----- Original Message ----- From: "Julio Huato" <juliohuato at gmail.com>
Believing that the Bible is God's word -- distorted or straight or whatever -- is not necessarily an obstacle for people to join the struggle for a better life. Anything, even certain paralyzing, nihilistic interpretations of Marxism, can be used as an excuse for not moving or for fostering cynicism and alienation -- as if the system didn't do enough of that already. I'd rather have people willing to fight, even if they use mysticism and faith on extranatural forces to rationalize their fight. ___________________________________
There were people who called themselves Marxists who built Gulags and tortured and killed millions of people. There were religious people who laid down their lives to protect indigenous people from imperial predators and there were other religious people who died in the fight for civil rights in the U.S. There is little that irritates me more about the left than their contempt for religion.
Here is Mario Savio recounting his first experience of reading Marx.
"It was sometime during high school, and late on as it seems to me, that I took a one-semester course in economics. Part of the course was devoted to "other economic systems" -- economic systems, that is, other than our own. I don't recall the context now, but in the textbook I encountered for the first time the following words...."From each according to his ability; to each according to his need!"
I was a religious sort: I have two aunts who are nuns, and under other circumstances I might have become a priest. To my naive mind, the beauty of these words was astonishing. It still is. Now I was worried. For it seemed to me that these words possessed a biblical sort of purity. I could imagine Jesus Christ himself speaking them in the Sermon on the Mount. But these were the words of Karl Marx, the prince of devils, the Antichrist, the ultimate generator of international Communism. How evil could the Communists be to succeed in twisting and idea as touching as this?"
He then recounts his father's life -- an immigrant from southern Sicily -- and how, despite his father's denunciation of communism, this life was a perfect illustration of Marx's exhortation.
To denounce religious feeling, to have contempt for those who have a spiritual practice is to alienate a very powerful and natural ally. I am certainly not saying that all members of organized religion could be such allies, but many are. Dismissing them is as much of a mistake as dismissing women's concerns as not being political, it is as much of a mistake as worshipping at the altar of technological progress.
We live and learn. I'd say this is the next important lesson.
Joanna