this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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It is incomprehensible for me how can one be both a communist and have a religious affiliation, or any form of metaphysical thought. I am very respectful usually of people with faith but not as communists at the same time.
Please help me understand, I am too dumb when it comes to this.
I'm not Muslim but I'm a religious person (I follow a Brazilian-African religious tradition called Umbanda) so I think I can try to respectfully chime in with my perspective.
For me personally it all boils down to recognizing that different spheres of your experience can be governed by different processes, with different rules.
When it comes to material interaction with the sensible world, I'm thoroughly and 100% materialistic. I don't attribute metaphysical explanations to material processes.
And honestly I think presuming that religion necessarily means attributing metaphysical explanations to stuff is a very stubborn miscomprehension of how religions other than Christianity works. Most religions are really not very interested in building systems of reasoning about the world and doctrinal orthodoxy like European Christianity is.
They are much more focused on ritual, on human connection, on sociality, and experience of the divine. And those things aren't at all incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how the sensible world works.
EDIT:
Sorry for editing, but I think my answer wasn't complete enough.
I think looking at religion as a system of beliefs is a fundamental eurocentric misunderstanding of those things we call religion that aren't western european Christianity. Specially protestant Christianity, which is a very specific practice, extremely focused on belief, and rationalistic systems of thought.
Most of the things we call religions: eastern varieties of Christianity, Buddhism, a lot of branches of Islam, Judaism, etc, etc are decidedly not about belief, but about practice, sociality and experience.
Think like this: what you have to do to be a good protestant christian? You have to have specific beliefs about who Jesus was, what he did, the significance of his actions, what is sin, what is salvation, what is grace, etc, etc, etc. It's a whole system of thought.
What do you have to do to be a good Muslim? Practice the tenets of Islam. Practice the pillars. It's not a person who adheres to a long list of beliefs. As a system of belief it can be summarized in a single phrase: there's only one God and a specific person is a prophet of this god. That's it. The rest is about practice, ritual, sociality and experience.
That is not incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how society organizes, of the processes that create exploitation in capitalism, etc, etc.
EDIT 2:
That's the last edit I promise.
Just a quick comment that there are those who argue that the word "religion" is a bad category. That lumping together all those different human experiences as instances of the same phenomenon is kind of unhelpful. Precisely because it necessarily draws an eurocentric comparison with Christianity which is prone to cause misunderstanding of those phenomena.
swiftessay: undefined> They are much more focused on ritual, on human connection, on sociality, and experience of the divine. And those things aren’t at all incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how the sensible world works.
Human connection, sociality (I'd say you mean socialization) are very much material, and so is behavior, communication, etc. The "experience of the divine" is beyond those, and you seem to want to mix things in order to connect them. How does one who is not a metaphysical believer exeperience the divine? If there is such divine how does it relate and affect our material existence?
I know it is very mechanistic as is our understanding of the material world though science. Science, begins with certain axioms, assumptions if you will, and builds up on those in a rational way for which you can backtrack back to the assumptions at any point you are in doubt. Just to see if you have made an error somewhere in the "line" of thought and end up with incorrect conclusions.
With metaphysical thought of any religion, eastern western, northern, southern, there is no such sequence, things are all over the place and not necesseraly need a connection.
The Christian religion you attribute to European origin, may have spread through Europe initially, but it is just a fork of a middle eastern religion, Judaism in specific. So is islam, an non-European religion, also a fork of Judaism, Historically and archaeologically it is hard to separate Judaism from the Greek times and language, in which rationalism and materialism is born, and on top of this philosophical base science and methodology. The religious claims may be going back thousands of years but the scripts in their earliest found and mentioned references data back to Hellenistic times. Jesus comes 7 centuries after Heraclitus wrote, whose writings were available and are referenced by others in the library of Alexandria which christian clergy says were destroyed.
To be a scientist or attempt to be scientific and serve metaphysical beliefs at the same time, if nothing else, to me it indicates mental contradiction and discomfort. If the metaphysical can not have any relation to anything physical/natural/material process or condition, why bother with it? It doesn't belong in this universe and in this physical life and presence. Why would illusion be necessary to a someone in search for material reality, in order to know what to do to change it, or improve it? It can only be an obstacle.
Is it because some religion serve as providing a social contract under which people are expected to behave against each other? We can do this by other agreements, social, political, legal. To maintain a social contract in fear of the metaphysical consequence is just a way to terrorize and manage humans to control them, with ultimate political and economic benefits of doing so.
I don't have time for a longer answer but I think you misunderstood me. My whole point is exactly that those religions do not focus on metaphysical beliefs.
They focus on ritual aspects, practice and social activities. It's exactly because they focus on the material aspects of worship that I don't think they matter much in terms of being a materialistic socialist. They don't impose metaphysical explanations for why society has a given structure or how to achieve such and such goal as a society.
They focus on activities and practices, both social and individual. They don't require that you adhere to specific metaphysical beliefs to engage in those practices.
For example: I don't believe in the actuality of metaphysical spirits and yet I find the practices of Umbanda tremendously meaningful for me as an individual journey of enlightenment and the social activities very fulfilling culturally.
About your last comment (imposing social behavior norms with threats of spiritual punishment) that's so incredibly Christianity centric. My religion has nothing of the sort, for example. Judaism doesn't even have a concept of hell. And although Islam have something similar for some branches, it's much less important than it is for Christianity.
What I mean by sociality is nothing of that sort. It's simply social activities. Festivals, collective worship, social gatherings, communal rituals, etc. Those things are tremendously more important for most religions than merely specific sets of metaphysical beliefs about the nature of things.
Yes I see what you meant now. I too realized that some of the mix of local/national/ethnic traditions and religious tradition was not exactly the religion and the belief in it. I just rejected much of this early on in life.
Protestantism is politically interesting as it is the group of religions that basically evolved to overcome the incompatibilities earlier christianity and catholicism had with capitalism. Simply they modified christianity to fit the lifestyle and practices of capitalists. I didn't grow up with either of those, not that the crap I grew up was any better.
The common scheme of this complex of judeo/X-ian/islamic is that it is very individual centered, it is all about a deity having a personal relation with the believer. I know many African and Asian religions had more collective relations with the metaphysical. Native American belief systems are even more collective in nature. The entire community does rituals for the benefit of the community. On Judeochristian scripts there is an entire city of sinners and this one guy who is not a sinner walks away while the city is destroyed.
Religion may have not had such negative overtone to Marxists if it wasn't for clergy that tends to align with the powerful and the rich, so the three bodies can manipulate, exploit, and control people.