Everyone should be able to attend

So riddle me this: what is the ultimate source of conflict, if such a single source exist? And does religion have no force on its own? Is religion just a tool for everyone and does nobody do anything because his religious tradition told him so?

Are you one of those people who blame suicide bombings on lack of education?

...

"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 altars and hearths,” i.e., for God and country] has been refuted. Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of himself, the non-man [Unmensch], where he seeks and must seek his true reality.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics."
t. Marx

Economic reality, material circumstances. Cultural differences can create enough mutual alienation and hostility to fuel a conflict, but these don't happen against an empty background but against a series of economic and political events that make use of them.

And of course, your approach need to be historical, it's not just about "X wants to grab Y's resources, so they make war with them" (although that too is often the case), it's about the economic origins even of the cultural and social presumptions that enable war. It's about where organized religion stands in the socieconomic structure. It's about the political economy of the media, or whatever means of shaping public opinion there is available. It's about economics, resources, markets, monopoly. Not understanding that and focusing instead on the tip of the Icerberg, the outwards, visible manifestations, the slogans and the rhetoric used for mobilization is to literally throw a middle finger to everything Marx said. That's one of the basic tenets of his analysis, even though some Marxist "schools" like National-Bolshevim like to dumb it down to "dude kill the rich" or whatever.

Superstructure shapes the base to a minor degree and legitimizes it, but is usually not the dominant force in the events of any given society. Christianity would be the classic example: it served one institution and one system for centuries until a few minor theological adjustments made it enemy of this class and the tool of other.

So yes, religion has a force of its own as long as it's tied to a class (or to a specific group that is tied to a class) that has material power on its own. If a religion finds no correspondence to the material reality of a people, it must either be changed (or to leave enough room to allow different interpretations) to suit thoat reality or it withers away.

Recent ISIS attacks can pretty easily be traced to the US smashing Iraq to bits with a fucking sledgehammer. As much as Islam sucks, it's not like a bunch of goat herders just sat around and came up with the idea to blow up europeans.

The rise of ISIS was facilitated by G.W.B's invasion of Iraq, true, but that doesn't mean that ISIS would just pack it in if the situation there were somehow stabilized. Political circumstances have enabled the creation of their ideology (in this, I agree with ), in concert with the violence latent in Islam, but now it has become self-perpetuating.

These people have really gotten it into their heads that they need to kill the kuffar for visiting concerts, and that they'll go to Jannah if they plow a hijacked truck through a promenade. The implied, unrealistic, assertion in all of these "it's all due to material causes"-type arguments is that, just because material causes enabled the rise of some phenomenon, they are also necessary for its sustenance. Ideologies, once off the ground, can become self-perpetuating. Modern Jihadism might have been largely caused by Western and Soviet interventions since WWII, but now it's here and it won't go away, even if those interventions were to stop. You can't un-crazy people once they've gone nuts with fundamentalist, Messianic mumbo-jumbo.

sometimes you nazis are A-OK with me tbh

y-you too

There's a lot that can be done to stop the spread of Wahhabism, mainly cutting off the flow of money to gulf states, because they are its main funders and promoters. Obviously this is not realistic under capitalism since oil is the blood of its machinery.

Any state repression against european muslims will on the other hand just feed radicalization even further. The situation is fucked but what you're promoting will make it very much worse

I didn't promote anything, I just implied that I'd love to get rid of the Abrahamic religions. It's not a realistic goal, but that doesn't change the fact that they're a cancer.

But since we're on the topic of Muslims in Europe: I don't want state repression against them, as such. I just want them out because I see them as a foreign, hostile group that victimizes the population through terrorism, welfare leeching, and street crime. I want these people out, all of them. The first, most realistic step towards accomplishing that is to shut down immigration. After that, we could stop granting visas and asylum, and restrict citizenship to natural-born children of two citizens. Cutting social services to non-citizens would be next, and would present a huge disincentive towards coming. Anyone convicted of terrorism would have to be stripped of citizenship as well, of course - and we'd include relatives who didn't report terrorists in that.

It's all about incremental incentives to leave. Everyone would be free to practice his precious religion in the meantime, of course. This'd have nothing to with Islam!

Christianity is a far harder nut to crack, but those people have less resistance to offer as well. Europe is already largely post-Christian and we'd only have to keep out the American nutjobs that have been encroaching since the 90s… fucking Baptists and Pentecostals and Mormons make me fucking sick, to say nothing of that Pope who licks the feet of Africans for a photo-op. Nigga, it's a feet-washing. Even if I were to allow someone to wash my feet, I wouldn't alllow him to slobber all over them, making it all sexual. Pic related.

Also, I agree completely. Letting Saudi-Arabia collapse would be a huge step in the right direction… but as said: the genie is out of the bottle now. Even if you cut off the money to the Wahhabists, they and their ideology are already out there. The spread of the infection would slow down, but it wouldn't disappear.

As long as we're in the land of shoulda woulda coulda, the police shouldn't exist, neither should religion, and neither should organic bodies.

quality post, thank you.

Spirituality is a biological fact, a degree of spirituality and mysticism(which can morph into a propper religion) will allways exist, even under late stage communism.

You kill Islam by destroying the material base for it and changing the system that upholds it. East Germany didnt magically become one of the most atheist places in the world. Do a propper comparison between the transition of power in Poland and Russia vs. East Germany and then look at why the church still holds relevancy despite barely having people that are actual christians beyond mere traditions.

Look at the reislamization of Turkey and the general rise of Islamism in the middle east in the recent decades. Look how Islamism and a lot of supposedly islamic traditions get rooted out in Rojava.

All of your proposals are completely retarded and will make shit worse, also your inabillity to seperate feels from reals regarding the pope tells everything you need to know.

I know very well how Western policies contributed to the resurgence of Muslim fanaticism, but we're just going in circles. I'm saying that it's a largely irreversible process, while you're saying that it's a reversible one.
It's easy to see how people can be driven to religious fanaticism by adverse circumstances (especially if the religion has a streak of violence inherent in it), but it's far less obvious how they become normal again once some nutty ideology has them in their clutches. The people who are committed Jihadists now, intent on killing themselves and recruiting others to kill themselves in their global Jihad don't need better economic perspectives or education, but a bullet from a high-caliber rifle.

As for why I want effectively all Muslims out: obviously most Muslims aren't terrorists, so the whole issue of extremism is somewhat beside the point. The main issue with them is that they form a hostile enclave in the West. They not only engage in all sorts of criminal or anti-social behavior, but they also defend other Muslims when they do so. In this, their semi-ethnocentric religion a contributing factor as well as a source of excuses ("they're only kuffar").

Worse them them. Luckily, they are outside of the circle of my sympathies.

Well, did he not, in fact, kiss those people's feet? Or was that some holographic trick?

It wasnt really only western policies but much more a power struggle and a promise of of freeing the nations of corruption and to a degree rejection of the perceived ills of western liberalism. Even Saddam and Assad for all their "secularism" had to use Islamism as a way to maintain control, and as long as this is possible it you cant defeat it.

Killing Jihadis is most of the time the only way forward, but the common western muslim who just mixes up his religion and traditions into some weird mixture is far less dangerous than the common nazi for a functioning society.

I know I have the Nazi flag and everything, but this is the common Nazi. Neonazis are nobodies, so unless you count everyone with xenophobic beliefs as a Nazi, this statement blatantly false.

religion existed before class society