Yes. And I would say that on the whole it is not even useful to "confront" religion; I think marxists (confining the argument to that sphere or the moment) need to be conscious of _why_ they reject religion, Carrol <<<<<>>>>>
religion is not subject that occupied much of marx's attention after 'early' years, 'mature' guy considering religion principally in terms of its affect on economic behavior & institutions (see *grundrisse* & *capital* for analysis of role of church in matters of capital & property), for example: 'the religious world is but the reflex of the real world And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby the reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour - for such a society, christianity with its *cultus* of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, protestantism, deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion' (capital, vol. 1, int'l pub., p. 79)
additionally, km writes: 'everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their noses in. But the workers' party ought at any rate...to have expressed its awareness of the fact that bourgeois 'freedom of conscience' is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part it endeavors rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion. but one chooes not to transgress the 'bourgeois' level' (critique of gotha programme, 'selected works', int'l pub., 333-334)
and in an interview, km answered questioner thusly: 'we know that violent measures against religion are nonsense; but this is an opinon: as socialism grows, religion will disappear' ('an interview with karl marx in 1879, aims, 19)
recall reading somewhere that m's daughter eleanor remarked after his death that antipathy had not prevented him from telling her when she was growing up that whatever else christianity may be, it had taught love of children... Michael Hoover
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