Rosa Provokateur
18th March 2009, 08:52
Author: Dan Margolis
Is Barack Obama really a Christian? Or perhaps he’s a Muslim, the McCain campaign suggests, and therefore not a real American? Should we teach Creationism in schools? What about the Ten Commandments? Should they be on display in state buildings? In courts? The Roman Catholic church, or at least its pope and some bishops, has its own set of questions: How can we stop people from having abortions and using birth control? The Pope has a pretty good pulpit to express his opinions: the Holy See has its own observer seat in the UN General Assembly, putting it on par with the government of Palestine, as well as the African and European Union. Some fundamentalist Christians have wrought havoc in the fields of gay rights and women’s rights, going so far as to bomb abortion clinics. And they have an extremely large role in the Republican Party.
Even more pronounced is the role of religion in the Middle East and South Asia: Where the struggle to liberate Palestine from Israeli control was once a secular fight, led by the PLO, there are now radical Islamist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the mix. Some organizations, acting in the name of their God, strap explosives to themselves, step on a bus or into a busy market, and blow the place and everyone in it to hell (or heaven, depending who you ask). Judaism has its own extremists: There is the Israeli settler movement, a very small fraction of the Jewish people themselves, but with a large influence in the Israeli government, who believe that the whole of Israel was promised to them by God, and therefore anyone on it who is not Jewish should be forced out.
It would be easy enough to say that religion is the problem for much of the world’s ills: root it out, and you’ll have a more peaceful world.
But what about those who say that Christianity means supporting the poor, acting as Jesus did? Or the Jews who say that they want to live peacefully with their neighbors, and see this as a tenet of their faith? Or Muslims who say, and believe, that Islam is a religion of peace? Archbishop Romero, who was assassinated for standing up for the rights of the poor, was certainly not harmful to the world. Nor are those Jews who work to broker a peace between Israel and Palestine, or the Muslim members of the various left and progressive parties in the Middle Eastern countries.
Obviously, religion and the religious population can’t be viewed as monoliths.
In all of the main religions—indeed, all religions—everything comes down to one point: Faith. You either believe or you don’t. There’s no need to back up or justify this point, as, by definition, you are to believe, and not prove. For the religious person, this is a virtue.
How did Marx view religion?
Answering this question would take much more space and time than this article can afford. However, there are a few points to make. Firstly, Marx didn’t “hate” religion. The quote above, is one of his most famous--and one of his most misquoted. In context, the quote, from his Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is:
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.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.
Marx realized that religion originated before capitalism. He studied religion as a human phenomenon. But in doing so, he didn’t so much study exactly what people believed and the contradictions within their ideas; instead he analyzed what conditions in the world give rise at certain points in history to certain religious ideas.
So, for Marx, religion is a reflection of the real existing problems on earth, a sort of mirror in which the real world is reflected. Religious battles, fights over religion, oftentimes reflect real fights.
In Peasant War in Germany, Engels argues that what caused the Reformation wasn’t simply differences in religious ideas. Instead, he argues, these religious battles masked class struggles—Martin Luther wasn’t just a spiritual leader, but also represented a rising class. The schism in the Catholic Church had much to do with the features of feudalism in that day, where the pope and his bishops were the largest landowners in Europe. In order to fight out real battles against an existing ruling class, the oppressed classes had to come up with new ideas. If the bishops considered it a sin to question the role of the bishops, new religious ideas needed to come into play, ideas that rejected the subservience of Europe to the Pope.
Can’t the same be said for many of the problems in the world today? Aren’t we right now seeing battles within the Anglican Communion over gay marriage, ordination of female priests? Didn’t the Catholic Church experience convulsions from within in Latin America over how much to support the poor? Weren’t Martin Luther King, Jr. and the racist white southern establishment both part of the Southern Baptist Church? There are different social forces at work in all the world’s religions. In fact, the African American church has historically been in the United States a huge force for social progress.
In all of these areas, concerns in the material world drove people to change their religious ideas.
Religious ideas tend to evolve as societies evolve, and to change as people's circumstances change. Thus it’s not a surprise that in some of the most unstable countries of the world, with some of the lowest living standards—think the Sudan, Afghanistan—fundamentalist religious leaders often arise and attempt to exploit the real hardships and grievances of the people. These extremist figures are also often privileged members of the elite: Osama Bin Laden is a wealthy man, and so were Ted Haggard and Jim Bakker.
