Day by day I begin to wonder more and more if I can even call myself a communist anymore. Its becoming hard to really reconcile my faith with communism if the ideology itself is theorically opposed to it. Bukharin's book, "ABCs of Communism," has an entire section on Chapter 11 that directly talks about why religion and communism are incompatible. Communists believe history is driven by class struggle and material conditions. Religious people believe in stuff like divine intervention or divine will. A communist would probably look at islam (my faith) and be like "No prophet was sent a message by God and acted upon it, it was their material conditions that made them act." I don't see how one could believe both, it feels like its either or.
Sure, it is perfectly possible for religious people to largely agree with Marxists on such things as historical materialism and present-day class struggles, not to mention struggles for national liberation, against racism, etc. It is possible be anti-capitalist and fight for a classless, moneyless, and stateless society where MOP is colletively owned but at the end of the day, there is philosophical tension.
I feel at best, I can be an ally, but the way I see it, I will never be one of them. I do not belong. My voice does not count equally and my beliefs make me suspect. I have faced hostility from leftists that are atheist and hostile towards religion and been called a revisionist. If this is how me and others are gonna be treated just because of our faith, I'd rather die than simply be used as cannon fodder in a revolution.
The non-dualism comes more into the problem of religion and scientific analysis. If your philosophical world-view posits that there is a power outside of nature that can influence it independently of nature itself, then how can you square the circle with the science of observation and testing of hypothesis. Surely every time you prove that things are only influenced by their material surroundings and conditions, then you are narrowing, constantly, the scope in which a dualistic power can act upon the world. If you have a divine power that ultimately has no outside observable influence on the world, then you end up falling back to spinoza's monist view of the divine and nature, the basis for most materialist atheist philosophies.
For a short piece pulling at this thread from Engels: https://redsails.org/shamefaced-materialism/
Fair point!
I might say that more strictly, it observably reduces the scope of which we know that a hypothetical outside power chooses to act upon the world in our time. Of course, if you spend all your life looking for unicorns, but never find one, it is perfectly reasonable to think they don't exist, so I understand your point.
By equating science with metaphysics, you are elevating Occam's Razor to an universal metaphysical qualifier to select the least presumptive explanation as the truest explanation - that is of course very useful in science, and also a very fair metaphysical standpoint to take. It's just not "provable" in a strict sense that this "best theory" is necessarily metaphysically "true", as the scientific method does not really attempt to define "metaphysical truth", but rather that "this is our most useful model of the truth". Still, it is fair to assume it is as true as it can be in our time.
I guess I'm trying to say that I think it is perfectly reasonable to not be religious. For me it is more about a personal faith relationship and faith as a "extrarational" mode of thought (ala Kieerkegard). I also find some of the conclusions one might draw from a purely atheist viewpoint a little absurd: A universe exists, possibly the only one, for no known reason and possibly for no reason at all, which we to a large part do not understand the nature of, and which happened to have the exact conditions possible to not just make life on at least one, and possibly only one, planet; and not just life, but human life, and not just human life, human life which can have a subjective experience of connection with the divine, and not just that kind of human life, but us specifically, and everyone we know and everything we do, and that then all this will pass, we will, human life will, all life will, possibly even the possibility of life and advanced structures in the universe - all for no reason at all, lost into nothingness through time. Maybe it's just my ego, but I don't find this a satisfactory explanation to why we exist - it seems to me absurd to think that it all just happened to randomly work out that way (sure, if it didn't, no one would know, but the fact is that we don't know about an infinite or large amount of other universes with different configurations where we don't exist, so we are still faced with the problem of existing in the one provably existing universe in which we do exist). I'd rather think that love is the reason and that love even defeats death in the end, but I totally get that not everyone needs to agree.
Max Planck would like a word.
I mean 2 million years ago humans didn't exist but lots of other life did. Why are we some kind of pinnacle? Some kind of special extra-natural entity? It's a very human/andro centric approach to viewing the world.
Sure, I agree! It is a very human centric approach to viewing the world.
I would say that I believe that we are special because we can have a different type of relation to ourselves, to each other, to the world, and to the divine than other animals (atheisticly, this might be just imaginary, but still special that we are able to, no?). I mean isn't it a little intriguing that humans is the only species line which has these traits? I guess I just feel like it is an awful lot of random chance if it is all random
Other animals exhibit the same traits, the more we learn.
I'm reminded of the Hindu laughing and crying goat; and the Himalayan devolution into yeti.