who seem to be all invariably reactionaries today) considering how only atheists seem to be interested in actual revolutionary action. Of course this doesn’t mean that we should do our best to alienate any theist or agnostic that may agree with communist principles, but any serious communist should acknowledge how the history of every pre-modern religion has often been at the service of capital rather than against it, as well as the fact that the ideal communist society has often been atheist.
To give an example: Fidel Castro understood not to alienate the deeply devout Catholic majority of his country, hence why he and other Latino revolutionaries often opted for liberation theology. Did this lead to Cuba becoming a theocracy with a red flag? No, instead it led to Cuba becoming one of the least religious countries in the Americas to this day, notwithstanding the liberalisation of freedom of religion in 1991.
>>2778546I agree with this for the most part other than to say that it doesn't inherently lead to atheism under socialism, agnosticism would also be a possible outcome (which seems to be the current direction China is going)
Anyone who wants to integrate Christianity, a religion that doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the USA, needs to grapple with this:
The New Testament was never meant as a law-code for ruling nations. That's what the Old Testament was for.
But, of course, since Jesus (supposedly and selectively) annulled the Old Testament, Christians don't have a a normative standard for what a "Christian nation" should be.
That's why every "Christian Nation" throughout history always relied on previously established pagan common law.
It's quite the predicament for Christian Nationalists when your "Christian West" never existed.
From what I've seen online, the only criteria for "Christian Nation" Christians have in their head is that all the citizens are nominally Christian.
Of course, they never go into detail about which Christian denomination should rule or what policies should be in place
It's LARP
And of course, when they DO go into policy, it's always about retarded culture war shit like gay marriage and abortion - and that's pretty much it.
(They abandoned the divorce talking points long ago since pretty much all of them have been remarried)
So there goes the Christian governance dilemma.
>>2778502umm i dont rlly identify as a niner because the association with tob pedos is embarrassing and i havent yet done the 7fw rites either soz. hidweh project is also much more than this stuff, it is just a significant influence. i want to work in more of chumbley's occultism in as well as sophiology
>>2778546>Marx further sees that exchange as an act is inherently abstract, so the idea that social relations "precede" abstraction is falsethis is true and in the blogpost i posted i do talk a little bit about value form theory and capital giving rise to an abstract form of social mediation. i meant like conscious abstraction. it is not simply a set of propositions people believe. also yes the "ethos" marx describes can be thought of as atheistic, insofar as it no longer tries to understand the world in terms of gods and goddesses outside of man .. though i have to say that this is more on the level of merely the theoretical understanding than full ethical character
>>2778619a lot of what you've said is generally true. you've actually brought out things ive sort of just been unconsciously operating on
>the exact opposite personality type of a leftist is not a committed rightoid […] it's a business founderthis is what lead me to the formulation of the "meedhsken" idea. it is sort of like a vanguard party but there is a spiritual element to it and its goal is not just governance (actually they should not have any formal authority outside of the democratic structure of the workers cooperative, but rather moral gravity and ethical authority). in general to me what makes sense is to first gather the most high initiative people. people who, even if not the most competent, are committed enough that they can build on themselves with time and on the initial material basis for the movement. some of these people may be labor aristocrats or generally privileged in some ways. when you do establish that economic base of your movement, it then becomes easier to pool in lower initiative people. my immediate priority w sangsoc is trans people so many might end up joining just based on economic necessity or social safety considerations. i think rule-following behaviour of rightoids can be good, but it does require that you had people establish the general framework of doing things to begin with. i dont think the current ways many parties organize provide much of a place for these people as it tends to be more focused on education rather than active construction. people that are low agency, initiative, and generally afraid of actual power might be the last to even join in tbh.. i mean i tend to share w anyone that seems like they are open to new approaches n stuff
