Jon Johanning wrote:
>
> That's where Marxism turns essentially into a kind of religious faith,
> IMHO. (Whenever they hear this, the old-line Marxists go wild, I know.
> But some newer-line Marxists are willing to accept that it is a kind
> of
> religion, although a sort of "scientific" one.)
I have long ceased, _as a marxist_, to be bothered by this label; that's what the opponents of any world view do -- they throw labels at it. It's a nice sport.
But as a student of language and literature, I object, and object strongly, to this silly use of "religion" simply as a pejorative label, because it empties the word "religion" of all content. It is a pretty sloppy word at best, given the number of different specific religions claiming the title. When you then simply use it as a (not-so-clever) epithet, you take some more life out of it.
If you disagree with marxism, or with certain aspects of it, the english language is large and flexible enough to find a way of expressing your point without this spoiling of a useful word. Your rhetorical skills can't be so impoverished that you need to use this stale chestnut.
I am put in mind of a disastrous freshman comp paper topic I gave out 40+ years ago. (I gave out many disastrous topics, but I remember this one so vividly because it drove home to me how unfortunate was the habit of stretching making all eulogistic terms synonymous with each other and all dyslogistic terms synoymoous with each other.) I asked them to describe "thoughtfulness." In the papers I got in, "thoughtfulness" described every conceivable human virtue. You are spoiling the word "religion" as they were spoiling the word, "thoughtfulness."
Several billion people on this earth self-label as adherents of this or that religion. Why steal the word from them. The last semester I taught, I had this student in a class who was (a)about the best student in the class (b) was a fundamentalist xtian, (c) really liked the class and my teaching of it, and (d) really really felt bad that some one she admired was going to hell. She gave me a couple books at the very end of the semester in the hopes that they would convince me. Your use of the word "religion" would (quite rightly) seem silly to her.
Carrol