--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> structures that they think give birth to it. Based
> on their personal
> experience, they often mistakenly believe that, for
> workers, peasants,
> and others below their own stations in life to
> "convert" to socialism
> or communism, they, too, must first develop
> criticism of religion,
> just as they did. But that is not so. Their
> personal conversion
> experiences cannot be generalized. Poor people come
> to socialism or
> communism in their own ways, usually not through
> criticism of
> religion, and they may choose to be active in both
> their church and
> party which is also like a church to them. After
> all, the essence of
> both, at their best, is fellowship, so there is no
> reason why it is
> impossible to combine them, while maintaining
> capacity to criticize
> both, though in practice it is often difficult to do
[WS:] One cannot look at religion in abstraction - it can be a very diffrent thing to different people and in different times. Marx's criticim of religion grew out of it role in the 19th century Germany as a major pillar of the bourgeois status quo. The same can be said about Russia. His rejection of religion was really a rejection of class division based on cultural identities legitimated by religion, but I do not think he particularly cared for the doctrine itself. Taken out that socisal context, religion is reduced to nothing more than poorly written literature.
My objection to religion goes along similar lines - it can be a conservative political institution in the US society, and as such it is the enemy. However, not all religion is such an institution cf. unitarian universalists or even sections of mainline protestant or catholic churches. Therefore, my "rule of thumb" in treatment religions is as follows:
If someone believes in fairy tales, Santa Claus, Invisible Hand and kindred figments of imagination - its is the job of a literary critic to analyze and critique it.
If someone acts on such beliefs - this becomes the job of a shrink.
If someone insists that others act on such beliefs - it is the job of a prosecutor or, if that fails, a revolutionary.
Wojtek
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