>leftists are infinitely better people with an infinitely better diagnosis of the problems of society […]to me the most important thing is that they at the very least realize something is wrong. if you have that, they are open to myth. i think a disillusioned maga supporter could show more promise than some democrat entryist
>attracting only a weird subset of people who really want to be in a cult or lead a cultdont need to worry abt this because i basically am doing a cult.. that's not because of a strategic thing, but because i am a schizo. at the same time though i do think the initial high initiative people should probs be more cult-like in dedication. tbh in general my strategy presupposes the possibility that people are open to making collective financial decisions that should be highly heterodox within our current economic climate. for instance, securing collective accommodations that can be used to free up surplus value for other strategic activities. if a normal business asked you to think along such lines, it would be definitely be eye-brow raising. my ideas presuppose a certain level of collective vision on top of just the basic practical question of setting up cooperatives in our current economy in the first place
>>2778631im guessing because christianity has more of a history with socialist sort of ideas and movements, also the west is very influential when it comes to politics + many of those leftists talking are westerners. on top of that christianity takes that god-man element to centre stage which bridges the divine and human worlds. also the fact that the logos was made flesh ultimately redeems to material world which makes christianity much less life-denying than many eastern religions. confucianism is very conformist while taoism is anti-political. pagan stuff doesnt really lean much into any social teachings that are very communist? i guess animism would support something like usufruct tho .. as for islam, there are islamic socialists out there too, but probs has less of a history
i dont think 3rd worlders convert to christianity just to get stuff from white people, they do end up believing that stuff a lot of the time. there are successful non-white missionaries as well
>>2778668see acts, distributism, and the sophic economy
>>2778240I think its important to remember when he said 'opium of the masses', its a pre-drug war context where you had opium dens on the same level as going down to the pub today.
Opium use was pretty normal when Marx was alive - the lower classes would use them in dens and smoke it while the upper classes would drink a opium tincture
>>2778165Trve nuke, the left lacks absolute confidence in itself. Despite that we are the strongest we've been since the collapse of the USSR and seen an incredible trajectory in the past 10 years. I'm one of those leftist that thinks we are laying bricks for the future and we have a long road ahead but I think we will see revolutions in our life time but it's not hopeless.
As far as working with religious organizations, I've soften on my atheism. I think the Juedo-prots are a lost cause and the left is going to be organizing with islsmo-catholics at least in regards to anti-imperialsim. I also think that leftist orgs or anyone aspiring to create their own org should take advantage of the U.S complete lack of any regulation or oversight when it comes to religious organizations. It makes it neigh impossible for the IRS to audit you. Not that you should commit financial crimes *cough* but we've seen multiple churches in America are money laundering operations that pay no taxes. I mean liberty university just buys and sells real estate and pays zero taxes and then operates as a way to reproduce the class of far right evangelical pundits and workers.
>conscious abstractionWell, Marx in the 1844 manuscripts sees Communism as the self-determining concept of Man:
<In the same way atheism, being the supersession of God, is the advent of theoretic humanism, and communism, as the supersession of private property, is the vindication of real human life as man’s possession and thus the advent of practical humanism, or atheism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of religion, whilst communism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property. Only through the supersession of this mediation – which is itself, however, a necessary premise – does positively self-deriving humanism, positive humanism, come into being.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htmAn issue with this view is rather obvious - the object of immediacy cannot itself have relative being unless it gains self-reflection by abstract mediumship (Marx writes on this in his introduction to the Grundrisse).
Marx debases culture as a realm of circulation; a secondary attribute of production, but this is long before the advent of mass culture, entertainment and communication. Marx even died 3 years before the invention of the automobile, which mediates existence by travel. So the place of the medium or the totem is unduly disconsidered by Marx in precisely the same way as the Young Hegelians, rather simply and uncritically. If we got rid of the "illusions" and "spooks" of life, living by a plan of bare subsistence, there would be no meaning to life. Marx does speak on a liberated society here:
<in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htmSo then, is circulation to be a self-determined fact? Marx speaks twofold upon this however; seeing the market as moved by the "whims" of those with ability to purchase, and calling this the Edenic landscape of man's rights:
<This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htmHe contrasts this with the realm production, which is the underbelly of the public market. So then, if culture is determined by demand in the market, where else does the communist "critic" have meaning except in his public broadcast? As I would say; the real object of economic intervention is to provide necessities, but the rest is carte blanche. Marxists say that money is inherently alienating, since it objectifies our essence into a token, but maybe we need alienation. Maybe we need religion? Bordiga makes a comment on this here (1961):
<If under the guise of the squalid Catholic saints the most ancient form of a not-inhuman divinity, like the Sun, continues to live, this brings to mind what knowledge we have — all too often a travesty! — of the Incan civilization that Marx admired. It is not that they were primitive and ferocious enough to sacrifice the most beautiful specimens of their young to the Sun who cried out for human blood, but that such a community, magnificent and powerfully intuitive, recognised the flow of life in that same energy which the Sun radiates on the planet and which flows through the arteries of a living man, and which becomes unity and love in the whole species, which, until it falls into the superstition of an individual soul with its sanctimonious balance sheet of give and take, the superstructure of monetary venality, does not fear death and knows personal death as nothing other than a hymn of joy and a fecund contribution to the life of humanity.https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1961/janitzio.htmSo Bordiga idolises human sacrifice and waste as the pinnacle of comfort, since where it is voluntary, the life of the community lives in them, and in all things. I recently watched Avatar: Fire and Ash, and it is glamorous. Mark Fisher and Terence Mckenna have also spoken upon the relationship between the technological and the primitive; that the End of History is also a prehistoric moment (e.g. Communism and Primitive Communism). So, in the end, religion can be aestheticised for politics, I suppose.
But I lead with spirituality anyway; politics is a worldly affair, not befitting of too much attention.
>>2778237>opium is also used by many people recreational and medicinally without any real long term issuesbro are you fucking serious right now. Look at what the opium wars did to China
>>2779366yeah it's wild that some want to pander to the tiny % of religious people who are into "liberation theology" in exchange for potentially nothing, while sacrificing materialism, all for the good boy points of not repeating the "Bolshevik mistakes" of blowing up churches or whatever.
>>2779492>Sacrificing materialismTo play devils advocate, has strident materialism been a benefit to the socialist movement historically? Cause the far right has been ascendant for a while now.
>>2779516
It would be unabashed good for humanity at large if it could seize power, but the problem is it keeps being defeated by groups that don’t use the same framework that is just assumed to give socialism an advantage in political action
>>2779559
At present the Socialist movement in Western society, for however small and weak it is, still puts up some resistance to a hegemonic push for fascism. I’d say that’s a good.
>>2775185Proper theoretical grounding is absolutely necessary these false believes in non materialist ideas like God harms the philosophical integrity of the Vanguard
ideas like Creationism are metaphysically linked to certain ideas that poison even ideas in physics or god forbid history
So ideas that are fundamentally opposed to Dialectical-Materialism should be absolutely fought within our parties and cadres
may it be God Creationism Idealism Or the Big Bang
this does NOT however mean that fruitful alliances and strategic workings with specific groups on certain goals can not exist they absolutely can there is nothing wrong with working with liberation theology organizations but they should not pollute the party or our ideology
>>2779479im not blind to the opium wars but we're being disingenious if you think it represents a special case as to why opium legalization would be bad - at the same time the opium wars where happening, the entire world was using it recreationally, which was why the wars happened they needed to destabilize the country enough that they could keep syphoning it over and exporting it.
It was a colonial invasion and domination thing, suggesting it was a unique character of the drug and not just the system of imperial domination is NOT DIALECTICAL LIBERAL
>>2778240>in terms of recreation alcohol is far superior to opiatesthey're both terrible for you
>>2778796>Opium use was pretty normal when Marx was alivefentanyl use is "pretty normal" right now. exploitation of workers is "pretty normal" right now. religion is "pretty normal" right now. you're making this sneaky argument where you go "oh marx was ok with religion, he was just calling it the opium of the masses because it's just like this chill thing everyone does." marx's entire thing was criticizing and deconstructing things considered "normal." Here's the full quote:
>Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
>The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.Emphasis mine. Everyone ignores that second part in bold.
