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Marx's "opiate of the people" thing is a bit ambiguous and I think is often taken out of context. Opiates aren't necessarily a bad thing, after all, like if you're in massive and debilitating pain they're probably the best thing for you. Religion and left wing politics absolutely are compatible, just look at liberation theology or the long tradition of church involvement in civil rights or in socialist movements in both the US and UK. In the old left christian socialists were pretty common, the wholesale realignment of American christians towards the right is actually a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to Reagan a significant chunk of politically involved US christians were left of centre, though I suspect many of them were already drifting away from the left for awhile before that due to the socially liberal realignment taking place in the new left of the 60s and 70s with the drug use, promiscuity and whatnot that came with it. And on the whole the proto-brocialist new left as a project was pretty awful in terms of its unreconstructed sexual politics, its patronsing, idealising attitude to minorities and its unfocused attitude to collective political action so maybe the christian socialists it alienated had a point.
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Mar 6, 2017 17:40
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I think a generalised hostility to religion on the left is a really bad thing to have. Churches, mosques and temples are excellent organising spaces, form the centrepieces of a lot of communities and often work on charitable outreach to the poor and needy in their vicinity. What leftists should be doing is getting involved in religious organisations and turning them towards socially redeeming and progressive causes. A church need only be as reactionary as its congregation.
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Mar 7, 2017 01:47
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From reading this thread I've grown convinced the mediaeval church was entirely right and proper in persecuting atheists for so long.
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Mar 8, 2017 05:46
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To put another slant on things, the scientific worldview used to mean acknowledging all things are possible, these days it seems it's been appropriated towards whittling away the very idea of possibility itself, narrowing our imaginative horizons and banalising the world to promote a paralysing, pedantic sociocultural stasis. For this reason the left should be more hostile to the turgid scientific (or, more properly, science-fetishist) chauvinism of the new atheists and more open to religion, because at least religion posits an alternative vision of the world beyond the stagnant, exhausted cultural landscape of the early 21st century. Religions are bodies of mythology. Myths are the foundational dogmas of human society, their historicity or factual, scientific basis is irrelevant to their symbolic power and consequent social significance. If the left wants to do away with religion it needs to make new, compelling myths of its own, think beyond reality and posit a vision of something better than this rudderless, meaningless poo poo.
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Mar 9, 2017 11:27
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If we remove religion from its role in public life without fashioning it a suitable replacement we do capital's work for it by demolishing one of the last vectors for collective political action, one of the last anchors in the social sphere that people can hold onto in order to glean meaning for their lives. If y'all believed as the anarchist Buenaventura Durruti did, that "the only illuminating church is a burning church," I could at least get on board, as Durruti had a competing vision for society that was radical, transformative and transcendant, in stark contrast to whatever vestigial, incremental half-measures the dessicated husk of the modern left can muster.rudatron posted:If it is to survive, any political ideology must face this situation with a clarity of purpose, a strong basis in materialism and scientific thinking, and without any sentimentality for archaic prejudices or relationships. We will ban sentiment, ban love, ban dancing and poetry and all these other things and live our lives as empty husks dully regurgitating only proven facts at each other. quote:In that context, advocating any kind of return of mysticism, mythology or spirituality to political ideology is dangerous and stupid. You misunderstand the concept of myth. The power of a myth I'm talking about is not in its factual basis or historicity, myths can be absolutely true or absolutely false, that's immaterial to their social purpose. The point is that they allow us to imagine things beyond the dull reality of our existence and hypothesize a future. Currently, the future is canceled or on indefinite hold. All our visions of the future drawn from the present reality are utterly monstrous as they follow the trajectory currently existing conditions mark out. You don't see utopias in popular fiction because capital, as a self-appointed patron and arbiter of art and culture just like the mediaeval church was, has a vested interest in you thinking things can't get better than they are and there is no alternative. That's why being able to think of and take seriously things that aren't immediately real and extant is so important. The future can be a promise again, rather than a threat, but this requires a feat of collective imagination akin to religious fervour. To reiterate, sure, get rid of religion, but have a replacement on hand, or you'd only be forfeiting a ready-made conduit for resistance down the line.
