[lbo-talk] M. Parenti joins the New Atheists?

[Voyou]

On Wed, 2010-03-24 at 11:51 -0700, Dennis Claxton quoted Marx:
> >Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and 
> >self-esteem of man who has either not yet won 
> >through to himself, or has already lost himself 
> >again. But man is no abstract being squatting 
> >outside the world. Man is the world of 
> >man­state, society. This state and this society 
> >produce religion, which is an inverted 
> >consciousness of the world, because they are an 
> >inverted world. Religion is the general theory 
> >of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its 
> >logic in popular form, its spiritual point 
> >d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, 
> >its solemn complement, and its universal basis 
> >of consolation and justification. It is the 
> >fantastic realization of the human essence since 
> >the human essence has not acquired any true 
> >reality. The struggle against religion is, 
> >therefore, indirectly the struggle against that 
> >world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

If that's what Parenti's doing, that's great, but, from the Counterpunch
article, it looks more like he's engaging in the same project as Dawkins
or Hitchens. Rather than criticizing religion diagnostically, attempting
to discover through a critique of religion both the "inverted world" it
represents, and explain how it became inverted, they treat religion as a
set of truth claims, which they then show to be false. The problem with
this is, as Marx said:


> The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their 
> activity when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” 
> They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only 
> opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real
> existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this 
> world.

The problem I have with all these attempts to show that religion is
false isn't that they offend the delicate sensibilities of believers,
but that they seem so boring. It's obvious that, interpreted literally
and evaluated by the norms we use to evaluate most truth claims, the
bible is false (even biblical literalists don't deny this!), so why
write whole books repeating this obvious statement? If people want to
spend their time doing that, it's their time to waste; but I find the
mindset of those who want to do that to be almost as incomprehensible as
the mindset of those who claim the bible to be (in some curious and
never entirely specified sense) true.

-- 
Voyou <voyou1 at gmail.com>
<http://blog.voyou.org>