Currently viewing the tag: "Religion"
This morning I had a wonderful breakfast conversation with my grandma. She read a letter to the editor on the topic of the current media and political circus around contraception where a reader pointed out that Hitler was never excommunicated from the Catholic Church. She was clearly dismayed, noting that she and my (“step”) grandpa were excommunicated from the Church when they got married, because both were divorcees, my grandma having divorced my abusive biological grandfather. They lived happily married until my (step) grandpa passed away from cancer.
Such are the priorities of the leaders of the Catholic Church. Abuse is fine. You can’t divorce abusive husbands. Hitler was fine. The Church collaborated with him. But birth control? That needs a “debate”. Even when 85% of Catholics support the right to birth control and 99% of women will use birth control in their lifetime.
The Church is serving a very destructive role at the moment. We need comprehensive healthcare. Yet the Catholic Church, in opposition to the opinions of the overwhelming majority of of its members, is saying that one component of healthcare is “sinful” and that Catholic health services should be except from providing whatever services it chooses.
Its almost unbearable to listen to the President these days. He talks about “religious freedom”. But what “freedom” is there in denying services that the vast majority of people want access to (because they need access to it)? The media circus is meant to distract us from the need for comprehensive healthcare reform – and to distract from the insurance industry giveaway that was Obama’s healthcare program.
Thankfully, it seems, that not many people are falling for the attempts at divisions.
“Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.” – Dorothy Day
“The assertion that religion is innate and natural to man, is false, if identified with Theism; but it is perfectly true, if religion is considered to be nothing but that feeling of dependence by which man is more or less conscious that he does not and cannot exist without another being, different from himself, and that his existence does not originate in himself. Religion, thus understood, is essential to man as light to the eye, as air to the lungs, as food to the stomach. Religion is the manifestation of man’s conception of himself. But above all man is a being who does not exist without light, without air, without water, without earth, without food, – he is, in short, a being dependent on Nature. This dependence in the animal, and in man as far as he moves within the sphere of the brute, is only an unconscious and unreflected one; but by its elevation into consciousness and imagination, by its consideration and profession, it becomes religion. Thus all life depends on the change of seasons; but man alone celebrates this change by dramatic representations and festival acts. But such festivals, which imply and represent nothing but the change of the seasons, or of the phases of the moon, are the oldest, the first, and the real confessions of human religion.” – Ludwig Feuerbach, §3, The Essence of Religion (emphasis added)
“The day has passed for patching up the capitalist system; it must go. And in the work of abolishing it the Catholic and the Protestant, the Catholic and the Jew, the Catholic and the Freethinker, the Catholic and the Buddhist, the Catholic and the Muslim will co-operate together, knowing no rivalry but the rivalry of endeavour toward an end beneficial to all. For, as we have said elsewhere, Socialism is neither Protestant nor Catholic, Christian nor Freethinker, Buddhist, Muslim, nor Jew; it is only HUMAN. We of the Socialist working class realise that as we suffer together we must work together that we may enjoy together. We reject the firebrand of capitalist warfare and offer you the olive leaf of brotherhood and justice to and for all..” – James Connolly, “Labour, Nationality, and Religion“.
“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
Its hard to write this because there are really no words to describe how disgusted I am. This guy’s name is Pete King. He’s a “representative” from Long Island, New York. He heads the House Homeland Security Committee which today is beginning a hearing on “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response”.
The timing of this hearing is so telling. On 20 January 2011 I wrote an article entitled “The Terrorist Plot Against the Spokane MLK Day Parade“. There was zero discussion of this story in the media. Someone tried to BOMB a Martin Luther King Day Parade attended by thousands, and no one in the media thought it an important story. Flip on the evening news and we have to sit through 55 minutes of them telling us how bad Black, Latino, and Muslim people are, with one short cat-in-a-tree fairy tale story to break the tension, but the vast systemic violence against poor and working people – including attempted bombings – is ignored. Yesterday the Southern Poverty Law Center announced that the F.B.I. had made an arrest in the case. Of course it turned out to be a white guy – Kevin William Harphan – who was/is a member of the Neo-Nazi group the National Alliance. Why isn’t Pete King holding a hearing on The Extent of Radicalization in the American White Community and that Community’s Response? Crazy, fascist, white people have been bombing and shooting up family planning centers, parades, gay bars, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum for years and it has only gotten much worse since the recession begun and a Black president was elected.
At my first college there were a lot of incidents of oppression and exploitation against Muslims. It was so disheartening. People wrote hateful things in bathroom doors, they threw Muslim holy books in the toilets – lots of really disgusting and dehumanising events. The emotional effect that these oppressive and hateful acts had on my Muslim friends and schoolmates was really difficult to see. People like Pete King want more of that and we can’t let him have his way. We just can’t. We have to stand up against King and speak loudly in defense of our Muslim sisters and brothers.
Make no mistake, this isn’t about terrorism. It is no coincidence that these lunatics are trying to redefine the legal definition of rape, strip family planning centers of their funding, attack the arts, gut education and low-income insurance, take away union workers’ legal right to bargain with their bosses – all in one fell swoop. Its because we in the midst of horrific ecological and economic crises. Their power is under siege in places like Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and Ohio and Wisconsin. They are terrified of losing. They are going all-out in an attempt to divide us one against another: man against woman, black against latino, Christian against Muslim, union worker against non-union worker. We can’t let them. The stakes are too high. We need to unite instead. Wisconsin, Egypt, and Tunisia are the way forward.
Let me close with some poetry from the 13th-century Islamic mystic poet Mowlānā known commonly in the West as Rūmī. His words speak to the absolute breadth and beauty of Islam and the religious yearnings of all people (what Ernst Bloch called “the search for home”). We are stronger together and it is together that we can win a new world:
“All religions, all this singing
One Song.
The differences are just
Illusion and vanity.
The Sun’s light looks
A little different on this wall than
It does on that wall,
And a lot different on this other one,
But it’s still one light.
We have borrowed these clothes,
These time and place personalities
From a light,
And when we praise,
We’re pouring them back in.”
Agree? Disagree? Have questions? Please comment below!
“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
“Naturally, no one thinks they form part of the ‘common herd’, but that each of their neighbours is common, and they therefore say that it is necessary for them, too, to pretend to be religious, so as not to perturb the minds of the others and cast them into doubt. Thus it is that many people no longer believe, everyone of them being persuaded that they are superior to the others because they no longer need superstition, but every one of them is persuaded that they have to show they ‘believe’ out of respect for the others.” – Antonio Gramsci, Q8§155
With the warmest regard for the labour, courage, and memory of Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci’s sister-in-law, without whose efforts to preserve Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks past both Mussolini and Stalin’s censors, at great threat to herself, we would have lost a great communist corpus.
“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
“In simple words, I hate the pack of gods.”
“Prometheus’ Confession” in Aeschylus’ tragic drama Prometheus Bound.
by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī, جلالالدین محمد بلخى, popularly known as ‘Mowlānā‘ or ‘Rūmī’ (in the English-speaking world)
Consider the difference 
in our actions and God’s actions.
We often ask, “Why did you do that?”
or “Why did I act like that?”
We do act, and yet everything we do
is God’s creative action.
We look back and analyse the events
of our lives, but there is another way
of seeing, a backward-and-forward-at-once
vision, that is not rationally understandable.
Only God can understand it.
Socialist Politics:
Recommended Readings