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Mar 9, 2017 15:55
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I think what bugs me about the continued attack on religion by a lot of self-professed atheists, particularly those of scientific backgrounds, is that they engage in a great deal of whig history. There seems to be a pervasive belief that religion is and always has been anti-scientific, when through much of human history the sciences and human knowledge in general have been pursued and protected by religious scholars. Other things like heliocentrism or the idea of a round planet or the theory of evolution were actually quite uncontroversial when they came about. The publication of Darwin's On the Origin of the Species, particularly, was pretty much a non-event in the religious circles and what little religious opposition there was to it was from what was essentially the christian left of the day due to evolutionary theory's appropriation by imperialists who used it to justify scientific racism and colonialism. It wasn't really until the Scopes trial that it became such a hot-button issue. The earth has been widely considered to be round since ancient Greece and the flat earthers only emerged in the 19th century as part of a counter-enlightenment tendency that also gave birth to the romanticist movement. Another thing I find funny is the idea that (of course) religion should not have primacy over our lives, but that somehow science should. As if we haven't been living under what is essentially a technocracy since the end of the second world war. If you want scientific management don't worry, it's already here and it's expanding, it's the future Silicon Valley's offering. It's automation, it's abandoning this planet once we use it up and loving off into space. It's the transhumanist libertarian hellscape Peter Thiel wants. Capitalists and science-fetishists both want to destroy religion, because religion offers a competing idea of our worth as human beings, of our place in the universe and our duty towards the earth we live on. There are almost certainly other, better ideas to be had, but none of them are as powerful or present right now as capitalism or religion. Think about it. Climate change denialists are in the white house, accelerating capitalism's war against the viability of life itself, while the Holy Father, nominal head of one of the world's largest and most secularly powerful religions is telling his followers that they must do more to protect the environment. https://twitter.com/Pontifex/status/611518771186929664 TomViolence fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 14:56
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Cingulate posted:Ok, and here's what's perhaps my most controversial conviction here: currently, the best societies in the world are the most secular. This means something. It matters. It's not a super convincing argument by itself - after all, historically, atheist-in-name regimes don't have such a good track record. Explain what you mean by "best" societies. When I look at the secular liberal west I don't see a gleaming city on a hill, I see one whose ostensible greatness is built on a foundation of corpses. The west boasts the "best" societies because it's made much of the rest of the world a great deal harder to live in, to suggest that we have better lives because we're relatively secular puts the blame for this squarely on the victims of our own imperialism, painting them as regressive bumpkins doomed from clinging to their retrograde beliefs. See, this is why I say religion is a nexus of resistance to capital's overreach, often it's the only thing left to those it butchers, exploits and discards.
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Mar 10, 2017 15:43
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rudatron posted:Rather than formulating an opposition, religion has historically, and continues to be, complicit in further entrenching the power of capitalism, and the hierarchy of society. Yeah, like all those black churches in the civil rights movement, the diggers, the levelers, Gandhi, Jean Bertrand-Aristide, Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King and Malcom X all prove, religion is the preserve of the willing handmaidens of capital and empire and can never serve a radical, democratic or socialist agenda. rudatron posted:You still loving sure organized religions going to be any kind of opposition to that worldview right there, of ignorant I never once referred to organised religion, save for mentioning the pope, who as you say breaks from the established values of the catholic church. Should leftists be hostile to the religious right? Yes. Should leftists be hostile to organised religions that pursue reactionary political agendas? Yes. Should the left be hostile to religion in general? gently caress no. Y'all make the mistake of generalising religion as this big monolithic thing, where your only points of reference as whitebread Americans are things like evangelical megachurch protestantism or scary Wahhabist Islam from those Bad Countries over there. There's more to religion than that and that y'all group them all up into this one loving monolith to serve your prejudiced worldview is incredibly ignorant and frustrating to deal with.
