kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jul 2000 08:31:55 PDT Carl Remick <carlremick at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Religion is at least as great a menace to overall human potential as
> capitalism and is a good deal more entrenched.
This is confused. Religion can't be viewed in isolation from the social relations in which it appears. Marx's view (whether accurate or not) was that religion would disappear within a society in which social relations had become transparent. His model for this (I suspect) was the relative attenuation of religion (or some forms of religion) as the advances in natural sciences demystified natural phenomena, and by analogy (?) a demystification of social forces would complete the undermining of religion. Whether this will be the case or not, it seems reasonable at least to assume that religion would at least be less destructive in a social order not characterized by exploitative social relations.
>
> Religion is also a great menace to capitalism, take some passages from the
> christian scriptures: "my house shall be a house of prayer: but you have made
> it a den of robbers" ... "the whole group of those who believed were of one
> heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but
> everything they owned was held in common..."
Any belief which encourages those with negative reactions to current social relations to withdraw is not only not a menace to those relations but aggressively supports them. Jehovah's Witnesses' practice among themselves is, I believe, strongly communal, but the political effect of the religion is to neutralize many who would potentially be serious opponents of capitalism.
>
> Normally those who follow up on this are called cultists...
See G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, *The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, Cornell Univ. Press, 1981 for an excellent description of the way Christianity from the very beginning was favorable to ruling class interests. He very neatly explodes the legend that Christianity was originally "communist" and favorable to slaves.
Carrol