CB several comments on religion, atheism and Marxism
Павел Лысенко There is no afterlife, there is no heaven, no hell, no
archangels, no judge, all you have is your life, now politically seize
it!
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Jacob Stuart It may sound contradictory but isn't stopping the
religious being marxists lowing our support count. You CAN be an
economic-Marxist and be a theist.
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Victor Alarcón Calderón We are not against them, but i would not let
religion stop the revolution. As long as they are not a problem to us,
they can be on our side.
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Einde O'Callaghan To be quite frank: I don't think that the majority
of the people who will make the revolution and build communist society
will be Marxists!
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Charles Brown Marxists can be Martin Luther King style Christians.
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Charles Brown "The history of early Christianity has notable points of
resemblance with the modern working-class movement. Like the latter,
Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first
appeared as the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves...See More
On the History of Early Christianity
www.marxists.org
First Published: In Die Neue Zeit, 1894-95;Translated: by the
Institute of Marxi...See More
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Charles Brown
http://books.google.com/.../The_urgency_of_Marxist...
The urgency of Marxist-Christian dialogue
books.google.com
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Charles Brown Why should Marxist be an atheist? Just because of the
fact that the religion is the opium of people? Why can't Christianity
exist in communism?//// In your _Marxism_ you must be an atheist,
because the theory and practice of Marxism is based on materialism or
naturalism: no belief in supernatural or immortal beings influencing
the class struggle. Marx gives a lot of compliments to religion in his
famous statement which says religion is the opium of the people.
Marxists when they are following Marx , however, note, that his
critique of religion is not so much that it is the opium of the
people. That is something of a positive service it does, like aspirin.
He doesn't really seem to emphasize that it deters them from
revolutionary activity by quieting them. His main critique is that Man
makes God; God doesn't make Man. Man makes God in his own image,
anthropomorphises him; God doesn't make man in his own image. I
interpret this as an urging of "Man", humans , to do what they expect
God to do. In other words, get up and get at it, get active, change
the world.
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Charles Brown For Germany, the criticism of religion has been
essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the
prerequisite of all criticism.
The profane existence of error is compromised as soon as its heavenly
oratio pro aris et focis [“speech for the ...See More
Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right 1844
www.marxists.org
Marx's, Draft Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right, which was never completed
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Charles Brown I think it might be helpful of Marxists ,at least in
certain linguistic groups, refer to themselves alternatively as
naturalists and materialists, because "materialist" has a connotation
of "materialistic" or money grubbing and "idealist" doesn't connotate
philosophical idealism but high minded pursuit of worthy goals. So,
how about historical and dialectical naturalists ?
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Charles Brown Naturalism (philosophy)
Naturalism is "the idea or belief that only natural (as opposed to
supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces operate in the world;
(occas.) the idea or belief that nothing exists beyond the natural
world."[1] Adherents of naturalism (i.e., naturalists) assert that
natural laws are the rules that govern the structure and behavior of
the natural universe, that the changing universe at every stage is a
product of these
laws.
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_%28philosophy%29
Naturalism (philosophy) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org
Naturalism is "the idea or belief that only natural (as opposed to
supernatural ...See More
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Dialectical Mysticist How can we know for certain that there is no
supernatural if we can not see such thing. How logical it is to
believe in nonexistence of something that is outside of your
perception. Well, i can't be sure that an alien is standing behind me
right now, because I can't be sure whether there is something or not,
It can't be seen. That is why I think that atheism and naturalism is
as dogmatic as Idealism and theismk
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Charles Brown Frederick Engels
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
Part 2: Materialism
darwin
The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent
philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being.
From the very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the
structure of their own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions
(1) came to believe that their thinking and sensation were not
activities of their bodies, but of a distinct soul which inhabits the
body and leaves it at death — from this time men have been driven to
reflect about the relation between this soul and the outside world.
If, upon death, it took leave of the body and lived on, there was no
occassion to invent yet another distinct death for it. Thus arose the
idea of immortality, which at that stage of development appeared not
at all as a consolation but as a fate against which it was no use
fighting, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive
misfortune. The quandry arising from the common universal ignorance of
what to do with this soul, once its existence had been accepted, after
the death of the body, and not religious desire for consolation, led
in a general way to the tedious notion of personal immortality. In an
exactly similar manner, the first gods arose through the
personification of natural forces. And these gods in the further
development of religions assumed more and more extramundane form,
until finally by a process of abstraction, I might almost say of
distillation, occurring naturally in the course of man’s intellectual
development, out of the many more or less limited and mutually
limiting gods there arose in the minds of men the idea of the one
exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.
Thus the question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation
of the spirit to nature — the paramount question of the whole of
philosophy — has, no less than all religion, its roots in the
narrow-minded and ignorant notions of savagery ( This is bad
anthropology. "Savages" were hardly ignorant and truly not savages;
the "civilized" were the actual savages, which Engels learned some in
writing _The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State_.)