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Mar 10, 2017 16:35
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rudatron posted:Like my criticism of Dawkins, Hitchens + Co is essentially the exact same criticism I'll level at you: you're not taking ideology into account, and because you don't, you end up with everything going backwards. Anti-clericalism need not be anti-religious, by abolishing priests and the primacy of institutional religion we don't abolish god. My argument for religion as a vehicle for mass political action does not require there to be a church hierarchy, in fact it couldn't happen without the destruction of the existing church hierarchy. My main point is that we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, religion has a powerful grip on many people's lives and that's not in itself an evil thing we need to extirpate to make a better society. rudatron posted:In reality, ideology motivates action, and any ideology will do. Right, but the current move towards a deterritorialised, dehumanised future that capitalist society is undergoing is driven by technological innovation and those who fetishise it as a panacea for all problems. If they do see themselves as having an ideology, that ideology is "I loving love science", however much or however little actual science is involved. rudatron posted:It's also weird to bring up black churches as proof of success, when you're dealing with a racial struggle that has also racially segregated religious structures. Had those churches not existed, would that struggle not have existed? I doubt it. But turn it around - what about the role of religious institutions in white oppression? Can you honestly say that, on balance, the existence of quote unquote religion actually helped the situation? I doubt it. A fair point, I guess, but that those churches did exist as organising spaces for a mass political movement must have been somewhat helpful, you've got a captive audience on the pews every sunday for your political program. You don't have to post up flyers or phone anyone, you know exactly where they'll be. To go a bit further back, it's worth pointing out that much of the popular opposition to slavery, the root of generations of American white supremacy, in the first place was from religiously-motivated abolitionists. TomViolence fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Mar 10, 2017 |
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Mar 10, 2017 17:12
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Shbobdb posted:When it happens, it's usually in spite of not because of religion. This old chestnut. "Oh, sure, there were religious people who did good things, but the worldview leading them to do such good things was in no way informed by their devout religious faith that they built much of their life around, no sir." If we discard the possibility of religion motivating people to do good things, why are we suddenly to embrace the idea that religion motivates them to do bad?
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Mar 11, 2017 03:07
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Philanthropy isn't bad in and of itself, it's just symptomatic of the state's inadequacy, unwillingness and inability to tackle the problems it causes or indeed uses to justify its own existence. Ideally there shouldn't exist enough wealth disparity in a society that philanthropy is viable, necessary or desirable to undertake.
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Mar 11, 2017 18:23
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Culturally catholic cafeteria christian anarchist. I like me some jesus and reckon if you actually interpret scripture as you would any other historical or literary source there's some good poo poo hidden in there glossed over by a series of unreliable, biased narrators and censors through the ages. Of course, the true word of God in his native patois is best gleaned from the Gullah bible.
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Mar 16, 2017 16:25
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Panzeh posted:The entire point of religion is to denigrate human achievement and tell us all how worthless we are. I disagree on this. If anything, religion is more anthropocentric than a scientific worldview, most religious traditions placing man at the centre of God's or gods' project. In contrast, a purely scientific perspective places humankind in a vast and unforgiving universe, at the mercy of violent cosmic forces we're powerless to act against and often even to predict or comprehend. We are truly insignficant before the vastness of the godless universe, no divine providence protects us, we are but insects, microbes. Panzeh posted:It's counter-revolutionary, reactionary at heart. It is worship of a cosmic Hitler. This is only true of monotheistic religions and even then if you conceive of god as all-knowing and all-loving and all-powerful then he or she or it's really more a force than a personality, a unifying idea rather than a dictatorial figurehead.
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Mar 20, 2017 13:21
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Who What Now posted:Ask a kid getting his eyes devoured by parasites if he feels like he's being protected from a vast and unforgiving universe by divine providence. Maybe faith sustains him, maybe it doesn't. My point wasn't that god exists or that there's someone up there looking out for us, just that the idea that religion denigrates man's place in the universe in contrast to a purely materialistic worldview is quite false. The kid's going blind either way, human beings are still just meat whether they believe god exists or not.
