Comment on Seeing shit like this kills me. People are so ignorant.
Saleh@feddit.org 3 days agoAs i have written:
What we have seen over the last century is the result of deliberate meddling by outside imperial forces that promoted wahabism and other extremist strands twisting Islam into being a tool of oppression and riddling it with hypocrisy.
Religion is a form of institutionalized control and oppression, and as such is a fundamental enemy of the working class.
A common argument is that Jesus would be a socialist by todays definitions, condemning the corruption of the rich and sitting with the poor. The prophet Mohamed, blessing and peace be upon him, was persecuted by the polytheists because Islam was challenging their business model surrounding the idol worship and they tried to coopt him into furthering their economic agenda. Moses was liberating his entire people from enslavement under the Pharaoh. The Abrahamic prophets all fought injustice and corruption in their society.
I agree with you that the institutionalization is an issue, but that is an issue of the particular institutions, not the religion itself.
loudwhisper@infosec.pub 3 days ago
Derubricating everything to the “external” imperial forces is dismissive and forgets centuries of violent history, including those of Muslim empires. Islam, like most religions is bigoted, intolerant and barbaric.
And that’s nonsense.
No, I think it’s actually religion and religious thinking specifically the problem. Institutionalized religion is just the natural consequence of the issue.
Religion is fundamentally a reactionary ideology because it prescribes an external entity (or entities) which decided how things should be. This deresponsibilizes people and inherently justifies the existing. All the religious emancipation still happens under the umbrella of a reality that has to work in a certain way.
For example, most religions tend to accept suffering and poverty as a given, as a test or as something that in general is by design. Assigning virtue to being oppressed (like in case of some Christian messages) is far from a revolutionary stance, it’s a tool aimed at controlling those who are oppressed.
If in millennia every religion ever has been used to crystalize a power hierarchy in humanity (from the clergy to caste systems), maybe there is a reason. And the reason is that religious thinking and mindset inherently enables these hierarchies.
Saleh@feddit.org 3 days ago
Islam acknowledges poverty and wealth to be given in the sense that it is not by the virtue or failing of the individual that he or she is rich/poor. This is contradicting the neoliberal mantra, that it is totally the individuals fault and thereby justified.
Furthermore it is the duty of the rich to help the poor and it is the right of the poor upon the rich to be helped by them.This is why mandatory donations for the wealthy are an obligation equal to prayer and fasting.
God tests people with poverty and with wealth. Also Islam with its prohibition of interest is incompatibile with capitalism. Christianity and Judaism also prohibit interest, but a millenia long effort to twist the prohibition away eventually suceeded.
Again you are describing institutionalization. On the contrary if someone is steadfast in their belief, they will obey God and not the worldly leaders, if those demand something in violation of the faith. This also creates a measure for the legitimacy of leaders that cannot be set by the leaders themselves. So what the historical and current leaders are doing is to try to corrupt existing religious institutions or build institutions so they can be corrupted. The hierarchy is inserted into the religiom by existing hierachies.
To further argue that point. What became of Soviet Russia? Maos China? Eastern Germany? All the other Warsaw pact countries? All of them were hostile to religion on a range from surveillance and coercion to death squads murdering clergy by the tens of thousands and razing places of worship down to the foundations.
Authoritarianism finds any tool to impose unjust hierarchies. And it creates its own idols to worship. Be it the market, the great chairman, the 5 year plan, the supreme race, the expanding imperium…
All these idols share one crucial aspect. They are geared towards material aspects in this world. And this is a great weakness of communist revolutionary thought. It chains itself to compete with the capitalists in the struggle for capital accumulation and distribution. Thereby communist thought is enslaving the working class to remain producers and consumers.
loudwhisper@infosec.pub 2 days ago
Sorta. But anyway, neoliberalism is far from the only oppressive ideology.
I really don’t think so. Interests are not really a foundational pillar of capitalism. Private property of means of production is.
And did god (or gods) speak to them? Or there is always a translation layer that includes other people; prophets, messiahs, clergy, shamans, visionaries, etc.? Still a hierarchy. Still a means of control. Who decides what the gods say controls people. That’s exactly the problem with religion.
About the soviet union and other antireligious countries: there are multiple ideologies that can lead to oppression. I am definitely not going to say that without religion oppression wouldn’t exist. I am saying that religion is an enabler for it.