>>2779826
then you agree they're both terrible for you
>>2779499>To play devils advocate, has strident materialism been a benefit to the socialist movement historically?Yes. understanding that reality is real and not an illusion created by the demiurge or a hallucination you live inside or the dream of brahma or the thoughts of God and that when you get hit by a bus you are in fact getting hurt, and that your consciousness lives inside a thing called a brain that can sustain permanent damage is pretty much the starting point for doing empirical science, let alone scientific socialism. Reality is not a waiting room for heaven and hell. You should not do as the book of Ephesians instructs and "serve your earthly master with fear and trembling" with the hopes it will get you into heaven after you die. You have to combat your own oppression while you are still alive, not sit there and take it up the ass because reality is just secretly a test god is putting you through to see how much of a bootlicker you are so he can let you in the bootlicker club when you die while "rebels" go to burn forever with the king of rebels, satan.
>>2779850
Russia went form a semi-feudal backwater led by an emperor and Orthodox Christian clergy to being ahead of the USA in the space race in 40 years flat. Why? Because they abandoned religious autocratic metaphysical idealism and embraced secular socialist dialectical materialism.
>>2779850
What led to the current status quo is a revisionist idealist capitalist roader clique taking over the USSR. They abandoned materialism.
>>2779865
back up your shitty hypothesis that "materialism doesn't work" and explain why idealism is superior now.
>>2779863
they did a damn good job considering they were the first successful socialist seizure of state power in human history, and they had to survive a civil war, an invasion by 14 nations, a genocidal campaign by the nazis, an arms race with the USA, etc. history moves slow. success comes from failing, learning from mistakes, and trying again, not throwing the baby out with the bathwater and using the soviet relapse into idealist metaphysics as an excuse to condemn materialism.
>>2779865
you have it exactly backwards materialism worked fine. even the bourgeoisie have to some extent embraced materialism for their own class interests, though they still use idealism to control the workers.
>>2779883
>>2779884
>>2779887
are you the anon with the sprained ankle and the petty bourgeois family who is taking it out on everyone
>>2779904suddenly he is silent. i take that as a yes.
this thread fell apart because the people pushing idealism have no arguments, just vibes
>>2780102people should reply to me :3
>>2779621 >>2780137The epistles are not written by Christ, but the first anti-christ, Paul.
>>2780163Where did Jesus say that masters are superior to slaves? He told the rich that they will not go to heaven and to give away their wealth to the poor to be saved from the vanity of power. Paul told women to shut up in church; he said gays will not go to heaven, etc. That is not a Christ-like message.
>>2780137Its almost like marx worked out that religion is shaped by material conditions. Jesus was a reaction to slavery, he freed some people and we like him but he didn't end slavery and religion kept going as a dialetic used by the upper class for social control it doesn't make Jesus any less significant as a historical anti slavery figure
>>2780174hitler was a member of the christian religion called "positive christianity" which taught that paul was a jewish falsifier of the aryan jesus, he didn't really care about islam either way, but he hated pacifist religions (or at least religions that condoned non violence more) like catholicism, quakerism, jehovah's witnesses, etc
>>2780164>Paul told women to shut up in churchhe didn't though, that was written long after he lived by someone posing as paul, only the first 7 epistles or so are authentically written by paul
>>2780184Internally he might not have cared about Islam so much but massive efforts where made by the nazi leadership to adopt hitters fascism for the middle east in order to get support for the Northern African front
>>2780191i mean yeah it was purely a form of opportunism, i could have brought up the fact that ᴉuᴉlossnW had declared himself "protector of islam" in a similar effort as well
>>2780188First Corinthians is a Pauline epistle:
>Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.<1 Cor 14:34-5 >>2780251yes but it's agreed by the majority of scholars that this is an interpolation since it doesn't follow what comes before or after
>>2777989>Sorel’s concept of the revolutionary myth.looks it up<In Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel argues that revolutions are driven less by rational analysis than by deeply irrational, emotionally charged myths that bypass reason to inspire unity, justify violence, and propel collective action.this seems kinda idealist….