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Mar 20, 2017 14:06
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We've pretty much already killed the planet we live on, we extinguish entire other species on a daily basis. I don't really consider this winning. We may dominate our natural environment, but if we carry on with our current trajectory this will have dire consequences for the viability of life itself on this planet and the distant dream of slipping earth's surly bonds and forging on into space is as deluded as believing in the rapture. We have one planet and we're loving it up massively. If we somehow do find a way to abandon spaceship earth and carry on elsewhere it'll only be a few of us and billions of folk will carry on living and dying on this toxified, decrepit sphere of ruin until our habitat becomes truly untenable -- a state of affairs creeping closer by the day.
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Mar 22, 2017 03:08
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The flip-side of this is stuff like France's burkini bans, though, where the implication is not "woman, cover thyself", but "woman, reveal thyself." If modest dress standards enforce objectification, I'd argue that enforcing immodest standards of dress does the same, demanding that women make their bodies available to male delectation. Clothing in western secular society is gendered too, though perhaps more fluidly, and is geared towards a certain presentation and expectation. I mean, sure, some western women choose to wear high heels, but even if it is a choice, that choice reinforces stereotypes and objectification and should be frowned upon, right?
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Mar 22, 2017 12:19
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RasperFat posted:Nope this argument is full of poo poo. A legal requirement to wear more revealing clothing is a continuation of objectification. Are you seriously comparing wearing heels to be the equivalent of someone wearing a habit or full veil? One of them has religious connotation specifically protecting the modesty of women, My point was that it's not merely religious societies where women's modes of dress are influenced by an objectifying male gaze.
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Mar 22, 2017 19:10
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It's probably worth pointing out that Harris and Hitchens were pretty happily aligned foreign policy-wise with the hard-right christians and neocons that shared their massive hate-boner for Iraq and Afghanistan. Their chauvinistic imperialist bullshit might not have come from the same place, but it shared the same view of the adversary. Hitchens' interventionism in particular was a particularly nasty brew of parochial middle class english prejudices, a reinvention of white man's burden for the modern age, a belief that the savage peoples of the world should be redeemed by benevolent white anglo-american pedagogy, albeit cloaked in the language of liberal progress rather than nineteenth century racial pseudoscience. A crusading missionary zeal that killed and displaced millions.
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Mar 22, 2017 21:28
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The colonialism, slavery and apartheid that drove much of western society economically throughout the 19th century certainly seems to have been explicitly justified on the basis of a pseudoscientific racial hierarchy. If we take "secular morality" to mean the prevailing ethical norms of a society divorced from any singular religious tradition, then I think it'd be fair to say european and american 19th century society was explicitly racist in its secular morality, to the point of being a fundamental belief. Racism wasn't just an unpalatable side dish to european enlightenment values, it came part and parcel with many of the young sciences of the time. Anthropology, for instance, was intimately intertwined with justifying and abetting the imperial project through study of native cultures.
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Mar 22, 2017 22:38
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RasperFat posted:This shows a serious lack of historical knowledge on the subject. Eugenics is definitely a lovely secular ideology, but where oh where did the idea that non European Whites aren't fully human come from? Okay, here I'm gonna transcribe a source from one of my textbooks to try and demonstrate that scientific attitudes based on supposed physiological difference were a significant basis of the secular, pseudoscientific racism of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries: T.A. Joyce, Assistant in Dept of Ethnography, British Museum, and Secretary of Anthropology Society, writing in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, 1910-11 posted:Mentally the negro is inferior to the white. The remark of F. Manetts, made after long study of the American negro, may be taken generally as true of the whole race: "the negro children were sharp, intelligent and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change set in. The intellect seemed to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence. We must necessarily suppose that the development of the negro and white proceeds on different lines. While with the latter the volume of the brain grows with the expansion of the brainpan, in the former the growth of the brain is on the the contrary arrested by the premature closing of the cranial sutures and the lateral pressure of the frontal bone." This explanation is reasonable and even probable as a contributing cause; but evidence is lacking on the subject and the arrest or even deterioration in mental development is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take their place in the negro's life and thoughts. At the same time his environment has