Should religion be outlawed?
As an American all I see it doing is taking advantage of desperate and mentally handicapped people. There are so many people in Houston Texas who really believe that if they donate all their money to Joe Osteen (net worth: $40 million) that somehow God will give it back to them tenfold. Let's not forget that these crooks' organizations are tax exempt.
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Do you want counter revolutions? State atheism is fine, as long people can worship in peace if they want
There are scum like that but most religious belief is harmless, the exploitation can even be viewed as a symptom of capitalism, if these people weren't alienated or impoverished they wouldn't place their faith in some con artist.
This problem would be solved by banning just protestantism alone. Or better yet, by giving a proper education to people but we all know it is not in the interest of porky to have people be really educated.
Read some Gramsci. As well we must make leftist interpretations of religions and spred it, so we can gain hegemonic control of them and we would need to make a socialist version of the Protestant work ethic to supersede the capitalist one.
True enough, but religion is an insidious disease currently infecting many otherwise perfectly functional minds.
I'd say strip religion of all power other than spiritual and let the hierarchies underneath flag themselves as traitors to the revolution when they try to regain it.
Then, summary executions, let's not make martyrs.
Religion strikes me as the kind of disease one has to live through rather than invasive removal
No, but specific religious instituions that already wield enormous socioeconomic power (i.e., the Catholic church) should be dismantled ASAP.
Outlawing religious belief in general is senseless, but banning religious organizations which prove themselves to be reactionary is sensible enough.
I'm a fedora-tipping atheist and prosperity gospel is some heretical bullshit, I tell you hwat.
no.
better to move the economy away from money and ban capital accumulation all together.
Maybe you should start a Christian terror organization to take back the church from the mammon worshipers. #cleansing of the temple 2017. #Joel Osteen is the antichrist
this
I dunno, I think State Atheism would definitely backfire; just look at post-USSR Russia and see the enormous influence of the Orthodox Church and its corruption there.
Personally, I think that getting rid of religion isn't a requirement for achieving socialism. After all, there are many examples of religion being used as both a tool of suppression and a tool of liberation (like the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra and other Latin American Communist movements, or instance).
Mormonism IS the way forward
Fuck you, Jainism is the way forward
america was a mistake
"Prosperity preachers" are literally con artists.
In theory, what they do is already illegal.
Exemption for anyone of any faith from laws regarding fraud, incitement, etc. should not be tolerated.
Actually protestants do the same thing in other countries too. It's a fucking cancer.
No, but we need to hang all televangelists. My grandma gives a ton of her money to Jimmy Swaggart who is a hateful asshole. I hate him and I want to throw his entire family into a woodchipper.
I need proof of this. It's always seemed like a specific american absurdity.
tbh I still have more sympathy for prots than catholics in general (current commie pope excepted), writing dumb books for the masses is still better than literally saying the masses are too stupid to understand the bible so we'll have an upper class read it for you (obviously catholics don't do this anymore but that's what it was built on).
I agree man. Orthodox seem to be the most bro of the three main branches. Or they make the best art at least.
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It is a thing in all of Latin America and Africa where people are fucking stupid and easy prey.
stopped reading here :)
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She'd just spend more. She gets books. Orders them over the phone. FOR A DONATION OF $[insert high monetary amount] YOU CAN OWN THIS BOOK THAT WASN'T GHOSTWRITTEN AT ALL. BY THE WAY, ALL THE OTHER RELIGIONS ARE WRONG. ANYONE BUT ME IS WRONG. WATCH FOX NEWS. HERE IS OUR TAKE ON THE NEWS TOO. JESUS WOULD'VE WANTED THIS.
I wish Jesus would come back and start beating the devil out of these charlatans. It's absolutely disgusting.
I tried reading The Brothers Karamazov and found it insufferable tbh. The Divine Comedy is some neat fantasy I guess. I really don't get the literary canon pedestal. Not that self-help books are better or anything, but who fucking gives a shit that skilled artists made art extolling the virtues of a religion? The culture they lived in was heavily shaped by it and in a lot of cases religious institutions are the reason for the success of religious art. So that's where artists went - the place where they knew they would be received and sometimes even paid - religion. Attributing the art to the religions is the same sort of logic as attributing prosperity to "job creators."
And the comparison with Osteen's book is nonsensical anyway, since it's a completely different sort of book. The Chronicles of Narnia would be more appropriate.
That isn't what the church was built on and it was never "we'll have an upper class read it for you" even during the most traditional days. The organizational structure regarding interpretation (which was open to every person and followed exegesis and allegorical interpretation) is due to communication at the time and the need of a unified doctrine ensuring that the bible could be discussed in a centralized forum and not be taken strictly by the literal word without literary context. This was before the advent of high-speed communication, priests were sent to areas not to act as an authority but to act as probably one of the only few lines of communication to and from the church for people in the region. You couldn't just convert all the theological texts and send them to every township, you needed some kind of institution to house it all and spend the time translating and distributing it.
