Die Neue Zeit
26th July 2010, 03:19
An Anti-Religious Critique?
"I have never put this question this way to myself for a simple reason. I am convinced that the socialist idea would not have come into existence without Christianity. Christianity is the religion of charity. The politically correct word for charity is solidarity. Karl Marx saw this somewhat differently. He called religion ‘opiate for the masses’. That is what he calls it in his Theses on Feuerbach. Religion at the time of Karl Marx played a different role than it does today. Today the question arises who in society is responsible for the promotion of values. Supermarkets cannot replace cathedrals." (Oskar Lafontaine)
In May 2010, Die Welt interviewed Oskar Lafontaine, an outgoing chairman of Die Linke (The Left party in Germany). This charismatic political figure started to establish his place on the left when in 2008 he called for including the phrase, “For exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, [the bourgeoisie] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” – from the Communist Manifesto – directly in the party program to succeed a much shorter programmatic summary. Later that same year, and during the inaugural congress of the Parti du Gauche (Left Party) in France, Lafontaine made an impressive speech that mentioned constant disappointment in the strategy of reformist parliamentary coalitions, saying that “this is exactly the big dilemma of these socialist parties: to formulate the principles of opposition at Epinay, and the principles of government at Godesberg. The history of west European socialist parties in power is a long list of rotten compromises.” Finally, his charisma became distinctly avuncular when he proclaimed that “We want to overthrow capitalism” in a May 2009 interview with Der Spiegel. While Lafontaine is not a genuine revolutionary, he has at least followed the steps of the old Independent Social Democracy under the anti-war Hugo Haase: vacillation and renegacy during revolutionary periods, but political activism worthy of at least critical support outside such periods (not to mention being assaulted by a mentally deranged person).
The interview by Die Welt started by asking Oskar Lafontaine if he has thought about leaving the Roman Catholic Church – a religious institution which, even beyond state non-interference, is plagued by cases of clergy sex abuse and by demographic decline in the more developed states – and how he could reconcile his personal Catholicism with working alongside left-wing atheists. It should be noted that, in responding, he confused the Theses on Feuerbach – best known for concluding against intellectual isolationism such as “Academic Marxism” and post-modernist radicalism in declaring that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” – with A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Also, the image of supermarkets is less powerful than the image of shopping malls representing a new opiate.
Nevertheless, the broader subject of organized religion and spirituality was discussed. It is therefore important to go beyond the agitational talking point of 19th-century religion being “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world […] the soul of soulless conditions [and] the opium of the people.” After all, modern consumptionism – as opposed to the proper “consumerism” of consumer activism and the belief that economies exist for the benefit of consumers – is a new opiate. Consumptionism can pertain to at least some discretionary goods, or it can pertain to less tangible things like the ever-notorious and fundamentally anti-political phenomenon that is infotainment.
Before recorded history, there was no organized religion, only spirituality (like belief in what is perceived to be supernatural). There were only basic rules on how not to exercise one’s personal spirituality and mainly on how not to interact with the world, rules which contemporarily speaking encompassed:
1) Rejecting ideas and practices associated with animism, pantheism, divine corporeal manifestation more generally, polytheism, trinitarianism or other kinds of henotheism – including human sacrifices and sex rituals, whether literal or metaphorical – and at the higher level of negative theology those of anthropomorphism (ascribing positive attributes to perceived deities);
2) Refraining from cursing even deities perceived to be false;
3) Refraining from murder, perjury in capital cases, and the Biblical capital offense of kidnapping (the real meaning of the famous Eighth Commandment against “stealing,” because kidnapping is in its own way taking an innocent life);
4) Refraining from typical adultery (as opposed to polyfidelity, responsible non-monogamy, etc.), bestiality, incest biologically or through in-law and step relations, and also pedophilia and rape;
5) Refraining from stealing possessions, cheating, committing acts of wage theft or fraud, and possessing false weights and measures;
6) Refraining from eating body parts of live animals or of any dead animal whose flesh was torn off while it was alive, and more generally from other acts of cruelty towards animal life; and
7) Establishing courts and systems of justice based on impartiality.
Moreover, there existed various negative and positive guidelines, such as:
1) Not neglecting someone in mortal danger, whether nearby or afar (hence Good Samaritans and supporting humanitarian work, respectively); not oppressing the weak; not cursing even the deaf, giving misleading advice as though they are stumbling blocks to the blind, misleading others more generally, spreading gossip as one going up and down tale-bearing, or embarrassing others publicly; not bearing grudges or seeking revenge; not accepting bribes; not consuming blood (as opposed to donating blood or receiving a blood transfusion);
2) Admitting wrongdoings and rebuking wrongdoers; respecting one’s own parents and the elderly; returning lost objects, making lost-and-found notices and even caring for lost animate objects such as pets; and helping even personal adversaries load and unload items for legal transport.
Unfortunately, with the emergence of class society came the emergence of organized religion, along with its priestly and other agents, and more barbaric beliefs and practices then than now: from human sacrifice to female genital mutilation, from generic sex rituals to same-sex rituals (as opposed to normal homosexual relationships, whether male or female), from the dominance of god-kings or sacred kings to the public depictions of their images and of them receiving “divine right” from their deities, and from myths of cosmological warfare involving deities perceived to be false – or between perceived deities – to worldly religious crusades that may or may not curse deities perceived to be false but are nevertheless waged in the names of perceived deities.
This was paralleled economically by the sanction of chattel slavery, the ownership of or at least control over the great agricultural estates and other significant areas of land by priestly castes, the growth of cavalry-based war machines through god-kings accumulating too many horses, and of course the institution of blatantly elitist justice systems which favoured those of the upper classes.
Traditionally, the class-strugglist left has advocated for the complete separation of the church from political affairs (not just “the state”) and the school system beyond subjects of mere academic interest, for full freedom of religious and anti-religious speech or writings, for ending tax exemptions and other state subsidies for any politically active body of organized religion, and for the expropriation of all properties of organized religion not directly related to acts of prayer or worship. As the Weekly Worker’s Peter Manson explained in response to the French ban on burqas:
Based on opposition to the all-pervading influence of the corrupt Catholic Church, this Jacobin anti-clerical secularism was based on a thoroughgoing statism. In actual fact the [French] left’s ‘secularism’ is an impostor. Secularism demands not state bans, but state non-interference in the citizen’s religious or non-religious beliefs and practices. The state must not accord privileges to a particular religion (as in the UK with the Church of England) nor discriminate against others. Genuine secularism insists on the equality of all in the eyes of the state, whatever their religion or lack of it. In other words, all citizens must be free to practise their beliefs - otherwise such ‘equality’ is totally meaningless.
Unfortunately, one particular phenomenon has posed problems for everything that the class-strugglist left has raised historically in regards to organized religion: megachurch businesses. These behemoths are quite political beneath the thin veneer of anti-abortion and homophobic rhetoric, openly promote inequality in access to and distribution of free speech with their media infrastructure, are tax-exempt while operating like for-profit corporations, and have in place of the traditional land holdings and art treasures massive merchandise and service arms beyond media infrastructure to promote their brand: fitness facilities, food courts, investment partnerships, and aggressively selling books and DVDs specific to their brand. How can the other extreme, as posed by the early Soviet League of the Militant Godless and its childish destruction of religious buildings and harassment of rank-and-file religious persons, be avoided?
The answer can be found, surprisingly, in the development of multiculturalism and progressive criticisms of it. In 1971, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau said that “national unity if it is to mean anything in the deeply personal sense, must be founded on confidence in one's own individual identity; out of this can grow respect for that of others and a willingness to share ideas, attitudes and assumptions. A vigorous policy of multiculturalism will help create this initial confidence.” Some have raised criticisms against multiculturalism, ranging from increases in hate crime to the voluntary geographic apartheid on the part of people sharing the same cultural background. What the more progressive critics of multiculturalism are calling for is the aforementioned respect and intercultural exchanges. The province of Quebec, for example, promotes the language of the majority (in this case French) as the public language for even minority groups, with the intention of forcing the kind of interaction needed between all residents in overcoming cultural and racial misunderstandings.
Likewise, all buildings of religious prayer or worship should be transformed into intercultural community centers shared by the various religious denominations. Although such a policy is a form of anti-clerical statism criticized by Peter Manson above, monumental displays of religious symbolism already go beyond full freedom of religious speech and writings. Prayer or worship services can be booked, and articles of prayer or worship should be stored in and brought out of storage areas in these intercultural community centers. Participation in political affairs, ownership land holdings or art treasures, investment partnerships, aggressive sales of books and DVDs specific to denominational brands, and control of media infrastructure in a way that promotes inequality in access to and distribution of free speech should still be prohibited for these denominations. Of course, ethnoreligious groups like Jews and Sikhs may not have to be as intercultural, since every cultural group should be entitled to its own community centers. However, synagogues and ethnic temples would have to be replaced by community centers of their respective cultural groups.
Access to these intercultural community centers should nevertheless be denied to dangerous cults and the occult, which are defined more by what their adherents must do in the service of their living leaders and how, than by what those same adherents are prohibited from doing. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses prohibit blood transfusions, yet their meetings are open to strangers and adherents do not live in groups that refuse interaction with society at large. On the other hand, Scientology extorts large sums of money from its adherents in the name of “donations” for consultations or books.
It should be noted that, although this proposed curtailment of organized religion’s influence is a radical reform that could be implemented by bourgeois societies like France, it is unclear how it enables further reforms, and the principle of social labour (against non-worker control, private ownership relations over productive and non-possessive property, debt slavery, and overspecialization of labour) is irrelevant when considering the unproductive nature of work in organized religion – despite the potential for these intercultural community centers and related media infrastructure to be publicly owned.
REFERENCES
“I'm a passionate mushroom picker” (German) by Claus Christian Malzahn and Miriam Hollstein, Die Welt [http://www.welt.de/die-welt/politik/article7623882/Ich-bin-ein-leidenschaftlicher-Pilzesammler.html]
Left Parties Everywhere by Oskar Lafontaine [http://books.google.ca/books?id=uL1kptbCEx8C&printsec=frontcover]
“We want to overthrow capitalism” by Björn Hengst and Claus Christian Malzahn, Der Spiegel [http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,624880,00.html]
Theses on Feuerbach by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm]
A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/index.htm]
Mishneh Torah (English) by Moses Maimonides
[http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1188354/jewish/Chapter-9.htm]
[http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/901723/jewish/Negative-Commandments.htm]
[http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/901694/jewish/Part-1.htm]
[http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/901704/jewish/Part-3.htm]
Religion, class struggles, and revolution in ancient Judea by Jack Conrad [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004034]
French burqa ban has nothing to do with women’s rights by Peter Manson [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004033]
The Megachurch Juggernaut: The making of McChurch by Jeff Keilholtz [http://www.zcommunications.org/the-megachurch-juggernaut-by-jeff-keilholtz]
Federal Multicultural Policy by Pierre Elliott Trudeau [http://www.abheritage.ca/albertans/speeches/trudeau.html]
Building an intercultural future by Karen Diepeveen [http://www.cpj.ca/en/content/building-intercultural-future]
"I have never put this question this way to myself for a simple reason. I am convinced that the socialist idea would not have come into existence without Christianity. Christianity is the religion of charity. The politically correct word for charity is solidarity. Karl Marx saw this somewhat differently. He called religion ‘opiate for the masses’. That is what he calls it in his Theses on Feuerbach. Religion at the time of Karl Marx played a different role than it does today. Today the question arises who in society is responsible for the promotion of values. Supermarkets cannot replace cathedrals." (Oskar Lafontaine)
In May 2010, Die Welt interviewed Oskar Lafontaine, an outgoing chairman of Die Linke (The Left party in Germany). This charismatic political figure started to establish his place on the left when in 2008 he called for including the phrase, “For exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, [the bourgeoisie] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” – from the Communist Manifesto – directly in the party program to succeed a much shorter programmatic summary. Later that same year, and during the inaugural congress of the Parti du Gauche (Left Party) in France, Lafontaine made an impressive speech that mentioned constant disappointment in the strategy of reformist parliamentary coalitions, saying that “this is exactly the big dilemma of these socialist parties: to formulate the principles of opposition at Epinay, and the principles of government at Godesberg. The history of west European socialist parties in power is a long list of rotten compromises.” Finally, his charisma became distinctly avuncular when he proclaimed that “We want to overthrow capitalism” in a May 2009 interview with Der Spiegel. While Lafontaine is not a genuine revolutionary, he has at least followed the steps of the old Independent Social Democracy under the anti-war Hugo Haase: vacillation and renegacy during revolutionary periods, but political activism worthy of at least critical support outside such periods (not to mention being assaulted by a mentally deranged person).
The interview by Die Welt started by asking Oskar Lafontaine if he has thought about leaving the Roman Catholic Church – a religious institution which, even beyond state non-interference, is plagued by cases of clergy sex abuse and by demographic decline in the more developed states – and how he could reconcile his personal Catholicism with working alongside left-wing atheists. It should be noted that, in responding, he confused the Theses on Feuerbach – best known for concluding against intellectual isolationism such as “Academic Marxism” and post-modernist radicalism in declaring that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” – with A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Also, the image of supermarkets is less powerful than the image of shopping malls representing a new opiate.
