Ask Lemmygrad

Gramsci talked a lot about how communists should try to emulate the Catholic churches structural reach - we should be doing what the church does for the working class - provide community, provide a 3rd space, charity and outreach work, mass events, teaching and reading and such.

I think we can learn a lot from how religion organizes.

Im personally agnostic and respect most moderates religious beliefs, although I remain spectical I wouldn't shut someone out or refuse to work with anyone who was religious.

I tend to view religion through a functionalist lens. Historically, religion served as a way to codify successful behaviors before we had the empirical tools to understand why those behaviors worked. Take the prohibition of pork in Abrahamic traditions for example. In the Bronze Age, there was no germ theory or concept of parasites like trichinosis. You could not explain to a population why eating undercooked pork might kill them, so the survival heuristic got wrapped in metaphysics. It became a rule not to eat it because it is forbidden by God rather than because of biology. It was an epistemological shortcut that encoded necessary knowledge into custom because the science was unavailable to explain the mechanism.

Beyond just physical survival, religion also serves a structural function by creating social cohesion. In feudal and capitalist structures, the economic engine does not inherently unite people. Capitalism in particular is fundamentally individualistic. It atomizes society by reducing the human experience to individual ambition and competition. The society risks fragmentation when the system atomizes people into isolated units. An external cohesive force becomes necessary to act as social glue for people to have a collective identity. Religion provides that superstructure by offering a common worldview and shared narrative that allows people to transcend the self. It acts as an artificial collective because the economic system refuses to provide a real one.

On the other hand, a socialist society does not require a crutch like religious to function. Socialism provides an inherent collective purpose that unites people toward a common goal. The idea of collective ownership and democratic control over the economy allows people to see themselves as part of a material whole. If a society is truly united by a common material goal, the external glue of religion becomes redundant. You no longer need a divine mandate to bind people together because the social relations of production are doing that work automatically. At the same time, material dialectics allow us to understand the world directly without needing to hide knowledge inside arcane traditions.

Crudely:

• religious westerners of any colour: those other countries deserve to be bombed because they are the wrong religion
• athiest westerners of any colour: those other countries deserve to be bombed because they are they are backwards due to religion
• western secularism came from Islam (Ibn Rushd) and then re-appropriated by the west as one of its many masks of the dictatorship of capital
• religion will sow the seeds of its own destruction and our first global contradiction is imperialism, and it is in anti-imperialism we find solidarity
• having said that any communist party cannot be religious but a dictatorship against capital may not necessarily be "athiest"
• dialectical materialism will lead towards athiesm but if you are religious it may not be in your lifetime, depending on your material conditions, and that's OK. Dialectical materialists are a spectrum (see all the folks Marx learned from and criticised to help formulate his DM)
• the reaction of religion is a fine needle to thread when attempting to build solidarity and a vanguard when fighting imperialists

I was raised in (and was devout about until age 27 or so) white evangelical Christianity in the US. From that, I struggled to view “religion” in a broad sense other than through that lens. I held on to a lot of anger and in some ways was an edgy internet atheist. Marxism helped me understand base and superstructure. It helped me understand how the religion I was raised in grew out of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and as a way to maintain the meager privileges that the bourgeoisie grant upon the reactionary, white working class. In other words, the specific material and historical circumstances of the time and place I lived, driven by a specific mode of production. And it was those things that I was really angry at (well, for the most part. Beliefs around eternal torment still bother me to this day). Also seeing how faith and religion has brought encouragement and hope to the people of Gaza also helped me approach the concept of religion with nuance.

Ultimately religion can be a force for good or bad, it just depends on the material elements that underlie it in a specific context.

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.

What's your opinion on religion?

Largely irrelevant to what we get into here. At some point, I became conscious of how prominent western atheism gets used as another variation of racism and imperialism. So I try to look at the religions of colonized and imperialized peoples differently than I would the religions of the colonizer, for example. In other words, I say it is largely irrelevant because I'm not going to reject an anti-imperialist struggle because of its religiosity, but neither am I going to especially support it if it's not. Liberation comes first and the form of religion is also impacted by the rest of society and politics, so a colonial society is going to warp religious practice and beliefs toward something more sociopathic than a liberated communal society.

