[lbo-talk] Marxism and Religion

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Tue Feb 27 23:39:48 PST 2007


I intended my remarks to be a relatively value-neutral description of what I thought the appeal and role of religion in American life was, not an endorsement. My ideas actually track the young Marx's hardly positive view of German (European) Christianity: it is the heart of heartless world, the soul of soullessness conditions, the cry of the oppressed, the opium of the masses. (A close paraphrase from memory.)

I think that you have to understand what religion does and function it serves in a particular context if you want to start to get answer to your own question, why "Americans build community based on
> reality instead of
> misguided beliefs." You may have noticed that
ordinary rational critique in the Enlightenment mode of Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alambert, Hume and De Holbach or Paine -- or the anarchist tradition, which inherited this rationalistic mode of critique of religion -- has absolutely no effect on the faith of the faithful. That is because it is not belief based on rational sustainability of theoretical or normative propositions as such. It serves other functions and needs. We have to understand the world in order to change it.

If you just say, "that's like believing in Santa Claus," you fruitlessly alienate people to no purpose and miss the point. I don't say that you and the Enlightenment tradition are wrong about the truth value of beliefs in supernatural entities, virgin births, resurrections and redemptions and the like. I agree that those beliefs are false. But arguing about the rationality of their beliefs with the faithful, which beliefs (the religious themselves will tell you) are not based on rational sustainability but on faith, is not merely an idle waste of energy, it is actively counterproductive. And blaming people to finding solace where they can in a world that is hostile to human flourishing and very hard to change is really blaming the victim.

I don't say it's not appropriate to keep the fanatics from imposing their beliefs on others. But if you want to see the vast majority of nonfanatical but religious Americans abandon unsupportable beliefs (the least of the problems with religion) and build communities based on reality, you will have to see what religion does for them and therefore why they believe it. And you will have to be in a position, and this is very difficult, to contribute to helping them find the things they find in religion in other institutions that are not based around religion. Otherwise you are wasting your breath.

--- Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:


> joanna wrote:
> >>I
> >>think what most religious Americans get from their
> own
> >>participation in religion, apart from the usual
> vague
> >>comfort of the feeling that someone is watching
> over
> >>them in a benign sort of way, is a sense of
> community,
> >>maybe even a real community, that is hard to find
> >>elsewhere.
> >>
> >>
> >
> > Absolutely, I think Woj has spoken of this most
> convincingly.
>
> Then why don't Americans build community based on
> reality instead of
> misguided beliefs in Santa Claus?
>
> I'm flabbergasted at the circle jerk for religion
> going on here. I have
> to wonder what you all would say if I started
> defending religious belief
> in creationism as something that helps comfort
> people.
>
> Chuck0
> ___________________________________
>
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>

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