this is fine until i have to figure out what minute I’m born. idk man I was kinda busy being born, didn’t check the clock
Look at the responses to this post. Someone says to be accepting of religious comrades and everyone’s dismissive, assuming bad faith, or adding buts.
This is a great take but just to nitpick, liberation theology I think is less a general phrase than a specific branch of Catholic theology mostly out of Latin America, and doesn’t so much apply to other religious comrades.
Yeah, but it’s still a good rhetorical term for leftist theology
Did you ask the people who actually subscribe to liberation theology, or the people who are religious leftists but are not associated with liberation theology?
When something is a term for something specific, it is usually not a good idea to just start applying the same term to other tangentially related stuff, especially when it is not a broader tendency but just something people in obscure forums do. I’ve noticed it a lot, people here and other leftist forums often use a weird lingo and use names of groups and tendencies in different ways than everyone else and it’s very weird sometimes.
I swear to god (hah), at least 20% of the posts on this website are posts making good points, but in the most hostile way possible.
Why are you surprised that some people reacted defensively to this post? You just stereotyped a bunch of people as crybaby wojacks, if you had instead made a short paragraph of text explaining your feelings, there would be way more people who would be willing to discuss the topic rationally.
People are talking. There are 140+ comments and a huge amount of it is very good. People will be learning from it.
The thread that actually gets people to engage and talk is more effective learning material than the thread that people gloss over and don’t engage with because it’s entirely reasonable and doesn’t rustle any jimmies or have the real guts to properly challenge anyone’s position. Challenging other people’s positions inspires them to defend it, and what comes from challenge and defence is the valuable good stuff.
Going to church, singing hymns, following dietary restrictions, sacrificing to the gods, etc., etc. :halal:
Demanding a ban on abortion because women’s rights makes baby Jesus cry :haram:
I never got the ban on abortion thing if you actually wanted to stop abortion you would be in favour of additional support for mothers, banning it just pushes the practice underground and makes it less safe
I think it’s because they’re thinking about abortion through a deontological lens as opposed to a consequentialist one.
The only important thing in Marxist thought separation of church and state as well as a separation of church and economy. Religion is a personal matter and the whole idea is that it ceases to be faith and becomes a tool of social reproduction of capitalism when it is integrated with the state.
Religion, like the state is something that withers away as social administration of the means of production increases.
Politics and economy are a continuum. Separation of church and state in the enlightenment sense only launders the influence of religion as a tool of the state into the hands of capitalists. In Europe, when states still had state religions, abolition of state religion was important. However as seen in America that has been technically secular since 1776, that doesn’t stop religion from still dominating economic and political reality.
As the state seperated from religion, the role of support is shifted to the capitalists who, brought up in usually white christian society, use their economic influence to preserve the church as a dominant force in the social reproduction of the working class. See: prosperity and wealth gospel/mega churches.
Separation of church and economy is basically just the prevention of the church from accumulation of capital beyond what is needed for its own subsistence. Essentially to prevent its expansion. It’s allowed to continue operating freely, but loses its role as philanthropist and savior of “the wretched masses” and essentially proto-welfare state as that role is taken on by the liberated working class now master of their own destiny.
Lenin quote:
The thing done is to keep silent about it as if it were a piece of old-fashioned “naivete”, just as Christians, after their religion had been given the status of state religion, “forgot” the “naivete” of primitive Christianity with its democratic revolutionary spirit.
It’s important to remember that nothing exists in a vacuum, and christianity has developed alongside the capitalist state as a functionary of the capitalist state.
Marx:
Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves – although in a limited way, in a particular form, and in a particular sphere – as a species-being, in community with other men. Religion has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism, of bellum omnium contra omnes (war of all against all/competition). It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of difference.
Essentially, the making of religion a private matter converts religion into a private enterprise. One subject to the same economic forces that govern capitalist production. So abolition of religion is more the ignoring of religion and removal of special privileges from it.
So basically the state will not act to either compel religion or forbid it and the charitable role of religion will be ended along with the need for charity, is that what you’re saying.
Christianity developed under the Roman state it adapted to both capitalism and feudalism, I’m sure it can adapt to socialism too people did after all make similar predictions about the end of religion about the transition from a feudal to a capitalist system so I’m somewhat dubious that a shift in economic systems will kill it