Its not perfect, but the Catholic Church has overtime adopted a strictly SocDem postion on things with the Catholic labor movement and the EJFA statement usccb.org
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But if you used the Chronicles of Narnia you would have to use the Lord of the Rings for the Catholics
LotR isn't about Catholicism, but on the subject is there a similar modern fantasy from the Orthodox tradition?
Yes, even woman user
…user, you may want to read up on Tolkien again. Not as obvious and hamfisted as C.S. Lewis, but there are some pretty obvious cosmological and thematic allegories leaking through.
Let me rephrase. LotR isn't overtly about Catholicism in the way that the other books in this pic are. That's what I was getting at. The religious themes are obvious but the story isn't really about that.
Religion is a wonderful tool.
Rather then engage in a futile effort to combat our species natural inclination towards religiosity (of one form or another), one should be looking to take advantage of it.
Despite what one may initially believe, given how harmful almost all existing religions are.
Creating a positive religion that will provide benefit to both the individual practitioner and the state who enforces it is not particularly hard.
Like most things, it just requires quite a commitment in time and study.
Got it, I guess Narnia wouldn't be up there either if it wasn't for Lewis straight up saying Aslan is Jesus
Howard, you do realise these posters made people incredibly hostile to the government, right?
Haven't you got some paintings to worship Boris?
This is a cybernetic religion thread now
No it should be nationalized to create a new people's crusade.
But true Protestantism is socialist. Read Niekisch.
you're insufferable faggot
Indeed I do know that.
However once you 'despook' (to borrow a term) a persons mind, they would only see comfort and security in such a poster.
I can assure you that CBT techniques work just as well on issues outside of depression.
It is a very handy little tool kit for helping people interpret things correctly.
Besides.
I personally quite like those posters.
Due to my lack of artistic skill, it is the closest I can get to visually communicating aspects of how the society I advocate for would look.
Is it socialist to exploit people's lack of intelligence to suck all their money?
Banning things give them power, user. It gives them value. Even when it's worthless information, like a religion. No one gives a shit about the immense majority of religious doctrine, but you start banning it and people will start looking into it. There's probably some pretentious political "law" named after someone that summarizes this.
The only real way to kill religion is to make it obsolete, which is to say, by eliminating suffering. Not just material, but psychological too. Remember, drugs had a different connotation when Marx famously wrote his opiate line; the people don't seek religion like a dissolute addict seeks a high, but rather as a wounded man seeking relief from pain.
The Catholic Church is the friend of the workers, icepick.
Kreeft possibly from what I hear. Never read him though.
Streisand effect
No
If the divine comedy is up there for Catholicism then brothers should be replaced with The Ray of the Microcosm.
Reading BK right now. You have extremely shit taste and it is not JUST about how great religion is, moron.
Nope, in Ethiopia they only accept donations in dollars because the local currency is worthless and the richest men in the country are preachers.
The majority of the problems of religion, and I would argue all of Christianity's problems, were its ties to the establishment of yore. Religion itself was never the problem, even Marx knew that was the Young Hegelians' rookie mistake. But regarding religion's ties to the establishment, this bond has significantly diminished in nearly all Christian countries, which makes the more legitimate socialist aversion to religion outdated.
In all honesty, I feel that the only reason that the faithful stick to defending the capitalist system is because of the long gone regimes that persecuted religion and the hateboner for religion quite a few of our comrades have. But even then, it's not as if Christianity has not had at some involvement within modern socialism. The examples of the Catholic Church in Latin America and the support of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation from the Armenian Apostolic Church under pic related, along with proper biblical context, should be more than enough to show that religion and socialism can easily be in harmony without compromise of orthodoxy or revolutionary spirit.
It's a shame this is happening in a country with a rich Christian background like Ethiopia.
I guess it doesn't help that the Ethiopian Orthodox Church can't do jack squat about those swindlers when the government keeps dicking down the ecclesiastical polity of said church for shits and giggles.
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Read Max Weber.
Suppressed
Off topic but it just struck me that le rational youtubers are just secular preachers that offer salvation (becoming a normie/saving western civilization instead of entering heaven) if you donate patreonbux and buy their books.
You cannot out-Bismarck Bismarck
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Religion is a terrible social force but outlawing it is likely to only exacerbate the problem and create militant counterrevolutionaries. Better to cease supporting it, destroy the material conditions which give rise to it, and wait for it to vanish on its own.
imo americans should be outlawed
Religion shouldn't be outlawed but a matter of personal preference.
However, the state should stop funding of churches and the like. Religion as a state-subsidized institution should stop, but we shouldn't engage in thought-crime if people keep their religion for themselves.
Read Lenin: