China and the Soviets got it right. You gotta treat religious institutions as every bit as backward and reactionary as you treat capitalist ones. That doesn’t mean you ban them outright, but you bring them under control of the state and keep them from preaching anything out of line or using their cultural influence against the DOTP.

your argument is based in idealist moralism, not actual material analysis. your moral condemnations are admirable but entirely useless and a typical example of liberal westoid smugness and edgy circlejerling.

a marxist-leninist approach to revolution is rooted in material conditions and class struggle, not cultural crusades or idealist moralism. while religion has historically served ruling-class interests, it also emerges from the real suffering and alienation of the working class. hostile, edgy anti-theism (“reddit atheism”) that treats religion as mere ignorance or superstition misunderstands this reality and ultimately undermines revolutionary efforts by alienating the masses.

marx’s critique of religion is often misused by superficial atheists. when he called religion “the opium of the people,” he was not simply condemning faith, but identifying it as a response to suffering in a world devoid of meaning and justice. religion, in this sense, is both a symptom of oppression and a coping mechanism for those experiencing it.

from a materialist standpoint, religion persists because it fulfills real social and emotional needs under capitalism. the task of revolutionaries is not to mock or suppress these beliefs, but to transform the conditions that give rise to them.

and if you would try to even once get out of your yankoid ignorance and actually look at the historical precedence of socialist projects, you would learn a lot:

In its early years, the ussr launched aggressive anti-religious campaigns, shuttering churches (and destroying century-old architectural monuments in the process), ridiculing faith, and persecuting religious leaders. these efforts, spearheaded by organizations like the League of the Militant Godless, were driven by ideological zeal rather than mass-line engagement. they confused state atheism with revolutionary strategy and alienated millions of religious workers and peasants whose faith was deeply embedded in their communities and daily lives.

rather than focusing drawing believers into the socialist project through improvements in their material conditions and political education, the early state attempted to impose atheism from above. this approach was idealist, disconnected from the real consciousness of the masses, and politically self-defeating.

they thus unwillingly played into the hands of the reaction, since religious believers, especially in rural areas, came to view the new socialist state as an enemy of tradition, community, and morality. reactionary forces capitalized on this resentment, painting themselves as defenders of the common people.

recognizing this, comrade Stalin eased anti-religious policies during the great patriotic war, in order to build unity, effectively admitting that earlier methods had been divisive and counter-productive.

leftists should understand that atheism, like any belief system, must be approached strategically. the goal is not to impose a worldview, but to unite the working class in the struggle against capitalism. religious people are not the enemy, capitalism is. mockery and cultural arrogance only serve to fracture potential alliances.

instead, we must engage religious workers respectfully, meet their material needs, and build class consciousness through shared struggle. religion will fade not through coercion, but as alienation and exploitation are overcome.

I’m just gonna chime in to say I don’t care about any of this

Goddamn, read some Marx. Incorporate materialism into your worldview.

170 years after he ripped into Max Stirner and Bruno Bauer for this exact type of thing and here are people still posting this idealist horsefeathers on my hexbear of all places. Fuck.

I very nearly wrote a comment about this long or longer going off on religion in reply to a post here but decided against it.

Christianity is a slave religion. It is not revolutionary. It is for the status quo, it demands slaves obey their masters, masters obey the state (render unto Cesar) and dangles above them all this idea that submitting here and now doesn’t matter because you’re on this plane of existence for 60-100 years and then if you’re a good Christian you go to heaven literally forever and get to live in a paradise so it’s just not worth struggling over. You can sit there as a smug slave, as a smug serf, worker etc as you’re beaten and starved because you know you have a ticket of this, you know you have a reward waiting for you so none of this matters. The Protestant work ethic is the Christian work ethic. It demands false peace instead of justice, says CSA victims must forgive their abuser in their church and says that abuser as long as they repent to god (not even the victim, they don’t matter) they’re golden and their ticket to heaven remains reserved and they can stand up in front of church, forgiven by god and cannot be judged.

You want to be a Christian and push for a better world? Fine I’m not going to go out of my way to make fun of you but I am judging you because you’re a cafeteria Christian, I find it unserious, you’re picking and choosing and ignoring parts of your religion to suit what you want it to say. You’re not an ounce of a more genuine Christian than the reactionary Christians who never do any charity at all who also pick and choose and twist the religion to be what you want it to be to suit your way of thinking.

Additionally Jesus says by the way that the OT is totally valid until he returns. Matthew 5:17-20:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter,[a] not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.

I get you know being afraid of death. I honestly think it’s the task of a world communist government to create a new religion for people who need this kind of thing, one that’s defanged and harmless, one that cannot be misinterpreted in any charitable way to support bigotry, one with equal rights for women at its core and which is simple and short in tenets and wildly progressive. And it should make all the wanted promises, eternal life, etc, etc, only you don’t confess to Jesus in your head, you confess to the local commissar in a self-crit and then you’re forgiven unless it’s a serious crime in which case you’re imprisoned or sent to reform labor or whatever but promised your spot in the afterlife is preserved as a result. The point being not to go out of our way to preach and convert the masses to worshiping the party or anything bizarre like that but having an out, an option for these people so they don’t get drawn into ancient, patriarchal, homophobic, reactionary ideologies.