I arrived at atheism through growing up USian catholic and gradually coming to reject it, and that is mainly where my knowledgeable criticisms of religion are confined to (that and western christianity more generally). I have retained some of the pro-social components of the religious mindset of caring about what happens to others, but I reject the gross the limitations of its solutions and find that many of its adherents seem less than committed to its pro-social teachings. Typically, its solutions amount to charity and individual piousness, which is obviously nonsense in practice. The catholic church demonstrated how pathetic of a conception of morality that is with the sexual abuse scandals of its own priests. They have since adopted more strict measures in their organization to try to prevent a repeat, but as far as I know, they still tend to preach the same individualistic, charity-based nonsense. For all the christians in the west fantasize about being persecuted, they sure do a great job of toeing the status quo line rather than challenging it on a systemic level with their teachings.

But it was not a dissatisfaction with religion alone that led me to atheism. The whole christian conception of an "all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving" being is riddled with excuses in order to justify how a being like this simultaneously exists, yet also doesn't step in and stop atrocities from happening. The most common of these excuses is the "free will" argument that doing so would undermine people's "free will". But one human being senselessly murdering another also undermines that other human being's "free will", doesn't it? And human societies generally criminalize and prosecute murder. They also generally have emergency services that try to resuscitate and rescue people who are in danger, rather than leaving them to the "free will" of their choices. This conception of a god essentially makes god look less moral than even some of the most imperialist, capitalist societies; that it can intervene in an instant, effortlessly, to end enormous amounts of trauma, suffering, and neglect, and does not do so.

However, this is not how all religions view god and some of them have multiple gods, so that's why I emphasize that it is mainly a criticism of western christianity. I do not pretend to have studied most religions and so I try not to weigh in on them in this regard. And especially if they are a religion specific to colonized/imperialized peoples, I am extra wary of weighing in because doing so critically could easily take on the character of western Chauvinism and colonial racism.

This place has a civil war over religion about every month lol.

"I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious." (Acts 17:22)

religion serves a purpose in society (opium of the masses). as material conditions improve, that purpose will fade away, taking religion with it.

personally, im an agnostic apatheist. from wikipedia:

A view related to apatheism, apathetic agnosticism claims that no amount of debate can prove or disprove the existence of one or more deities, and if one or more deities exist, they do not appear to be concerned about the fate of humans; therefore, their existence has little to no impact on personal human affairs.

Probably we will need to abolish at least organized religion, but not with the methods of Western Atheism and Western Secular Rationalism

I'm a big fan

I believe in God so I obviously support religion as a concept and continued practice, but the church is extremely flawed and often used in service to the ruling class and must be given only the bare minimum of power. I think even if you think religion will fade as we build twords communism you can't ignore the huge influence it has and rejecting that will leave many of the victims of capital alienated. I don't think it's possible to build community and draw people to a better vision of our world without connection on every aspect of their lives. I think this discussion also often discounts specifically religious communist organizing that tends to be out of the sphere of focus.

I'm not a fan, my country is basically christian, even tho we are technically a secular state (I hope this is the correct term, the term in portuguese is estado laico). There's a pretty big evangelical/protestant lobby in the government and a bunch of billionaire pastors.

We even have a very widespread coloquial term for evangelicals/protestants, the word crente (something like believer in a very quick translation). Part of my family is catholic, part is evangelical (I'm pretty sure I'm the only atheist), but even tho the crentes are known for being annoying about their religion, my relatives are very chill and don't really bring it up unsolicited (at least I don't remember it happening), so I can't say I have had a bad interaction with crentes outside the internet, where they are very annoying, specially because a lot of them tend to just go to comment sections to preach and spread hate towards lgbt people out of nowhere.

There's also the very big problem of pedophile pastors here in Brasil.

I don't have much experience with people from other religions, mostly I know a couple of muslims, but I'm not against religion in the sense that it should be prohibited, because I think everyone should be free to have and exercise their own beliefs. I'm against it in the sense that it is used as a tool to control people, and I think it will mostly wither away when people's needs are met since religion serves as a way to socialize and feel part of a community for a lot of people. But I could be wrong on this, since socialist states like Cuba have a very big christian population.

I think the way China deals with religion is probably the way. You allow people to exercise their beliefs, to carry their religious texts and symbols, to have their temples and churches and religious places, but you don't allow for public preaching and the state has the last say in it, maintaining it under constant supervision.

Each respective religion spoke the truth of it's time and place, now it's burden on society.