looks into Sorel's politics<Georges Sorel moved from Marxist sympathies through revolutionary syndicalism into a marked rightward, proto-fascist drift, as his rejection of rational politics and embrace of myth, violence, and anti-democratic instincts led him toward nationalist currents.Oh…
>>2780258well the church disagrees and they're keeping it in
really tells you how they feel
>>2780174>Islam needs a Germanic leaderlol the ego on this saltine
>>2780162>The epistles are not written by Christ, but the first anti-christ, Paul.I am the anon you are responding to… my only reply is that it's really convenient that Christians have this entire book of scripture that they tell you to read and obey but then you find out that it basically has every single possible opinion within it and Christians get to selectively reject or accept verses based on their individual ideology and interpretation. It loses its authoritative character entirely and becomes purely a tool for evangelizing based on the needs of the believer and the target. How did your religion get taken over by an "anti christ" so early on and why are his thoughts repeated ad nauseum?
It seems to me that the central figure of Christianity, the anointed one, Yeshua, left no writings, and rather spoke to gathered masses of people, and only long after he died were the gospels finally put to text, and even then, it was so disputed, we have four different versions just of the gospels alone. And then the class interests of the literate aristocrats and church fathers infected the interpretations of the new testament so that the poor and starving masses who may have been the original focus of the religion became de-prioritized in favor of the church-as-institution …
>>2780543Wait till you find out about hadith basically invalidating the entirety of the Quran
>>2780564>wuddabout other religions also being inconsistent and self contradictorywait until you find out i don't like religion in general
>>2780543>How did your religion get taken over by an "anti christ" so early on and why are his thoughts repeated ad nauseum? Its quite clear to see in the example of the Pharisees. There are those who profess the law vainly and proudly, and those who are humbled by service to righteousness. The thief on the cross was not baptised, prayed over, part of a specific sect, etc. yet he still asked Christ for forgiveness and it was granted to him. Christ did not come for the righteous, but sinners. A sinner thus may be more glad than a saint - and if you want evidence, look at all of the "heretics" and martyrs the roman church has persecuted.
>church as institutionAs Jesus says:
>For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them<Matt 18:20Church has no ceremony, but is simply the fellowship of believers. The Catholics are of course the Great Beast with the anti-Christ at its head. History speaks well enough for their crimes. But lets think, if Christ said not to murder, and a church commits murder, is it of Christ?
>>2780164>X says this awful stuff>>2780188<Noooo he didn't say that, that was someone else!>>2780251>Yes he did, heres the fucking source>>2780258<Yeah but but but but but but but its agreed by the majority that its not that way cause of interpolation interpretation Every religger discussion is like this, fucking pharisee uyghurs nitpicking worthless backwards shit for "feels"
"Atheism" is a religion no matter how much it tries to reject
>>2780585i'm not even religious, it's just a fact that this wasn't the intention and that it was falsified after the fact to support these beliefs they held
>>2780536i mean yeah, that's sort of the point
>>2780621>drinking water is the same as being thirsty>eating food is the same as starving to death>constipation is the same as pooping>up is down>left is right>forward is back>slavery is freedomwow your hegelianism is so powerful
>>2780621Is agnosticism also religion
>>2780534damn that's pretty fucked up
>>2777989explain yourself
>>2775185the western left is not "missing" some ideological secret sauce. it is missing the part where you stop arguing online and get shit done
note: am a hypocrite and a coward >>2781171
>why did no atheist here ever question the historicity of Jesus
i did, but i saw no one else do it either
>>2780180>Jesus was a reaction to slavery, he freed some peoplethat never happens in the new testament even once. what the fuck are you talking about. jesus has nothing to do with slavery. you are deeply confused. historical jesus, assuming he even existed, was part of a theological struggle in roman occupied judea between pharisees, essenes, zealots, sadducees, and early christians i.e. the movement around jesus. early christianity was not a movement against slavery, and it wasn't even overtly against roman occupation. it was a theological/philosophical movement which advocated paying taxes to rome i.e. "rendering unto caesar what is caesar's" and pacfiism i.e. "turn the other cheek" and "forgive your transgressors". the most radical and violent thing jesus does it not against slavery or roman occupation, but against something he perceives as blasphemous: Money lenders in the temple. where did you get the idea that jesus frees slaves?