But this question could for the first time be put forward in its whole
acuteness, could achieve its full significance, only after humanity in
Europe had awakened from the long hibernation of the Christian Middle
Ages. The question of the position of thinking in relation to being, a
question which, by the way, had played a great part also in the
scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the question: which is primary,
spirit or nature — that question, in relation to the church, was
sharpened into this: Did God create the world or has the world been in
existence eternally?
The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them
into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to
nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in
some form or other — and among the philosophers, Hegel, for example,
this creation often becomes still more intricate and impossible than
in Christianity — comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who
regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of
materialism.
These two expressions, idealism and materialism, originally signify
nothing else but this; and here too they are not used in any other
sense. What confusion arises when some other meaning is put to them
will be seen below.
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Dialectical Mysticist And If we want workers to have logical and clear
idea of the existence of supernatural, not fanatic attitude towards
this, they should be agnostics, our philosophy should be agnosticism
and not atheism, because workers are progressive class, proletariat
should hold the right attitude towards anything, and atheism can't be
such because it is illogical and a priori dogma
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Charles Brown Engels: "From the very early times when men, still
completely ignorant of the structure of their own bodies, under the
stimulus of dream apparitions (1) came to believe that their thinking
and sensation were not activities of their bodies, but of a distinct
soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death — from this time
men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul
and the outside world. If, upon death, it took leave of the body and
lived on, there was no occassion to invent yet another distinct death
for it. " Comment by Charles: I think the concept of an immortal soul
is more likely to develop out of so-called ancestor worship, as
ancestors are treated as still living , so if they are still living ,
the living might go on living after death. Ancestor "worship" is
central to culture , the anthropological concept, and culture is
transgenerational or dead generations living on in some natural , not
supernatural, sense in future generations. I have dubbed culture
"natural soul" ( as opposed to supernatural soul). Various peoples may
have conceived of soul naturally , too. They might understand that the
bodies of their ancestors were dead , but their ideas, beliefs, myths,
stories and language , now termed culture by anthropology, etc lived
on in the new generations continuing the customs and traditions and
family names and kinship. Stone Age societies were founded very
intensely , more than we can understand, on their kinship systems;
people ordered their living relationships in the foraging bands based
on relations to common ancestors who are dead.systems, people order
their living relationships based on relations to common ancestors who
are dead.
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Liam Murcia It seems rather odd to criticize the alleged "alienation"
and "unscientific" character inherent in "all religions" (without
contrasting religious beliefs that have been useful to push for
emancipation, for example certain trends in Catholicism) and "prove
it" by quoting texts by Marxists as if they were scriptures. C'mon
people.
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Charles Brown Dialectical Mysticist And If we want workers to have
logical and clear idea of the existence of supernatural, not fanatic
attitude towards this, they should be agnostics, our philosophy should
be agnosticism and not atheism, because workers are progressive class,
proletariat should hold the right attitude towards anything, and
atheism can't be such because it is illogical and a priori///////
Engels would beg to differ with you in Frederick Engels
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
Part 2: Materialism (smiles)
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Dialectical Mysticist Murcia Since religion is still religion after
the death of Marx and Engels, their opinions on religion is still
valid since the religion has not lost his essence
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Liam Murcia Didn't say ot wasn't valid, just not an standard to
qualify as a "good Marxist".
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Liam Murcia Didn't say ot wasn't valid, just not an standard to
qualify as a "good Marxist".
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Dialectical Mysticist " Engels would beg to differ with you in Frederick Engels
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
Part 2: Materialism (smiles)" sorry, don't understand what you mean, comrade.
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Charles Brown Hume and Kant are the famous agnostics. Engels calls
agnostics "shame-faced" materialists: "In addition, there is yet a set
of different philosophers — those who question the possibility of any
cognition, or at least of an exhaustive cognition, of the world. To
them, among the more modern ones, belong Hume and Kant, and they
played a very important role in philosophical development. What is
decisive in the refutation of this view has already been said by
Hegel, in so far as this was possible from an idealist standpoint. The
materialistic additions made by Feuerbach are more ingenious than
profound. The most telling refutation of this as of all other
philosophical crotchets is practice — namely, experiment and industry.
If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural
process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its
conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then
there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable “thing-in-itself”. The
chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals
remained just such “things-in-themselves” until organic chemistry
began to produce them one after another, whereupon the
“thing-in-itself” became a thing for us — as, for instance, alizarin,
the coloring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow
in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and
simply from coal tar. For 300 years, the Copernican solar system was a
hypothesis with 100, 1,000, 10,000 to 1 chances in its favor, but
still always a hypothesis. But then Leverrier, by means of the data
provided by this system, not only deduced the necessity of the
existence of an unknown planet, but also calculated the position in
the heavens which this planet must necessarily occupy, and when
[Johann] Galle really found this planet [Neptune, discovered 1846, at
Berlin Observatory], the Copernican system was proved. If,
nevertheless, the neo-Kantians are attempting to resurrect the Kantian
conception in Germany, and the agnostics that of Hume in England
(where in fact it never became extinct), this is, in view of their
theoretical and practical refutation accomplished long ago,
scientifically a regression and practically merely a shamefaced way of
surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the
world."