The Scientology cult, which contains within its ranks people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta, seems to be a religion chiefly by and for the rich and powerful. In Saudi Arabia, which has grown rich from oil wealth, the ruling class has used an ultra-conservative form of Islam as a state religion to keep the population in line and ensure the rule of the princes.
In all of these areas, it is possible to trace the ideas to some tangible real-world conditions. None of what is written here should be taken as an argument for economic determinism. While this article deals in a very simplistic material-world-to-religion argument, reality is always far more complex. The point is that religious ideas arise naturally from many of the fundamental questions regarding human existence. (Why are we here? What happens after we die?) As these ideas arise, they are shaped and re-shaped by the world in which they exist. And these ideas, of course, take on a life of their own and, in doing so, can end up influencing the material world itself.
Religious extremism that results in terrorism is not excusable. Nothing can justify bombings of abortion clinics or suicide bombings on school buses and in discothèques, and these sorts of acts should be punished. But the question is how to stop extremism from developing. The way to combat it is to develop society, better people’s lives and give people access to quality, scientific education, as well as a much higher standard of living. If Afghanistan were a rich country, with a relatively equal distribution of wealth, and people had modern conveniences in the countryside, it is highly unlikely that bin Laden would find as many supporters there.
Marx, Engels and Lenin all spoke on the need for atheism, “militant atheism” to use Lenin’s words-- in the days when religion and the state were almost entirely entwined in Russia. And even then, in Tsarist Russia, for example, Lenin never called for banning religion: He argued the necessity of education, of taking the Orthodox Church from state power, allowing people religious freedom.
But what does religious freedom mean? It means that people have a freedom of what to believe: which religion they choose, and it also means a freedom from religion for those who desire it. Therefore, it can only mean democracy and a militant separation of church and state. Lenin led the revolutionary Russian government in breaking up the Russian Orthodox Church, in ripping it from power. This was not a question of people’s ideas, but a question of power, a question of an anti-democratic domination of society by a group of sycophants to the Tsar, wrapping themselves in religious garb.
The Orthodox Church stood in the way of a democratic society by propping up the autocracy. It stood in the way in the way of equality by perpetuating pogroms against Jews and spreading anti-Semitism. It was this institution that introduced the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the miserably infamous document upon which much anti-Semitic “thought” is based. It stood in the way of religious freedom by forcing a state religion. The problem here wasn’t the Orthodox members of the peasantry, but the Tsarist hierarchy.
Communists argue that people can believe and pray to whatever they want, so long as the state is not to be taken over by religion, and religion is not used as a pretext to set society backwards. While it may seem paradoxical, at first, the strict separation of church and state leads to more religious freedom, not less. For example, wouldn't compulsory Christian prayer in American schools be contrary to the religious freedom of Jews or Muslims? And the enforced domination of Wahhabi Islam in Saudi Arabia--this can't be helpful to the religious freedom of anyone else, even non-Wahhabi Muslims.
In the Middle Eastern countries, the Communist and Workers parties do not demand an end to religion, but they do demand the end of theocracies, a separation of church and state. The Iranian party doesn't argue for the abolition of Islam--many of its members are Muslims themselves--but they advocate a secular democracy, that the country be run by the people, all the people, and not any supreme religious leaders. For their troubles, many Communists and other progressives have been repressed--and even executed.
Here in the United States, we demand that extreme right wing Christians do not endanger public education. In Israel they demand peaceful coexistence with other religions. None of us are in favor of measures to suppress Islam, Christianity, Judaism or any other religion. (Of course, there have been some tremendous violations of this basic principle in some of the socialist societies, most notably under Stalin, who, on the one hand, crushed the rights of certain religious groups, and, on the other, reinstated much of the Orthodox Church’s power.)
It is this secular world view of Marxism that allows its adherents to look beyond rhetoric about a “clash of civilizations,” and see what has actually been going on in the world.
Believers, just like anyone else, are social creatures. What people believe or lose site of in their particular holy book or texts is based on a whole dynamic host of things: their class position, nationality, culture, the kind of society they are in and so on.
So what of those members of Communist parties who are religious? It's true, Marx was a materialist--he saw everything arising from the conditions of the material world. But since secular organizations are not faith-based, not every single thing uttered by Marx or Engels or Lenin has to be regarded as some "eternal truth."