>>2781171
> why did no atheist here ever question the historicity of Jesus, the gospels or the authorship of the Bible, despite ample room to do so?
>And I do think that’s the big issue overall: In actual leftist spaces, few are willing to take on Christian theology.
christian theology and the historicity of jesus are two different questions. there probably is a historical figure who became the basis for early christianity. whether he even closely resembles the jesus of the four gospels (written between 70 and 150 CE) is a different question entirely. The fringe hypothesis of Caesar's Messiah says that the gospels were fabricated by Titus and Josephus to create a pacifistic form of Judaism that would submit to Rome. While that is possible the evidence is circumstantial, and even if it were true, it is not incompatible with a historical Jesus who they based their fabricated religion around. Imagine if a few hundred years from now a religion sprung up around some half-remembered political martyr from the 20th century. The question of a historical Jesus isn't a question of whether the character Jesus existed but whether that character was based on a forgotten real person or not.
>>2781171
>That goes for both idpol-type stuff and economic policy. Like, the Bible never calls for property abolition ever, not even in the passages liberation theologians use as talking points
i'm with you on most of this post but I gotta say Acts 4:32 comes pretty close
<All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.
>>2781184>>2781184The glaring issue is that this does go against the commandment on not coveting for other’s goods as well as the prohibition of theft that rests on the notion of private property.
Honestly, this cuts into what I think is the crux of the issue: Most socialist and capitalist Christians often overlook the fact that Christianity, at the end of the day, is a pre-modern religion that began as a bunch of multiple and often conflicting sects before being consolidated (albeit incomplete) into the Catholic Church, and as such the Bible doesn’t have an economic theory that neatly fits into either capitalism or communism/socialism since both capitalist and socialist economic theories arose as products of modernity, although to be fair modernity in itself is heavily influenced by Christianity via either acceptance or rejection of it.
Overall, while I do think Christianity is closer to socialism than the free-market dogmatism that characterises right-libertarian nutjobs, Christianity doesn’t exactly affirm socialism either.
Anyway, please do read the following article for I think it provides good counter-rebuttals to many of the liberation theology arguments as it concerns economics, and does provide some interesting takes for all sides of this thread’s debate:
https://billmuehlenberg.com/2016/05/30/bible-private-property/ >>2780621not really. most atheism is entirely passive. you wouldn't say that sitting on the couch is a sport.
you're on much stronger ground when you recognize that many "non-religious" things (which both religious and non-religious people take part in) are basically ersatz religions without the supernatural nonsense: politics, fandoms, etc.
and, for religious people in the first world, the substitute is often clearly stronger than the "real deal" (e.g. non-zero numbers of US christians would spurn a returning Christ if he got on the wrong side of Donald J. Trump.)
>>2780621>"Atheism" is a religion no matter how much it tries to rejectthis accusation is better reseved for civic religions like confucianism or american civic religion, or the roman cult of the emperor. vid highly related btw
>>2781201>you're on much stronger ground when you recognize that many "non-religious" things (which both religious and non-religious people take part in) are basically ersatz religions without the supernatural nonsense: politics, fandoms, etc. this
Unique IPs: 85