Socialism and Religion
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The Socialist Party stand on religion
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/socialism-and-religion
mcolome1; are you an SPGB chatbot? It's something I've long thought about proposing but didn't realise the internet committee already got there first. Not sure if you'd pass the Turing test though.
jondwhite wrote:mcolome1; are you an SPGB chatbot? It's something I've long thought about proposing but didn't realise the internet committee already got there first. Not sure if you'd pass the Turing test though.Probably, I will not pass the test. I am awaiting for a professor like you to educate me. It looks like you do not read the website of the SPGB too frequently because the Pamphlet was published many years ago
jondwhite wrote:mcolome1; are you an SPGB chatbot? It's something I've long thought about proposing but didn't realise the internet committee already got there first. Not sure if you'd pass the Turing test though.It is also a topic that has been widely discussed at the WSM forum and SPopen
mcolome1 wrote:jondwhite wrote:mcolome1; are you an SPGB chatbot? It's something I've long thought about proposing but didn't realise the internet committee already got there first. Not sure if you'd pass the Turing test though.It is also a topic that has been widely discussed at the WSM forum and SPopen
There are also 3 articles published on SOYMB dated 12/9/16
I know that you won't like my participation in this thread, mcolome1, but here's my ten pence worth, anyway.Whilst the SPGB regards itself as 'materialist', it is adhering to what amounts to a religion. That's why I often characterise your beliefs as 'Religious Materialism'.As many thinkers over the years have pointed out, 'materialists' simply replace the 'absolute' of the 'idealists' with their own 'absolute'. That is, the 'materialists' replace 'god' with 'matter'.Belief in 'Matter' requires a religious faith, in an 'absolute' that 'exists', has always 'existed', and will always 'exist'. The Religious Materialists become furious at those Communists who insist that 'matter' is a social product (just like Communists insist that 'god' is a social product).And since 'matter' is a social product, it's easy to show workers that the Religious Materialists are either lying to workers or are totally unaware of the political effects of an 'absolute' of any kind.An 'absolute' (since it doesn't really 'exist') necessarily requires an elite minority who insist to the majority that the 'absolute' does 'exist', but the majority do not have the required consciousness to 'know the absolute', and so an 'elite special consciousness' must determine the nature of the 'absolute', and this determination cannot be made by the majority (by a democratic vote).That is, the Religious Materialists politically insist that the majority do not have the right to vote 'matter' out of 'existence' and replace 'matter' with something more suited to the interests and purposes of the majority.Once this is understood by workers, they can soon realise why Kautsky and Lenin (for example) regarded themselves as 'materialists' – it's because their elite politics require an 'absolute' which provides the elite with a basis which is unable to be controlled or changed by the proletariat.Unless the SPGB confront this issue, they will continue to have faith in an 'absolute', and Democratic Communists will continue to point out this underlying elitism of the SPGB to workers who wish to know about how workers can, as Marx argued, change their world.'Absolutes', as the term suggests, cannot be changed.
jondwhite wrote:While a bit repetitive, that would at least pass the Turing test.But, alas, it won't pass your 'Materialism test'!
jondwhite wrote:The materia-bot is clearly more sophisticated than the SPGB-bot.Isn't any bot more sophisticated than the SPGB-bot?
Well I can’t resist having a go at this one, as a scientist and allegedly a ‘religious materialist’, as we are all supposed to be. Matter exists and the material world is, well material etc. It’s endemic in the scientific thinking you see and there is thus a refusal to contemplate anything else. This is going to sound like tin foil hat and David Icke stuff but it isn’t; I had another dose of it from Jeff Forshaw a couple of weeks ago. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quantum-Universe-Everything-that-happen/dp/0241952700 http://www.physics.manchester.ac.uk/people/staff-spotlights/jeff-forshaw/ It is that we may be living in a computer simulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation/ What matters here is the so called scientific religion of ‘materialism’. I had been following it as a kind of intellectual exercise since that guy Bostrum through the gauntlet down in 2003; I read it shortly after going onto the internet probably in 2004. I went to a talk on it around 2010 at a Manchester Café Scientifique. [They managed to get some really important scientific bods happy to turn up at that kind of thing.] This guy, who did the simulation hypthothesis thing, was a proper professor of electronic engineering [computer hardware basically] with a background in quantum mechanics. It was scary. I stood up and had a bit of a rant about old Greek stuff about shadows on cave wall etc. And he said Ah yes Plato; we have been thinking about that as well. What’s doubly alarming is the emergence within it of what is essentially Hegel’s Phenomenology of Logic; or the ‘computer algorithm’. Although I am sure they haven’t got that far yet, I have no intention of helping things along. Hegel was obviously an important character as he was captain of the German philosophers football team; loved the socks. Plato in goal for the Greeks. Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz in goal for the Germans, no doubt for his space, matter and orientation; was a disappointment in leaving an open goal for the Greeks. Bad boy Nietzsche was booked again. Perhaps no surprise that the surprise selection of Archimedes for the Greeks teamed up with the dialectician Socrates to score the only goal. Marx was correct; it was offside. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2gJamguN04 Incidentally ‘materialism’ has crept into the debate from a totally different direction.