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Dialectical Mysticist oh i guess now
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Einde O'Callaghan Application of Ockham's Razor suggests that the
simplest explanation is the one you should start with - in other
words, we should start from perceptible explanations and only reject
them if they can't explain the phenomenon.
As regards the existence of...See More
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Dialectical Mysticist What about pragmatic attitude like pascal's wager?
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Einde O'Callaghan Many people may adopt this attitude, but personally
I tend to side with Laplace who when asked if he believed in god
replied: "I have no need of that hypothesis."
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Charles Brown Liam Murcia and "prove it" by quoting texts by Marxists
as if they were scriptures. C'mon people./// Notice below my comment
is longer than what I quote and is a critical comment. That is the
complete opposite of quoting Engels like scripture. You are ...See
More
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Dialectical Mysticist God is improbable, but there is little chances
that he exists. and if he is there...which is unlikely but still
probable....Pascals wager becomes rational...doesn't it?
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Liam Murcia I wasn't refering to you Charles.
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Charles Brown I'd say the main reason Marxists must be atheists in
analysis of the class struggle is that the bourgeoisie are atheists or
their effective activity in class struggle and their political actions
to keep the working class ruled and oppressed are based i...See More
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Charles Brown
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=782458945098207&set=a.597736973570406.1073741825.275373239140116&type=1&theater
Mobile Uploads
By: Working class atheists
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Charles Brown I don't see anybody else referring to Marx as scripture
either. We need more extended quoting of Marx by leftists , not less.
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Liam Murcia I see quite a few before you, quoting, as I said
"Marxists" (not only "Marx"). Quotes are important and we should make
use of the wealth of theory we have access to, but they shouldn't
constitute the final word, don't you agree?
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Charles Brown Some of it is the "final" word _for now_. Like E = mc
squared is the final word for now. Many of Marx's formula are
scientific laws, like natural laws, until capitalism is over. Not
religious dogma, but scientific truth. Like Darwin's law of natural
history, Marx has the laws of capitalist accumulation down very
precisely. So, we treat them rigorously. Notice Marx treats laws as
tendencies. They are also like jurisprudential laws. Of course, people
break laws, but in the main they are followed and give rise to
empirical generalizations of the facts of people's behavior , conduct
, activities.
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Charles Brown "The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the
capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property.
This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded
on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets,
_with the inexorability of a law of Nature_ ( emphasis added -CB), its
own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not
re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him
individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era:
i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of
the means of production. "
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm
Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Thirty Two
www.marxists.org
Capital Vol. I : Chapter Thirty-Two (Historical Tendency of Capitalist
Accumulation)
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Charles Brown Notice natural science works on a metaphor from
jurisprudence, "law": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_science
Laws of science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org
The laws of science or scientific laws are statements that describe,
predict, an...See More
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Charles Brown "Every beginning is difficult, holds in all sciences. To
understand the first chapter, especially the section that contains the
analysis of commodities, will, therefore, present the greatest
difficulty. That which concerns more especially the analysis of the
substance of value and the magnitude of value, I have, as much as it
was possible, popularised. [1] The value-form, whose fully developed
shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless,
the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to
the bottom of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful
analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at
least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is
more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of
economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents
are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in
bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour — or
value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form. To the
superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon
minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same
order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.
With the exception of the section of value-form, therefore, this
volume cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty. I presuppose,
of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and
therefore to think for himself.
The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in
their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence, or,
wherever possible, he makes experiments under conditions that assure
the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality. In this work I have
to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of
production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present
time, their classic ground is England. That is the reason why England
is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical
ideas. If, however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the
condition of the English industrial and agricultural labourers, or in
optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany
things are not nearly so bad; I must plainly tell him, “De te fabula
narratur!” [It is of you that the story is told. – Horace]
Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of
development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural
laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws
themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards
inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially
only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. "
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Charles Brown My main criticism of Nietzsche ( and it's a big one from
the standpoint of Marxism) is that in the Geneology of Morals I think
it is he basically becomes the champion of all the ruling classes that
he knows of from all times ! He is sort of the anti-Marx explicitly,
pro-ruling class anti-ruled class in all the modes of production in
the history as a history of class struggles. So, Nietzsche's famous
atheism of "God is dead" is the voice of Ruling Class atheism from all
times. We should treat it as an expose of this fact. Some where in a
class conscious sector of people, all ruling classes must have
atheists or they couldn't successfully rule. Can't rule if you really
believe in Zeus , thus Plato, atheist. , etc. Many philosophers are
sort of secret atheists for the ruling classes down through history.
On the other hand, they accumulate a lot of objective knowledge
because they are materialists in some ways.
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