>joanna bujes lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org, Wed, 24 Dec 2003 09:49:55 -0800:
>
>>The current discussion partly related to whether the left needed to
>>grapple with religious/spiritual issues other than to denounce them
>>as "the opium of the people." In this respect, I am arguing that
>>being able to speak of religious feeling/practices that fall
>>outside of organized religion is important.
>
>It seems to me that the main context in which leftists' opinions
>about religious feelings & practices really matter is that of
>religious leftists debating religious issues with their right-wing
>opponents within their own congregations/denominations/faiths.
Religious beliefs and practices are easily understood from a materialist conception. The fact that religion has served an essential social purpose through most of human history must be assumed from its pervasiveness. The exact material value of religion to society through the millennia is not hard to work out either, even if it is somewhat shrouded by the literal beliefs which clothe religion. But although the literal beliefs differ widely, the basic material functions are always the same. To preserve the values and culture of a society, essential to its cohesiveness and thus its viability, through the generations.
What is essential for social radicals to comprehend is that the religious system of preserving cultural values and beliefs is an obstacle for those who want to create a society based on new values and beliefs. Because religion is entirely concerned with preserving existing values and traditions.
But all is not entirely lost. As it happens the very system which we wish to replace, capitalism, is also the enemy of religion. Capitalism repeatedly finds itself needing to quickly uproot existing values and traditions and replace them with new one, to suit the new material conditions it creates. So the very system of preserving old values intact from generation to generation, the religious culture, is an obstacle to capitalism.
Religion is the common enemy of both the existing capitalist system and the socialist opposition to capitalism. Just because we sometimes appear to have positions in common with various religious strands of thought doesn't change that, it just means that there are some particular aspects of past culture which we both wish to preserve and capitalism needs to destroy. But it is *our* interests to find a different way to preserve these values, rather than dogmatic faith. We must advocate for certain values because they are in the objective best interests of humanity, not merely for dogmatic reasons.
Although of course the reason these beliefs became incorporated into religious dogma in the first place was that they represented a social good. But the point is that religion takes far too long to adapt its dogma to changed material circumstances, dogmatic preservation of social values is simply impractical in a society where social values must be amenable to more rapid change to adapt to changing material circumstances.
But of course the notion that religion is merely the "opium of the people" fails to acknowledge all the (other) material functions of religion. The main ones. Even to dismiss the need for an opiate outright is narrow-minded, an opiate has been entirely the appropriate social prescription for most of human history. Not much else could be done about human misery so long as the material conditions were lacking to lift everyone out of that misery. It is entirely the wrong prescription now, when a cure (socialism) is materially possible, but that doesn't mean we can assert that the religious opiate was always the wrong prescription.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas