Religious Believers in London
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All religions have their particular way of intimidating people into abiding by their rules. Christianity and Mohamedenism threaten eternal damnation; those religions that believe in reincarnation threaten being reincarnated as some “lower” life form; the Jewish religion of the Old Testament threatened your descendants with being cursed down to the third or fourth generation.
They are all as bad as each other and none is worthy of respect. All of them are mistaken (there is no afterlife and there is no reincarnation), irrational and anti-human and have to be opposed.
Reincarnation is the same type of nonsense. It caters, as does “soul” and “spirit” to the desperate need for self-permanence.
Alexandra David Neel recounts a meeting with a Buddhist hermit who coherently exposes the fallacy of reincarnation. Reincarnation would require a “self” or “soul” – some entity that is permanent and transmigrates through life cycles. This catering to human desire enabled “Buddhism” to flourish and become a structure at home with class society. But, the hermit should have said, that is not Buddhism.
Buddhism is the world’s fourth largest religion, and along with other non-theistic religions, does not entail a belief in the existence of a supernatural entity that intervenes in nature and human affairs.
“It still allows them to kill Muslims. It is the age old use of all religion in secular affairs. Where ‘believers’ are manipulated.”
I’m not defending Buddhism, Matt. I think it is possibly the most objectionable of all religions. But according to that car-crash Conference resolution which you posted there is nothing objectionable in what the Myanmar Buddhists believe as they persecute the Rohingya Muslims.
Buddhism forbids the infliction of harm, so the only thing giving the name Buddhist to these persecutors is that they call themselves it.
Rather like the Bolsheviks calling themselves socialists.
No one is saying ( at least I don’t think so) that a religious person can’t want socialism. It is possible to be right for the wrong reasons. But that is not the question at issue. It is whether or not people with religious views should be admitted to the party.
The case for saying that they should not be is hinted at in the introduction to the ABC of Marxism elsewhere on this site when it says:
”Now, when socialists are so very few, a higher degree of understanding of the workings of capitalism and the course of history are required of socialists (at least of organised socialists). This need not be the case when the socialist movement takes off and begins to become a mass movement.”
People who hold religious views do not reach the degree of understanding required at this stage of the development of the socialist movement.
Or, put another way, we are a Marxist party as well as a socialist party and a Marxist and a religious view of the world are incompatible. If we admitted religious people we would risk regressing to become some sort of wishy- washy ethical group rather than a scientific socialist party.
What we are still up against.
Atheists and humanists are facing discrimination and persecution in some countries because of their beliefs and values, according to a new report. Evidence is growing that humanist and atheist activists are being targeted on the basis of their rejection of a majority religion or their promotion of human rights, democratic values and critical thinking, it says.
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/religious-believers-in-london/page/2/#post-204536
BTW, is the Humanist Association still a proscribed organisation that Party members cannot join or was it another silly resolution that has been made null and void?
Fair enough.
Just an aside on belief.
Christianity is centred on belief. So we think of religion being belief.
Hellenic and Roman religion was about behaviour. Educated Romans didn’t actually believe in the gods. But they insisted on taking part in the rites, in order to be “good Romans.”
Early Christianity was fanatical. It arose among the slaves, whose misery made for millenarian hopes. Alone of all the cults, it rejected observance of the Hellenist rites. It was about belief, but practised mutual aid among its own devotees alone. It was viewed as anti-social by non-Christians.
Judaism, because of its great age, was exempted from observance of the Gentile rites. It was, and is, like Hellenism, about behaviour and daily life on this Earth, with the “afterlife” being irrelevant, and by many Jews, even denied.
Those Christians who held to Jewish observances and rejected Paul, went their own way and were eventually reabsorbed into Judaism. For them, behaviour, the rites, and “good works” (James) were more important than belief.
Whilst the Gentile Pauline Christians fought one another into the Byzantine era, belief was paramount, as rivals sought power to impose each one’s Christianity over one another by swaying the Emperor of the day.
Byzantine Christianity, for all its ritual, is still today closer to Protestantism’s obsession with belief than Catholicism’s stress on good works. For once Western Christianity was securely in charge, from the Middle Ages, it merged James comfortably with Paul. Today, the Roman Church is noted for stressing “good works”, whilst Protestant evangelicals shout about belief, and tell us if we don’t believe, then no matter how good we are, we’re all going to Hell.
In Islam both belief and good works are of equal importance.
Hinduism has so many thousands of cults that no Hindu belief can be pinned down. The Bauls don’t even take part. Hinduism best approximates ancient Hellenism, where behaviour is what counts – how to live here on Earth now.
Buddhism is supposed to be all about behaviour, with no belief at all.
So, religion does not necessarily equal belief.
”Now, when socialists are so very few, a higher degree of understanding of the workings of capitalism and the course of history are required of socialists (at least of organised socialists). This need not be the case when the socialist movement takes off and begins to become a mass movement.”
Maybe this would become true as the practice of socialism became more relevant than the theory. If you’re establishing more democratic workplaces, helping to get food to those who need it, building a more eco-friendly environment, etc., it doesn’t really matter what your religious views are.
But I don’t think membership would grow significantly, if at all, if we dropped the religion question. It would probably fall as some people would be bound to leave.
Religio From NovaRoma. A general term of the Latin language meaning “conscientious scrupulousness”, “sanctity” or “taboo”. It is also used in reference to “respect for what is sacred”, “reverence for the gods,” “obligation, the bond between man and the gods”.
I suggest that many members are wanting in their understanding of materialism too. (But then, should the party be a talking shop of philosophy?) They know it rejects the supernatural, and that’s enough for them, but I suggest they are not up on their Godwin, Holbach, Shelley,”free will” vs Necessity etc., not as they were in the old days of The Western Socialist.
The party will always only attract avowed Marxists, ex-Left, ex-Bolsheviks, for whom “materialism” is a word they associate with Marx.
Which brings us back to the actual socialist revolution not being made by Marxists at all, and our party, remaining unknown by most people, not being the political tool that we have always envisaged it would be.
The Anglican church should reconsider the way statues and other representations of Jesus portray him as white in the light of the Black Lives Matter protests, the archbishop of Canterbury has said.
I know of no Jewish Christian representations of this mythical character. The earliest appear to be Roman, of a gleeful and beardless youth with fair hair, forever happy-looking.
The bearded Christ we recognise was Greek and modelled on Zeus. The Coptic-Ethiopian Christ is dark-skinned. The pale and blue-eyed heavenward-gazing, sentimental-looking Jesus doesn’t appear until the Renaissance revolutionized art and introduced realism.
Posted by (Moved from Coronavirus thread) I think some forms of religious worship are acceptable for Party members.
The Church of England really are a pathetic lot. Now they want to paint the face of the idol they worship black. This won’t please the feminists among them who will want him portrayed as a woman. There is a possible solution. They could make their idol a mixed race hermaphrodite. An earlier group of Christians had a more radical solution— destroy them all, as the soldiers in Cromwell’s army started to do— but then they weren’t C of E.
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