this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Is it wrong to make fun of the religious?
yes? Have been told by several queer friends from latin america for example that they've felt alienated from white/global north queer spaces bc of the casual mockery of their beliefs (with the justification that they are only mocking the "bad ones")
you don't get a pass to believe the sun is councious and you can communicate with it just because you're queer
And you don't get a pass to mock people without that having consequences (e.g. POC especially from global south leaving whitedominated spaces time and time again because y'all care more about whining about metaphysics and spreading the gospel of Dawkins than actually getting off your asses and doing shit)
I am a POC from the global south. I am also an atheist. There is no excuse to believe something objectively wrong and which was historically used as part of a system of oppression. Why do you have this idea that POC are helplessly religious (and white people are evil atheists) when there are so many POC leftists who are atheist and so many highly religious white people?
You should be skeptical of "highly religious" white people in the global north. It's just a cultural affectation and a community thing and has nothing to do with actual belief. Even the ones that go to church and profess to believe in god and go on mission trips. It's all kinda bullshit.
I don't have this idea and never said nor implied it. I have repeatedly been saying that this is a thing I have seen occur time and time again, not that it is true for every single person and case. I would appreciate it if you would not misrepresent what I'm saying comrade. It doesn't help anyone
I can assure you the meat-only chud who sells scam supplements isn't a POC from global south.
It's best done privately, so as not to alienate our religious comrades.
Why not use your limited time on this Earth to build your comrades up instead of tearing them down in private? Why do you need to mock people, especially if your mockery hits your comrades in the crossfire? Is this a materialist analysis aimed towards revolutionary praxis or is this you just wanting to get more upvotes with le burn?
Magical thinking in all its forms should be mocked. It is harmful to the thinker, dangerous to the people around them and is the root cause of a great deal of all the world's problems.
I don't begrudge our religious comrades their faith, but I do not have it, and to someone without faith, all religion can seem to be is delusion.
We all work toward the same goal, so it is important to be openly polite and cooperative, but I am never going to treat any claim of gods or spirituality with private respect, and nor should people be obliged to withhold their opinions while amongst the like-minded.
Materialist analysis has never treated religion very kindly.
Idealism. Claiming that ideas are the root cause of a great deal of the world's problems is the opposite of materialism.
It has actually treated religion very kindly and respectfully. Like Marx read the bible repeatedly in multiple languages. He told his wife to seek spiritual edification in the jewish prophets rather than a secular church. His analysis of religion is constantly and consistently respectful and to the point with the notable and glaring exception of people who say "i'm a christian/jew/etc" and then ruthlessly exploit their workers. And even then, Marx's disrespect is usually quoting scripture to show how far they've gone from it rather than "lol u believe in man in the sky".
Marx actually admits to an existence of a ton of abstract, non-material social things in Capital which exist, objectively, without a material form. The entirety of communism is a belief that Marx had could become reality. As many indigenous folks have argued (for example, deloria jr. in "Same old Rock" in Marxism and Native Americans) Marxism is itself a religion that demands taking a lot on faith (revolutionary optimism is faith; belief in revolution is faith; belief in an eventual better world in the future? Faith.
And if you read indigenous activists, theorists and so forth (e.g. Coulthard Red Skin, White Masks) you will see it argued very strongly that indigenous religions/spiritualities are materialist in that they are methods of describing and organising empirically obtained information, disregarding theology which no longer holds true to investigation. When you research religions besides Christianity in the global north in particular and organised hierarchical monotheistic religions which developed to support material inequalities and sufferings it becomes very evident that this is how most of them work, except for the religions of the nobility who write things down and get obsessed with literalism.
If you don't mind my asking comrade what sorta investigation into religion (past or contemporary) have you done? What sorta investigations into the structure of science and how it works (e.g. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Siltoe ed Local vs. Global Science or Aikenhead and Michell *Indigenous and Scientific Ways of Knowing Nature) have you done?
Faith is belief without material evidence. Revolutionary optimism is belief derived from in material evidence.
Furthermore, religion is a concept that arose alongside the state. Bringing up spiritual practices from Native Americans and calling that "religion" is not based in historical reality, because those practices have been preserved from before rise of the modern capitalist state.
We're broadly on the same side, but I think you're in error on a number of levels in the second paragraph. Most religions are much older than the "rise of the modern capitalist state" and many indigenous religions as-received existed within the context of a state (whether an empire or the smaller national formations that are sometimes called "tribes").
One very obvious difference between a religion and mysticism/spirituality/ritualism/cultural practice/etc is that, once the Bible's canon was decided on, then that was it. It didn't change anymore, you can't discuss it, and if you changed it (through translation or addition of other books) then you had to start a whole new sect of the religion and break away from the church. There's centralization around a head, canonization of specific books, strict definition, etc. Dogma.
It's that process, where a spiritual belief system crystalizes around a centralizing dogmatic power structure, that it becomes a religion. There's a reason Eastern traditions of Christianity had less of an interest in defining a strict religious canon as opposed to Western traditions (though as the West took over the world it imposed religion on everyone, from Hindus to Buddhists to Orthodox Christians). It's modernist, and actually tied quite strongly to the printing press.
I'm confused, the biblical canon was established in the late 300s, over a thousand years before modernism or the printing press.
I also think that dogma is important to organized religion, but that there are lots of things commonly thought of as religion that are less dogmatic, like pre-Imperial Shintoism. tbh I am not that familiar with Imperial Shintoism either, but what little I have heard about it strongly suggests being oriented around the central authority of the state to decide its doctrines. Basically, what I am saying is "folk religion is also religion"
I should clarify: there was a "canon", but every church basically just did its own thing. They all had their own relics and traditions and special sermons passed down, completely different from every other church. There was a unifying holy world of the Catholic canon, but every fiefdom had its own relics and traditions that it adhered to on top of that. That's what pissed Martin Luther off so much, all of this extra fanon that was made up and tacked onto the canon. Folk mysticism was tolerated by the Catholic Church as long as they payed their dues.
When the reformation came and zealots started burning reliquaries and melting down shrines, that was when Christian spirituality became religion.
Magical thinking is a behaviour, not an idea.
It is absolutely not faith, Marxism is a series of conclusions drawn from evidence.
Spirituality cannot be materialist. Methods of describing and organising information that assumes something beyond what is observed is fundamentally not a materialist approach.
If Marxism is not a science, it is merely an affectation that has no particular reason to be held as better or worse than other "lenses" of analysis like Lacan or whatever. The most basic point of "scientific socialism" is that it is attempting to be a science, and to discard that is to discard the heart and be left with a corpse.
https://archive.org/details/075_Marxism_as_a_Science_FINAL.lite