Nevertheless, the broader subject of organized religion and spirituality was discussed. It is therefore important to go beyond the agitational talking point of 19th-century religion being “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world […] the soul of soulless conditions [and] the opium of the people.” After all, modern consumptionism – as opposed to the proper “consumerism” of consumer activism and the belief that economies exist for the benefit of consumers – is a new opiate. Consumptionism can pertain to at least some discretionary goods, or it can pertain to less tangible things like the ever-notorious and fundamentally anti-political phenomenon that is infotainment.
Before recorded history, there was no organized religion, only spirituality (like belief in what is perceived to be supernatural). There were only basic rules on how not to exercise one’s personal spirituality and mainly on how not to interact with the world, rules which contemporarily speaking encompassed:
1) Rejecting ideas and practices associated with animism, pantheism, divine corporeal manifestation more generally, polytheism, trinitarianism or other kinds of henotheism – including human sacrifices and sex rituals, whether literal or metaphorical – and at the higher level of negative theology those of anthropomorphism (ascribing positive attributes to perceived deities);
2) Refraining from cursing even deities perceived to be false;
3) Refraining from murder, perjury in capital cases, and the Biblical capital offense of kidnapping (the real meaning of the famous Eighth Commandment against “stealing,” because kidnapping is in its own way taking an innocent life);
4) Refraining from typical adultery (as opposed to polyfidelity, responsible non-monogamy, etc.), bestiality, incest biologically or through in-law and step relations, and also pedophilia and rape;
5) Refraining from stealing possessions, cheating, committing acts of wage theft or fraud, and possessing false weights and measures;
6) Refraining from eating body parts of live animals or of any dead animal whose flesh was torn off while it was alive, and more generally from other acts of cruelty towards animal life; and
7) Establishing courts and systems of justice based on impartiality.
Moreover, there existed various negative and positive guidelines, such as:
1) Not neglecting someone in mortal danger, whether nearby or afar (hence Good Samaritans and supporting humanitarian work, respectively); not oppressing the weak; not cursing even the deaf, giving misleading advice as though they are stumbling blocks to the blind, misleading others more generally, spreading gossip as one going up and down tale-bearing, or embarrassing others publicly; not bearing grudges or seeking revenge; not accepting bribes; not consuming blood (as opposed to donating blood or receiving a blood transfusion);
2) Admitting wrongdoings and rebuking wrongdoers; respecting one’s own parents and the elderly; returning lost objects, making lost-and-found notices and even caring for lost animate objects such as pets; and helping even personal adversaries load and unload items for legal transport.
Unfortunately, with the emergence of class society came the emergence of organized religion, along with its priestly and other agents, and more barbaric beliefs and practices then than now: from human sacrifice to female genital mutilation, from generic sex rituals to same-sex rituals (as opposed to normal homosexual relationships, whether male or female), from the dominance of god-kings or sacred kings to the public depictions of their images and of them receiving “divine right” from their deities, and from myths of cosmological warfare involving deities perceived to be false – or between perceived deities – to worldly religious crusades that may or may not curse deities perceived to be false but are nevertheless waged in the names of perceived deities.
This was paralleled economically by the sanction of chattel slavery, the ownership of or at least control over the great agricultural estates and other significant areas of land by priestly castes, the growth of cavalry-based war machines through god-kings accumulating too many horses, and of course the institution of blatantly elitist justice systems which favoured those of the upper classes.
Traditionally, the class-strugglist left has advocated for the complete separation of the church from political affairs (not just “the state”) and the school system beyond subjects of mere academic interest, for full freedom of religious and anti-religious speech or writings, for ending tax exemptions and other state subsidies for any politically active body of organized religion, and for the expropriation of all properties of organized religion not directly related to acts of prayer or worship. As the Weekly Worker’s Peter Manson explained in response to the French ban on burqas:
Based on opposition to the all-pervading influence of the corrupt Catholic Church, this Jacobin anti-clerical secularism was based on a thoroughgoing statism. In actual fact the [French] left’s ‘secularism’ is an impostor. Secularism demands not state bans, but state non-interference in the citizen’s religious or non-religious beliefs and practices. The state must not accord privileges to a particular religion (as in the UK with the Church of England) nor discriminate against others. Genuine secularism insists on the equality of all in the eyes of the state, whatever their religion or lack of it. In other words, all citizens must be free to practise their beliefs - otherwise such ‘equality’ is totally meaningless.
