> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>> Also, religion _is_ an ideology: and ideologies are only broken _within
>> the framework_ of a struggle against the conditions which generate the
>> ideology, NOT by a direct struggle against the ideology itself. The old
>> image of pushing on a string comes to mind.
>
> A lovely piece of base-superstructure vulgarity. How do you "struggle
> against the conditions" if people, in the grip of ideology, don't see the
> condition as either a problem, or transformable by collective action? But
> it fits in nicely with your whole "nothing to be done" position - since
> "we" are too few and too weak, we can't do anything until conditions
> ripen. How and when that might happen is anyone's guess.
It just didn't make sense to me. For one thing, saying that religion is an ideology seems to me to be casting a rather wide net. A _particular_ religion is certainly an ideology, but religion _in general_ seems to be something less arbitrary-- one might as well say that "spiritual pain" or "sexual desire" are ideologies. It may very well be that the religious impulse is something that's nearly universal in humans, to varying degrees.