Ask Lemmygrad

My username is a reference to a catholic communalist leader in Brazil, so you can guess lol. I can't speak for other religions, but the Catholic church has massive hegemony in Romance Language European and Latin American countries, as well as a lot of tenets that focus specifically on the plight of the poor, spurned and exploited. It also has a form of political organisation that has survived the test of time and deserves study.

So I see religion as a great tool, and the positivist and idealistic tendency to reject religion altogether as one of the biggest problems of communist movements in religious countries. The God that demands blood and condemns infidels can be the same Christ that washes the feet of the poor, feeds the hungry, lives among the abandoned. All it takes is molding the religion to the beliefs and hopes of the people, rather than abandon it to the reactionaries.

Besides that, religion is also part of culture. For all his atheism, Richard Dawkins is functionally a Christian. We can try to deny that part of our culture, but even in that we are engaging with it as a negation. I'd much rather engage with it dialectically and materialistically than pretend to replace it with "neutral" cultural values that are often actually just Western European.

That all said, ontologically I'm an atheist.