The problem is that many of us, irreligious leftists, in America do not have any particular place to go and work with our fellow believers every Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, unlike religious leftists. The lack of standing secular left institutions keeps secular leftists an insignificant minority, for people who become politicized have nowhere to go in many places, and it makes religious institutions the only ones to which people can turn. The vaccum becomes especially a problem in a time like this.
> Despite your many suggestions, I'm not convinced the left has generally
> thought or made it appear otherwise. Any historical left-wing intolerance
> towards religion has been aimed, not at the mass of believers, but at
> instances where reactionary clerics have often had the blood of massacred
> dissenters and innocents on their hands.
Indiscriminate anti-clericalism made political sense when the Catholic Church, a centralized institution, also had vast land holdings and its clerics were a class unto itself, but it doesn't make sense in Islam, Protestantism, and other decentralized religions, and probably even the Catholic Church today, where some clerics are on the Left, some are on the Right, and there is a vast middle inbetween. In Protestant denominations like Congregationalism and Presbyterianism, pastors are more employees of their congregations than national churches, for each congregation chooses its own. If possible, we want to draw a political line so that we can put ourselves on the side of a majority.
General anti-clericalism won't do in the USA. Nor will it in West Asia.
> I don't think your views about religious belief represent a departure from
> Marxism. That seems a side issue.
Has it been an issue? No one said anything like that here or on PEN-l, to my knowledge, in this and related threads. Not that I would care if anyone did. Since when has Marxism become like the Catholic Church? :->
> Your critics are reacting to something
> more specific: what they regard as a romanticizing of political Islam and a
> corresponding softness towards crimes committed by the Islamic clergy
> against the Iranian left. It may be another case where differences get
> magnified and the debate becomes artificially polarized on both sides, but,
> given the gravity of the issue, maybe not.
The record of the Iranian Revolution on political executions, imprisonment, and so on should be evaluated by the same standard we employ in evaluating other revolutions, bourgeois nationalist, populist, or socialist. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>