on 25/11/02 12:18 am, Alberto Monteiro at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Richard Baker wrote: >> >>> Questionable. Communist might be considered a kind of religion, as >>> some of its dogmas are based on faith. >> >> It explicitly rejects supernatural explanations though. >> > Some religions also deny supernatural explanations, like those > that believe in psychic powers. > >> Dialectical materialism might be wrong, but it is materialism. >> Also, for example, "We take these truths to be self-evident..." >> towards the beginning of the Declaration of Independence >> might be argued to make American >> democracy a kind of religion using similar reasoning. >> > And I think it is also a kind of religion. > >> If we're going to >> use a definition of religion that broad then... I'm not sure what I >> have to say on the matter. >> > The real problem is that we **don't** have a decent definition > of religion, as things that are considered religions by most > people differ substantially. For example, compare religions > that believe in a distant God that eventually interfers but will > judge people after death to those mystic ufologists that > believe that UFOs contact people using telepathy and > nothing is supernatural, just supertech.
"Marxism, which provides remarkable evidence of the power of dominant key ideas to inspire and direct man, is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges to traditional religious belief. Based on the socio-economic philosophical thought of the 19th-century thinker Karl Marx, Marxism can be said to be a quasi-religion on two counts. First, Marxism had connections with the metaphysics of G.W.F. Hegel, an 18th-19th-century German philosopher who interpreted reality in terms of a spiritual Absolute. Furthermore, the thinking of Marx had religious overtones, whether from his own Jewish background or from a Christian atmosphere, not least in Britain where he lived from 1849 to 1883. Second, Marxism can be called a quasi-religion insofar as it calls from its followers a devotion and a commitment that in their empirical character greatly resemble the commitment and devotion that characterize religious people. Marxism has undoubtedly fired the spirit of man and given to revolutions, whether in Russia or China, a powerful direction that has maintained stability and avoided anarchy. Furthermore, like a religion, it has provided themes of fulfillment and hope-a revolution interpreted as the initiation of a Communist world society that would be a final consummation. There are many logical similarities between the doctrine of the Marxist millennium and the Christian doctrine of Christ's Second Coming. Marxism has also stressed the significance of cooperating with the immanent spirit of the times-something comparable to the providence of God-in economic and military struggles that are viewed as the travail by which society would be reborn. The main difference between Marxism and Christianity in the 19th and early 20th centuries, according to some scholars, was that for many the Christian vision encouraged men to endure tyranny, while the Marxist view inspired men to rebel. Yet, once it can be established that religion is not the servant of oppression, is not necessarily linked with an illiberal regime, and does not use concepts of "other worldliness" to make men content with tyranny and injustice, then religion may yet have a place in the Communist state. Such a religion would not have to concern itself with the kind of supernaturalism that Marxism now rejects; it would not have to appeal to an invisible world entirely other than the present world. It is not without significance that Marxism has its own form of public ceremonial and its own language of glorification. If it has to be granted that many religions have a ceremonial, a symbolism, and a moral code that has lost the vision they once had, Marxism is a social program, a doctrine, and a ceremonial searching for a vision that haunts it and that may at some time bring it to fruition. In this regard, Chinese Marxism is particularly significant insofar as Marxism in China cannot escape some interweaving with Chinese Buddhism. Chinese Buddhism brings with it a natural framework of absolute Idealism, which may yet supply Marxism with the spiritual dimension that for many critics appears to be Marxism's main inadequacy, something it lost when it shed its Hegelian metaphysics and became the anti-God Materialistic world-view of the U.S.S.R."[1] [1]The Rt. Rev.Ian Thomas Ramsey(d. 1972)Lord Bishop of Durham, England, 1966-72. Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of Christian Religion, University of Oxford, 1951-66. Author of Religious Language; Christian Discourse. In Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002. -- William T Goodall [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
