I don’t even agree with your shit how am I better at it than you. How are you gonna jerk off over the rules based societal order and then claim you can ignore whatever highest court you have because you personally disagree. mfer you just reinvented feudalism again
atheists talking about religion be like
And exactly like atheism, it is the intense, structured formation of a formal critique in analysis, a thought experiment to test the default assumption, an attempt to understand why the starting conclusion “feels wrong” than directly leads to a unwinnable confrontation with the magical thinking that underpins both of these enterprises
Like a bishop once told me, not all atheists went to seminary but studying at a seminary “earnestly, in good faith” will inevitably lead to a struggle with atheism for the rest of their life
There’s a bit of the spirit of the political revolutionary in the atheist movement I guess, in this way. I’m not sure what to do with it, but I think it’s something to jot down for the moment
i mean that’s how i got here in a roundabout way. There’s a failure of a large segment of the “skeptical community” to apply their skeptical tools to contemporary social issues, but you also had the less internationally famous people like PZ Myers, Rebecca Watson, Sikivu Hutchinson and other people in their blog networks who were not comrades but usually did better than typical white liberal democrats.
The atheist community of austin had (or has? idk fuck them) a long-running public access tv show but they imploded over trans rights with all the comrades quitting in protest. Prior to that they were a good example of post-New atheism that wasn’t overtly racist and so on.
a lot of shit libs stanning clinton and biden came out of that group though. minnesota liberal radio hosts gonna minensota liberal i guess.
Then we must say that it was completely seized and perverted by opportunists, at least in the anglophone context (and in France, from what I can tell), since it is just another cudgel of chauvinism to be wielded against the imperialized when it is discussed in Popular Discourse ™.
except in the places it was most successful and influential as actual policy? literally what did the soviets do besides what could be judged not far enough in retrospect? the actual history of atheism is not richard dawkins, its a straight line from jacobins to the bolsheviks, a legacy the nu-athiests were actually very keen to avoid. this bending over backwards to amend for the time imperialists figured out how to posture atheism against state enemies (for a vanishingly small portion of these respective country’s populations) in effect ignores the almost universally positive effects of state atheism and revolutionary action against organized religion have achieved in the past 300 years.
like i know you specified anglo-french but when they constitute both a minority in their own nations and a speck of the worldwide mass of atheists it feels terribly misleading
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kinda
there but on the other hand i’m not broken up about the canadian arson after they found those first-nations remains.
idk if the jacobins are really the best example, the reactionary backlash to hardline anticlericalism destroyed them. in retrospect napoleon breaking the spine of european feudalism did more to turn europe functionally atheist than anyone who was actually trying
There is a reason why Marx developed his thought in part but in an essential way by transcending the Young Hegelian critique of religion, and moving beyond a purely formal, abstract, intellectual critique on the internal consistency of the ideas, to the conditions which produce these conditions.
Marx emphasizes the concept of fetishism in part because he wants to highlight how the fetishist function of money in a capitalist society has important similarities to the fetishist aspects of religion.
Obviously it was a far bigger deal being an atheist in, say, 19th century Prussia or Russia, than the West today, but it still aggravates me that critique of organized religion has declined among Communists. Especially as a major obstacle to communist politics in non-western societies is the influence, authority and power of organized religion. I understand why, however, in that this critique has superficially been taken up by reactionary liberals, neoliberals and neoconservatives, and as many of us do not want to risk appearing, let alone being, say, Islamophobic. However I do think this a something of a passive relationship, rather than an actively or constructively critical and evaluative one to organized religion. This has less to do with if someone, say, is interested in the metaphysics of Taoism or Buddhism, or whatever (though not all religions are metaphysically equal frankly), but more with critiques of organized religion and religious ideology in its variety of forms.
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I think it’s a really big problem how the position of permanent and principled critique of religion as mystification has been surrendered by people who described themselves as on the left, including, communists, and taken up by reactionary Neoliberals and Neoconservatives, whose critiques are obviously deeply ignorant and reactionary, and motivated to a huge degree by a desire to feel intellectually superior to others, but in a way analogous to junk food, as these people do not actually have any interesting things to say, let alone critiques, of religion other than obvious and trivial ones which are expressed in a reactionary way.
The most hardcore atheists I know are all Iranian communists, for obvious reasons.