LBird wrote:I know that you won't like my participation in this thread, mcolome1, but here's my ten pence worth, anyway.Whilst the SPGB regards itself as 'materialist', it is adhering to what amounts to a religion. That's why I often characterise your beliefs as 'Religious Materialism'.As many thinkers over the years have pointed out, 'materialists' simply replace the 'absolute' of the 'idealists' with their own 'absolute'. That is, the 'materialists' replace 'god' with 'matter'.Belief in 'Matter' requires a religious faith, in an 'absolute' that 'exists', has always 'existed', and will always 'exist'. The Religious Materialists become furious at those Communists who insist that 'matter' is a social product (just like Communists insist that 'god' is a social product).And since 'matter' is a social product, it's easy to show workers that the Religious Materialists are either lying to workers or are totally unaware of the political effects of an 'absolute' of any kind.An 'absolute' (since it doesn't really 'exist') necessarily requires an elite minority who insist to the majority that the 'absolute' does 'exist', but the majority do not have the required consciousness to 'know the absolute', and so an 'elite special consciousness' must determine the nature of the 'absolute', and this determination cannot be made by the majority (by a democratic vote).That is, the Religious Materialists politically insist that the majority do not have the right to vote 'matter' out of 'existence' and replace 'matter' with something more suited to the interests and purposes of the majority.Once this is understood by workers, they can soon realise why Kautsky and Lenin (for example) regarded themselves as 'materialists' – it's because their elite politics require an 'absolute' which provides the elite with a basis which is unable to be controlled or changed by the proletariat.Unless the SPGB confront this issue, they will continue to have faith in an 'absolute', and Democratic Communists will continue to point out this underlying elitism of the SPGB to workers who wish to know about how workers can, as Marx argued, change their world.'Absolutes', as the term suggests, cannot be changed.I am planning to answer to your repetitive argumentation.The only thing that I want to say is that what you have written it is not the main topic of the pamphlet that has been published in this forum. The pamphlet covers the true origin of religion, and its development thru history, and what is the aptitude of the socialists toward religion. Your definition of religion shows that you have not read the pamphlet of the SPGB, or you do not know what religion is. The expression of Marx regarding religion on his time as the 'opium of the people' do not apply to our time either because religion do not have the same influence that it had during the XVIII century . You are the one making a religion of Marx
jondwhite wrote:mcolome1; are you an SPGB chatbot? It's something I've long thought about proposing but didn't realise the internet committee already got there first. Not sure if you'd pass the Turing test though.The difference between a man and child is the type of toys that he plays with. I was expecting that you were going to give a lecture at least on Apologetic or Theology, but instead you are playing computer or video games
mcolome1 wrote:I am planning to answer to your repetitive argumentation.I'm glad we're going to get an answer – that's what debate is supposed to be about.As for my 'repetitive argumentation', that's only a response to your 'repetitive religiosity' regarding 'matter'. Repetitive claims of the need for 'faith' must be argued against.
mcolome1 wrote:The only thing that I want to say is that what you have written it is not the main topic of the pamphlet that has been published in this forum. The pamphlet covers the true origin of religion, and its development thru history, and what is the aptitude of the socialists toward religion. Your definition of religion shows that you have not read the pamphlet of the SPGB, or you do not know what religion is. The expression of Marx regarding religion on his time as the 'opium of the people' do not apply to our time either because religion do not have the same influence that it had during the XVIII century . You are the one making a religion of MarxUnfortunately, it's precisely your 'definitions' that are at issue. It's no proper response to criticisms of your 'materialist' claim for the need for 'faith in Matter' to say that we can't discuss this.There will be no need for 'faith in Matter' in a socialist society which is controlled by the democratic producers. Only the democratic producers can determine for themselves what they produce.'Materialists' make the anti-democratic claim that only the minority of 'materialists' can determine 'matter', and it is apparent that the SPGB also makes this claim – and this is a religious claim, which will end in priestly rule, just like it did with Lenin.This, of course, has been the response of many socialists since the 19th century about the dangers of 'materialism' – it's not a novel claim by me. The Stalinists even reinstated the Orthodox church.As for me 'making a religion of Marx', anyone who's read my posts for the last three years will know that I'm very critical of Marx – I think that he's a terrible writer (even Engels didn't understand much of what Marx wrote – and we're not talking about 'handwriting', but 'explanation'), and that he sometimes undermined his own stated ideas (Engels did the same, but much more often), by saying the very opposite to his key claims.In fact, I think that only a comprehensive re-assessment of Marx's ideas in the 21st century by the emerging class conscious proletariat, can solve many of our problems with Marx. We need to read, discuss, discard, re-formulate, re-iterate, and create new ways of understanding the core of what Marx was trying (very poorly) to say about democratic social production and the building towards socialism/communism.Marx's ideas have to be made understandable to any worker – and that task is the job of socialists.
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