[lbo-talk] Marxism and Religion

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 3/3/07, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
> > Among the religions of the book, the oldest is Judaism, so one might
> > suppose that it is the most difficult to square with science and
> > modernity, but it turns out not only that the largest branch of
> > American Judaism, Reform Judaism, is perfectly capable of doing so
> > but
> > also that Reform Jews hold a more progressive foreign policy view
> > than
> > secular "Just Jewish" Jews (who are themselves to the left of most
> > other groups in America), according to the AJC survey cited by a
> > recent Ha'aretz article (cf.
> >
> <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070219/0036
> 89.html>).
>
> All that appears to be true, but I take it that you are not going to
> argue that Reform Judaism is anyway typical of the forms of
> religiosity that are prevalent in the US.  You might also wish
> to keep in mind that in the US, and elsewhere, there has been
> a sharp shift to the right, theologically and even to some extent
> politically among Orthodox Jews.  Within the world of Orthodox
> Judaism, you will find more than a few people who are sympathetic
> towards creationism and intelligent design.  In fact in Israel
> some of the writings of American creationists like Duane Gish
> and Henry Morris have been translated in Hebrew and given
> circulation among ultra-Orthodox Jews there.  There is
> also strong opposition to Darwinism among many American
> Orthodox Jews as well. (see:
> <http://tinyurl.com/o459y> for a study of attitudes towards
> evolution among Orthodox Jewish university students).
<snip>
> Yes, the US is by far the leading stronghold of creationism
> but there are some strong proponents of creationism
> in Europe too, especially in eastern Europe where
> there have been attempts to suspend the teaching
> of evolution in state schools. Also, in Italy Berlusconi,
> back when he was prime minister attempted to limit
> the teaching of evolution in Italian schools, but he
> was forced to retreat in the face of public protests.

There are old and new oppositions to Darwinism out there in each
faith, but it seems to me that it's a politically marginal force in
every faith except literalist varieties of Christianity in the USA.

I looked into the Berlusconi affair.  His swift reversal after protest
basically confirms that there is no mass base for creationism in
Italy.

"Berlusconi le dice "no" a Darwin "
<http://www.clarin.com/diario/2004/04/28/i-02301.htm>
"Berlusconi vuelve atrás con la censura a Darwin "
<http://www.clarin.com/diario/2004/04/29/i-02802.htm>


> One can talk all one wants about Christian scientists,
> but we must also confront the fact
> that the scientific community has seen a very sharp drop
> in the proportion of its members who accept theism
> within the past 150 years.  In 1914 US psychologist James H. Leuba
> did a survey study of religious belief among scientists and he
> found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed
> disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to
> near 70% among the 400 "greater" scientists within his sample.
> Leuba, twenty years later, repeated his survey in a
> somewhat different form, and found that these percentages had increased
> to 67 and 85, respectively.

God is certainly a hypothesis irrelevant to natural science.  But most
people in the world are not natural scientists and won't be able to do
much natural science in the foreseeable future, and if we have to wait
till a lot of scientific education kicks God out of their universe
before we can build a Left, we might as well give up.

The paradox for secular leftists is that people whom we must claim our
constituency -- a majority of peasants and workers of the world --
tend to be more religious than those whose stations are above them.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>