Currently viewing the tag: "Christianity"
“Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.” – Dorothy Day
“One of the signs of the present time is the idea of participation, the right that all persons have to participate in the construction of their own common good. For this reason, one of the most dangerous abuses of the present time is repression, the attitude that says, ‘Only we can govern, no one else; get rid of them.’” – Óscar Romero, 10 July 1977, born 15 August 1917 – assassinated 24 March 1980
“It was their article of belief and they wanted to establish this principle, ‘All property should be held in common’ (Omnia sunt communia) and should be distributed each according to their needs as the occasion required. Any prince, count, or lord who did not want to do this, after first being warned about it, should be beheaded or hanged.” – Thomas Müntzer (1488 to 27 May 1525), a leader of the German Peasants’ War of 1524 to 1526, his Eighth Article of Confession, Confessed Under Torture Before Execution
“The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence, relations which cannot be better described than by the cry of a Frenchman when it was planned to introduce a tax on dogs: Poor dogs! They want to treat you as human beings!” – Karl Marx, “Introduction” to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
“If you will let me be a preacher just a little bit – one night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn’t get bogged down in the kind of isolated approach of what he shouldn’t do. Jesus didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must not commit adultery.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, now you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively.” He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic – that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down in one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, “Nicodemus, you must be born again.”
“He said, in other words, “Your whole structure must be changed.” A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them – make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!”" – Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?: Chaos or Community”
Marx’s take on religion must be counterpoised as distrinct from the bourgeois materialist critique of religion. While religion is, on one hand, the “opiate of the people”, the “sigh of the oppressed creature”, “the heart of a heartless world”, it is also, in the words of German Marxist Ernst Bloch, the anticipatory consciousness of the future, the pre-illuminations of a better world, the “search for a place we’ve not yet been: home”.
A bit more of Marx’s oft-quoted passage:
“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. 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 man – state, 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 encyclopaedic 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.
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” – Karl Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
It should be noted that opium did not have the same negative connotations that it brings to mind today. At the time opium was a socially acceptable pain killer, not a moralised and mystical material associated with social evils or crime. The common critique of Marx in mainstream society takes advantage of this change in social definition and does nothing to clarity the author’s genuine meaning or purpose.
How did Marx suggest critically-interested people relate to religion? In a Letter to Arnold Ruge Marx wrote that:
“our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that humankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.”
Gramsci, defining the contours of Marxism (for which he used the term “the philosophy of praxis” to elude Mussolini’s censors, as he was writing from inside a fascist prison in Italy) as a critical theory of society, wrote similarly that:
“The philosophy of praxis does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing contradictions in history and society, but is the very theory of these contradictions. It is not the instrument of government of the dominant groups in order to gain the consent and exercise hegemony over the subaltern classes. It is the expression of subaltern classes who want to educate themselves in the art of government and who have an interest in knowing all truths, even the unpleasant ones, and in avoiding the impossible deceptions of the upper class, and even more their own.”
In a world rife with superstition and oppressive moralising, a proper understanding of religion is vital for changing the world. More to come on the topic soon, but that’s some food for thought for now.
For further reading:
Chris Harman’s The Prophet and the Proletariat.
Karl Marx’s Introduction to A Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
Paul N. Siegel’s The Meek and the Militant: Religion and Power Across the World. (Several chapters are online here).
Peter Thompson’s “Is religion the opium of the people?” and “Religion: the wrong answer to the right question”
Karl Kautsky’s The Foundations of Christianity.
Roland Boer’s excellent book series: Criticism of Heaven, Criticism of Religion, Criticism of Theology, and Criticism of Earth.
And for the brave who want a difficult, but extremely rewarding book: Ernst Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom.
O Frondens Virga
(O Leafy Branch)
by Hildegard von Bingen
O Frondens Virga
O Frondens virga
in tua nobilitate stans
sicut aurora procedit:
nunc gaude et letare
et nos debiles dignare
a mala consuetudine liberare
atque manum tuam porrige
ad erigendrum nos.
English:
O leafy branch,
standing in your nobility
as the dawn breaks forth:
now rejoice and be glad
and deign to set us frail ones
free from evil habits
and stretch forth your hand
and lift us up.
“The less you eat, drink, and buy books, the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moth nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.” – Karl Marx, “Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property“, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, quoted in Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology by Roland Boer
“19. Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:
20. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
21. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” – Jesus, The Gospel of Matthew 6:19-21
by Ernst Bloch
“Mildness and “The Light of His Fury” (William Blake)” from Atheism in Christianity (1972).
“Some men are born lambs… to them Jesus did not preach with the power the Scripture speaks of. And least of all is he himself the mild figure some meek spirits make out. The future the wolves have dressed for the sheep, so that their wolfishness may become twofold. The pseudo-shepherd is portrayed as so quiet, so infinitely patient, that one might think he really was like that. The founder figure must have been free from passions . . . Yet Jesus had one of the strongest passions there are: anger. He overthrew the tables of the money-changers in the Temple, and did not forget to use a whip. He is only patient in the affairs of his own quiet circle; he shows no love at all for its enemies. So far as the Sermon on the Mount is concerned it does not, it is true, speak of one man being set against another for the love of Christ, as do some zealous words (Matt. 10. 35 f.); but then it is not a sermon about days of battle at all. With its blessing on the meek and the peacemakers, it is concerned with the last days: with the End, which Jesus (according to the Mandaean John) thought close at hand. Hence its immediate, chiliastic references to the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 5. 3). There is quite a different message for the battle, for the achievement of the Kingdom: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10. 34); or, in more outward-looking, outward-burning terms: “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” (Lk. 12. 49). Which is exactly what William Blake meant by his corollary in verse, applicable to 1789, “The spirit of turmoil shot down from the Saviour/ And in the vineyards of red France appear’d the light of his fury.”
“The sword in Jesus, preaching, and the fire which purifies as well as destroys, are certainly directed at more than mere palaces: they apply to the whole of the old aeon, which must pass away. But at the lead of the list stand the enemies of those who labor and are heavy laden: the rich, for whom it is more difficult to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than it is (with all the irony of the impossible) for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. The Church has widened that aperture considerably since, and her Jesus has of course now left the focal point of mutiny. Mildness – to the unjust, that is – has come up trumps, not Jesus’ anger. And yet even Kautsky, who only say in it a “minor religious mantle,” had to admit in his Foundations of Christianity that “The class hatred of the modern proletariat has scarcely ever reached such fanatical forms as that of the Christian proletariat.” Jesus would spew the lukewarm out of his mouth; no single word of his can fit ideologically into any of the social structures we have so far known – least of all the words of Sermon on the Mount. Everything he said is full of expectation, and preparation for the End. His moral teaching is incomprehensible without its apocalyptic counterpart – even prescinding from the (very late) Revelation of John, which, though not confined to Jesus’ doctrine, was continually hinted at in his preaching.
“‘He who endures to the end will be saved’ (Mk. 13. 13): a strict complement indeed to the demands of the Sermon on the Mount. “And what I say to you I say to all: Watch” (Mk. 13. 37). There is no quietism there; rather, in the words of William Blake, these sayings relate to the light of that undeniable fury.”
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