In a sense, it’s no stranger for a religious person to be a Communist than a scientist.
http://yclusa.org/article/articleview/1882/1/346/?disqus_reply=7310045#comment-7310045
Is Barack Obama really a Christian? Or perhaps he’s a Muslim, the McCain campaign suggests, and therefore not a real American? Should we teach Creationism in schools? What about the Ten Commandments? Should they be on display in state buildings? In courts? The Roman Catholic church, or at least its pope and some bishops, has its own set of questions: How can we stop people from having abortions and using birth control? The Pope has a pretty good pulpit to express his opinions: the Holy See has its own observer seat in the UN General Assembly, putting it on par with the government of Palestine, as well as the African and European Union. Some fundamentalist Christians have wrought havoc in the fields of gay rights and women’s rights, going so far as to bomb abortion clinics. And they have an extremely large role in the Republican Party.
Even more pronounced is the role of religion in the Middle East and South Asia: Where the struggle to liberate Palestine from Israeli control was once a secular fight, led by the PLO, there are now radical Islamist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the mix. Some organizations, acting in the name of their God, strap explosives to themselves, step on a bus or into a busy market, and blow the place and everyone in it to hell (or heaven, depending who you ask). Judaism has its own extremists: There is the Israeli settler movement, a very small fraction of the Jewish people themselves, but with a large influence in the Israeli government, who believe that the whole of Israel was promised to them by God, and therefore anyone on it who is not Jewish should be forced out.
It would be easy enough to say that religion is the problem for much of the world’s ills: root it out, and you’ll have a more peaceful world.
But what about those who say that Christianity means supporting the poor, acting as Jesus did? Or the Jews who say that they want to live peacefully with their neighbors, and see this as a tenet of their faith? Or Muslims who say, and believe, that Islam is a religion of peace? Archbishop Romero, who was assassinated for standing up for the rights of the poor, was certainly not harmful to the world. Nor are those Jews who work to broker a peace between Israel and Palestine, or the Muslim members of the various left and progressive parties in the Middle Eastern countries.
Obviously, religion and the religious population can’t be viewed as monoliths.
In all of the main religions—indeed, all religions—everything comes down to one point: Faith. You either believe or you don’t. There’s no need to back up or justify this point, as, by definition, you are to believe, and not prove. For the religious person, this is a virtue.
How did Marx view religion?
Answering this question would take much more space and time than this article can afford. However, there are a few points to make. Firstly, Marx didn’t “hate” religion. The quote above, is one of his most famous--and one of his most misquoted. In context, the quote, from his Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is:
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.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.
Marx realized that religion originated before capitalism. He studied religion as a human phenomenon. But in doing so, he didn’t so much study exactly what people believed and the contradictions within their ideas; instead he analyzed what conditions in the world give rise at certain points in history to certain religious ideas.
So, for Marx, religion is a reflection of the real existing problems on earth, a sort of mirror in which the real world is reflected. Religious battles, fights over religion, oftentimes reflect real fights.
In Peasant War in Germany, Engels argues that what caused the Reformation wasn’t simply differences in religious ideas. Instead, he argues, these religious battles masked class struggles—Martin Luther wasn’t just a spiritual leader, but also represented a rising class. The schism in the Catholic Church had much to do with the features of feudalism in that day, where the pope and his bishops were the largest landowners in Europe. In order to fight out real battles against an existing ruling class, the oppressed classes had to come up with new ideas. If the bishops considered it a sin to question the role of the bishops, new religious ideas needed to come into play, ideas that rejected the subservience of Europe to the Pope.
Can’t the same be said for many of the problems in the world today? Aren’t we right now seeing battles within the Anglican Communion over gay marriage, ordination of female priests? Didn’t the Catholic Church experience convulsions from within in Latin America over how much to support the poor? Weren’t Martin Luther King, Jr. and the racist white southern establishment both part of the Southern Baptist Church? There are different social forces at work in all the world’s religions. In fact, the African American church has historically been in the United States a huge force for social progress.
In all of these areas, concerns in the material world drove people to change their religious ideas.
Religious ideas tend to evolve as societies evolve, and to change as people's circumstances change. Thus it’s not a surprise that in some of the most unstable countries of the world, with some of the lowest living standards—think the Sudan, Afghanistan—fundamentalist religious leaders often arise and attempt to exploit the real hardships and grievances of the people. These extremist figures are also often privileged members of the elite: Osama Bin Laden is a wealthy man, and so were Ted Haggard and Jim Bakker.
The Scientology cult, which contains within its ranks people like Tom Cruise and John Travolta, seems to be a religion chiefly by and for the rich and powerful. In Saudi Arabia, which has grown rich from oil wealth, the ruling class has used an ultra-conservative form of Islam as a state religion to keep the population in line and ensure the rule of the princes.
In all of these areas, it is possible to trace the ideas to some tangible real-world conditions. None of what is written here should be taken as an argument for economic determinism. While this article deals in a very simplistic material-world-to-religion argument, reality is always far more complex. The point is that religious ideas arise naturally from many of the fundamental questions regarding human existence. (Why are we here? What happens after we die?) As these ideas arise, they are shaped and re-shaped by the world in which they exist. And these ideas, of course, take on a life of their own and, in doing so, can end up influencing the material world itself.
Religious extremism that results in terrorism is not excusable. Nothing can justify bombings of abortion clinics or suicide bombings on school buses and in discothèques, and these sorts of acts should be punished. But the question is how to stop extremism from developing. The way to combat it is to develop society, better people’s lives and give people access to quality, scientific education, as well as a much higher standard of living. If Afghanistan were a rich country, with a relatively equal distribution of wealth, and people had modern conveniences in the countryside, it is highly unlikely that bin Laden would find as many supporters there.
Marx, Engels and Lenin all spoke on the need for atheism, “militant atheism” to use Lenin’s words-- in the days when religion and the state were almost entirely entwined in Russia. And even then, in Tsarist Russia, for example, Lenin never called for banning religion: He argued the necessity of education, of taking the Orthodox Church from state power, allowing people religious freedom.
But what does religious freedom mean? It means that people have a freedom of what to believe: which religion they choose, and it also means a freedom from religion for those who desire it. Therefore, it can only mean democracy and a militant separation of church and state. Lenin led the revolutionary Russian government in breaking up the Russian Orthodox Church, in ripping it from power. This was not a question of people’s ideas, but a question of power, a question of an anti-democratic domination of society by a group of sycophants to the Tsar, wrapping themselves in religious garb.
The Orthodox Church stood in the way of a democratic society by propping up the autocracy. It stood in the way in the way of equality by perpetuating pogroms against Jews and spreading anti-Semitism. It was this institution that introduced the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the miserably infamous document upon which much anti-Semitic “thought” is based. It stood in the way of religious freedom by forcing a state religion. The problem here wasn’t the Orthodox members of the peasantry, but the Tsarist hierarchy.
Communists argue that people can believe and pray to whatever they want, so long as the state is not to be taken over by religion, and religion is not used as a pretext to set society backwards. While it may seem paradoxical, at first, the strict separation of church and state leads to more religious freedom, not less. For example, wouldn't compulsory Christian prayer in American schools be contrary to the religious freedom of Jews or Muslims? And the enforced domination of Wahhabi Islam in Saudi Arabia--this can't be helpful to the religious freedom of anyone else, even non-Wahhabi Muslims.
In the Middle Eastern countries, the Communist and Workers parties do not demand an end to religion, but they do demand the end of theocracies, a separation of church and state. The Iranian party doesn't argue for the abolition of Islam--many of its members are Muslims themselves--but they advocate a secular democracy, that the country be run by the people, all the people, and not any supreme religious leaders. For their troubles, many Communists and other progressives have been repressed--and even executed.
Here in the United States, we demand that extreme right wing Christians do not endanger public education. In Israel they demand peaceful coexistence with other religions. None of us are in favor of measures to suppress Islam, Christianity, Judaism or any other religion. (Of course, there have been some tremendous violations of this basic principle in some of the socialist societies, most notably under Stalin, who, on the one hand, crushed the rights of certain religious groups, and, on the other, reinstated much of the Orthodox Church’s power.)
It is this secular world view of Marxism that allows its adherents to look beyond rhetoric about a “clash of civilizations,” and see what has actually been going on in the world.
Believers, just like anyone else, are social creatures. What people believe or lose site of in their particular holy book or texts is based on a whole dynamic host of things: their class position, nationality, culture, the kind of society they are in and so on.
So what of those members of Communist parties who are religious? It's true, Marx was a materialist--he saw everything arising from the conditions of the material world. But since secular organizations are not faith-based, not every single thing uttered by Marx or Engels or Lenin has to be regarded as some "eternal truth."
In a sense, it’s no stranger for a religious person to be a Communist than a scientist.
http://yclusa.org/article/articleview/1882/1/346/?disqus_reply=7310045#comment-7310045