However, I think I would use the term "religion" more conventionally. Most actual religious people believe in god. If most religious people interpreted religion as you elucidate below, it would not be such a political problem.
The criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism, according to the Moor. I wouldn't make that the major job of criticism. But it has to be continuously explicit, and not quiet in the context of so many explicit affirmations of theism.
One idea of atheism is that nothing is unknowable in principle. There are unknowns, but not unknowables. Religion in the conventional sense holds that there are unknowables, infinite mysteries. I would venture the guess that workers accepting the idea of unknowables in church tends to their accepting that most IMPORTANT political and economic questions are unknowable, and to leave them up to the Democrats, as Katha mentions - to The Democrats and the bishops of the ecumenical synods.
We must break the longstanding position of the Left that because Martin Luther King , Malcolm X or Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth or secular humanist religious organizers were great radical heroes whose god and religion we therefore respect, that we do not continue the vital Marxist tradition of explicitly, continuously criticizing the main public figures representing god and religion INCLUDING CRITICIZING THEIR RELIGION. A main aspect of this criticism must be philosophical. I am using "philosophical" conventionally here also.
Charles Brown
>>> Mathew Forstater <forstate at levy.org> 06/03 12:36 AM >>>
I would add that one can also be religious and an atheist. religion does
not have to mean god or any 'other being' or external 'higher power.'
maybe people prefer to call it philosophy or art or inspiration or
communalism or science or shared commitment. how many movements or
campaigns have failed partly due to big egos, lack of mutual respect,
mental or emotional hang-ups, because people couldn't get along,
resolve personality conflicts, etc. why, e.g. might certain music, say
john coltrane be politically subversive? because it can be liberatory.
freedom and liberation mean something for the human heart and mind and
"spirit" as well as for politics and economics. it doesn't take the place
of real social and political action. but it can (must?) be part of the
motivating force, the "common-sense," a collective healing force to combat
the real human sicknesses that allow/motivate people to kill and exploit
and rape and slave. i am not talking about something that takes the place
of real political organization. but an ethic, an acknowledgment of the
dignity of life, of profound meaningfulness in shared experience,
laughter, creative expression, bonds between people, beauty of nature. i
don't have a problem calling the necessary struggle for self-realization
or "internal" liberation and freedom that must accompany the necessary
struggle for political economic social liberation and freedom and
emancipation "religion," though it has nothing to do with "god" for me and
i don't care if someone else would rather use another term. cynicism,
disrespect, impatience, egotism, despair, mental and emotional suffering,
etc. are plentiful on the left, and hinder progressive social change. i'm
sure this will seem silly to many. eurocentrism dichotomizes art
and politics, the "internal" and the "external", the material and the
spiritual. this is not hocus pocus to me; i really think that mass mental
illness and sickness of the human heart is part the problem--the
political, economic, and social problem. and anything that is part of the
healing process I have no trouble calling religion. it is, like everything
else, a social product. but that doesn't make it less powerful than
anybody's "god," which to me is a pure figment of the imagination, a
symbol. it makes it most powerful and most real, not replacing social and
political struggle, but part of it.
On Tue, 2 Jun 1998, Charles Brown wrote:
the ideology of atheism has been utterly
silenced....
>
> but some how atheists have to have more of a voice in public discourse. We
must struggle to legitimize it.
>
> And I think leaving public discourse on "god" to believers is a
profoundly corrupting influence on mass consciousness that does
contribute to the current collapse of the left and triumph of the
bourgeoisie .
>
> Charles Brown
>