Unfortunately, one particular phenomenon has posed problems for everything that the class-strugglist left has raised historically in regards to organized religion: megachurch businesses. These behemoths are quite political beneath the thin veneer of anti-abortion and homophobic rhetoric, openly promote inequality in access to and distribution of free speech with their media infrastructure, are tax-exempt while operating like for-profit corporations, and have in place of the traditional land holdings and art treasures massive merchandise and service arms beyond media infrastructure to promote their brand: fitness facilities, food courts, investment partnerships, and aggressively selling books and DVDs specific to their brand. How can the other extreme, as posed by the early Soviet League of the Militant Godless and its childish destruction of religious buildings and harassment of rank-and-file religious persons, be avoided?
The answer can be found, surprisingly, in the development of multiculturalism and progressive criticisms of it. In 1971, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau said that “national unity if it is to mean anything in the deeply personal sense, must be founded on confidence in one's own individual identity; out of this can grow respect for that of others and a willingness to share ideas, attitudes and assumptions. A vigorous policy of multiculturalism will help create this initial confidence.” Some have raised criticisms against multiculturalism, ranging from increases in hate crime to the voluntary geographic apartheid on the part of people sharing the same cultural background. What the more progressive critics of multiculturalism are calling for is the aforementioned respect and intercultural exchanges. The province of Quebec, for example, promotes the language of the majority (in this case French) as the public language for even minority groups, with the intention of forcing the kind of interaction needed between all residents in overcoming cultural and racial misunderstandings.
Likewise, all buildings of religious prayer or worship should be transformed into intercultural community centers shared by the various religious denominations. Although such a policy is a form of anti-clerical statism criticized by Peter Manson above, monumental displays of religious symbolism already go beyond full freedom of religious speech and writings. Prayer or worship services can be booked, and articles of prayer or worship should be stored in and brought out of storage areas in these intercultural community centers. Participation in political affairs, ownership land holdings or art treasures, investment partnerships, aggressive sales of books and DVDs specific to denominational brands, and control of media infrastructure in a way that promotes inequality in access to and distribution of free speech should still be prohibited for these denominations. Of course, ethnoreligious groups like Jews and Sikhs may not have to be as intercultural, since every cultural group should be entitled to its own community centers. However, synagogues and ethnic temples would have to be replaced by community centers of their respective cultural groups.
Access to these intercultural community centers should nevertheless be denied to dangerous cults and the occult, which are defined more by what their adherents must do in the service of their living leaders and how, than by what those same adherents are prohibited from doing. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses prohibit blood transfusions, yet their meetings are open to strangers and adherents do not live in groups that refuse interaction with society at large. On the other hand, Scientology extorts large sums of money from its adherents in the name of “donations” for consultations or books.
It should be noted that, although this proposed curtailment of organized religion’s influence is a radical reform that could be implemented by bourgeois societies like France, it is unclear how it enables further reforms, and the principle of social labour (against non-worker control, private ownership relations over productive and non-possessive property, debt slavery, and overspecialization of labour) is irrelevant when considering the unproductive nature of work in organized religion – despite the potential for these intercultural community centers and related media infrastructure to be publicly owned.
REFERENCES
“I'm a passionate mushroom picker” (German) by Claus Christian Malzahn and Miriam Hollstein, Die Welt [http://www.welt.de/die-welt/politik/article7623882/Ich-bin-ein-leidenschaftlicher-Pilzesammler.html]
Left Parties Everywhere by Oskar Lafontaine [http://books.google.ca/books?id=uL1kptbCEx8C&printsec=frontcover]
“We want to overthrow capitalism” by Björn Hengst and Claus Christian Malzahn, Der Spiegel [http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,624880,00.html]
Theses on Feuerbach by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm]
A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/index.htm]
Mishneh Torah (English) by Moses Maimonides
[http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1188354/jewish/Chapter-9.htm]
[http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/901723/jewish/Negative-Commandments.htm]
[http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/901694/jewish/Part-1.htm]
[http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/901704/jewish/Part-3.htm]
Religion, class struggles, and revolution in ancient Judea by Jack Conrad [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004034]
French burqa ban has nothing to do with women’s rights by Peter Manson [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004033]
The Megachurch Juggernaut: The making of McChurch by Jeff Keilholtz [http://www.zcommunications.org/the-megachurch-juggernaut-by-jeff-keilholtz]
Federal Multicultural Policy by Pierre Elliott Trudeau [http://www.abheritage.ca/albertans/speeches/trudeau.html]
Building an intercultural future by Karen Diepeveen [http://www.cpj.ca/en/content/building-intercultural-future]