not been such as would produce in him the restless energy which has lead to the progress of the white race; and the easy conditions of tropical life and the fertility of the soil have reduced the struggle for existence to a minimum. But though the mental inferiority of the negro to the white or yellow races is a fact, it has often been exaggerated; the negro is largely a creature of his environment, and it is not fair to judge his mental capacity by testsin mental arithmetic; skill in reckoning is necessary to the white man, and it has cultivated this faculty; but it is not necessary to the negro. If you're going to throw around accusations of historical revisionism you probably shouldn't try and erase the scientific narratives that, appearing bereft of overt religious motive and wholely invested in the advancement of a flawed but nonetheless scientific vision of human knowledge, gave credibility to racist 19th-century worldviews. Yes, there were papal bulls justifying slavery, yes there were missionaries and forced conversions and genocides brought about on religious grounds. My position is not a denial of this, it's an acknowledgement that secular societies can and do harbour the same chauvinistic ideas and that they cannot solely be layed at the doors of the religious. I'm not against secularism, quite the opposite. I just think a great deal of the blanket revulsion people display to the unwashed faithful carries with it echoes of the imperialist attitude to the "irredeemable savages" 19th-century imperialists saw it as their duty to uplift. It's the same pious chauvinism, just dressed up in new clothes.
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Mar 22, 2017 23:56
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are a load of poo poo.
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OwlFancier posted:Because when think of the revolution, the first thing I want to do is destroy the work of people who worked hard for poor pay? To be fair, even within religious traditions iconoclasm can play an essential role in reform, revolution and redistribution. Many of the early protestant reformers explicitly set out to dismantle and expropriate the hoarded wealth of the church in order to fund things like feeding the neglected poor. Of course, there's no way they would have done this on the basis of their deeply held faith and conviction, because religiously motivated acts cannot by definition ever be good.
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Mar 23, 2017 00:22
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And yet destroying them won't undo the harm done in their construction. Some might call it a wasted effort.
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Mar 23, 2017 00:48
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Wipe the slate clean, eject us into a blank new characterless world bereft of built heritage. Year zero will commence again.
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Mar 23, 2017 01:05
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Mar 23, 2017 01:17
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Panzeh posted:It's a rallying point for reactionary scum, a place where they are revered and worshipped, and these places always have been. Yeah, when I go to my church with its dwindling congregation of 16 or so folk to receive the latest batch of papal orders in our neverending war against secular society I can't help but think, lord above, what reactionary scum we are, how revered we are, how worshipped we feel. As we symbolically cannibalize our dead saviour's flesh and blood all I can think is how important it is to me, to us as a faith, that the revolution is strangled in its crib and that human liberation is forever fettered and hamstrung by me and the 15 other people singing hymns and afterwards shaking hands with the priest, maybe inviting him back for a cup of tea before he takes the ferry to the mainland. I remember the horror of witnessing weddings and christenings and funerals in these great stone follies and think yes, this is sinister and terrifying and all these people are surely evil servants of a monstrous cult, drawn together by a deep, atavistic compulsion to sow terror and disarray across the world and forever retard the growth and prosperity of mankind.
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Mar 23, 2017 02:40
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How does that make sense? If no harm is done that absolutely is better than if harm is done, regardless of intent. If I fantasise about killing someone that's massively different from actually murdering them.
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Mar 23, 2017 05:56
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Actually god is genderless, as is the soul, and only through a constant cycle of death and rebirth can we truly realise salvation. It's extremely sexist to gender my god you prick.
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Mar 26, 2017 21:16
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They're not in this thread though are they.
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Mar 26, 2017 21:30
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And yet you keep posting with your snide bullshit, I wonder if that might be what killed the productive conversation.
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Mar 26, 2017 22:02
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ISeeCuckedPeople posted:Lol everything can be co-opted by the right. Even leftism. Legit. Just look at the democrats (who were never left wing to begin with and basically just took to wearing their skin) or any european labour party (who might have been centre-left once but embraced neoliberalim and underwent a slow rot).
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Mar 27, 2017 22:18
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