The Bible is very clear that you cannot pick and chose

Shitty pastors who go on how “inerrant” the bible is say this as a tool of control.

The book written by doezens of people over hundreds of years itself does not.

I find it odd that you accept this line of reasoning that is clearly (no pun intended) in bad faith from obviously evil fucks.

In the funny pope thread, “maybe we should at least consider cultural sensitivity re: the pope and be more kind to one anothet” was responded to with a slew of unfounded accusations, seemingly deliberate misreadings, and pushback from a defensive posturing.

And now this has spawned at least two major threads whose premise is, “Christianity us reactionary and we must explicitly and openly reject it to be a good communist”.

I’m not sure what the actual goal would be. Is it to berate any and all Christians on this website into disavowing a bunch of things they already don’t believe and apologizing for things done by other people? Is it to ban the dead Christianity comm? Socially police anyone from admitting to being part of the most popular religion regardless of their direct views on the topics where you note Christianity having reactionary sentiments?

Personally I don’t think there is a goal in mind. Just people getting in between a Hexbear user and their treats: a false catharsis because the pope died. And getting between the Hexbear and those treats in any capacity, you must be tarred a reactionary object of hate.

People are talking about state atheism and the church-monarchy feudal system and the USSR. Comrade, you (most likely) aren’t even in an organization. We are not the inklings of Chinese national liberation but in [X Western country]. We’re in a lost Redditor pro-trans vaguely commie site full of yt people eager to weaponize their marginalization to verbally kill each other and I’m suggesting you be slightly less reactive and escalatory towards comrades.

Did you know that Christianity did not start with a ready-made canon? It just kind of existed in a spectrum of traditions in the Roman world for almost 3 centuries, until a bunch of people connected to the new Byzantine emperor had a meeting on what they were going to allow as part of a state-sanctioned religion. And even then, there was an ongoing disagreement over whether 7 books used by diaspora Jews (but not by Jews in Jerusalem) would be included in the canon.

It doesn’t really have a discernable core, beyond the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. That’s why Catholics and a few other denominations place so much emphasis on traditions.

“It’s not those in the past who were stupid enough to create mythology and believe it literally, it’s us in modern times who are foolish enough to treat it as a literal matter.”

all religions are evil, but christianity – being the religion of the cracker – is the most evil

The Bible is very clear that you cannot pick and chose, that you have to accept the full book or none of it

What exactly constitutes the “full book” is a matter of debate between denominations. Protestants notably consider the deuterocanonical books to be apocrypha.

you can’t just take the verses you like and still be Christian

Again, barring the existing discrepancies in biblical canon, who’s gonna stop me? okay, some churches might kick you out, the accepting ones really aren’t going to care. I’m not even a christian, although I do think they’ve got some cool stuff going on, i just don’t see it as that big of a deal to take that cool stuff (love one another, camel/needle) and leave the wack stuff (everything you quote in your post)

You could do this with literally any of the major monotheist religions of “the book” (Christianity, Islam, Judaism). It’s extremely unhelpful as an argument to get people to leave religion because it does not address why religion exists, or why the vast majority of people globally are religious. To to that, you need to analyse the social function religion plays in our reality, of which organised religion is a key part.

Nevertheless, another reading can be made of Marx. The often cited phrase–“religion is the opium of the people”–is truncated. What follows this remark lets it be understood that human beings need opium, because they are metaphysical animals who cannot avoid asking themselves questions about the meaning of life. They give what answers they can, either adopting those offered by religion or inventing new ones, or else they avoid worrying about them.

In any case, religions are part of the picture of reality and even constitute an important dimension of it. It is, therefore, important to analyze their social function, and in our modern world their articulation with what currently constitutes modernity: capitalism, democracy,
and secularism.

We also need to move past the false dichotomy of religion and secularism being incompatible as concepts, in particular with regards to Christianity in the western centric parts of the world. The reason non belief, in agnosticism or atheism, grew so much over the past few decades in the West was because the church held onto some archaic positions about the world being 6000 years old, evolution being false, and homosexuality being morally wrong. Religion had detached itself from factual reality, it was easy to bludgeon in this regard. But that is no longer the church or society we are in now, by and large (there still are of course many extreme reactionaries). Modern secuarlism has essentially freed Christianity from its shackles here, there’s no need for modern Christians to believe in such archaic nonsense. For example, the Catholic church accepts evolution as a scientific theory, and no longer considers homosexuality inherently sinful. This form of “secularism combined with religion” may in fact lead to reinforcing belief in the long run, and even leading to an increase in Christianity over the coming years in the West. Trying to foster an increase in non belief in this environment is very different to that of 10, 20, or 30 years ago. When I became an atheist, it was in that old environment.

Contrary to a widespread Eurocentric preconception, however, secularism is not peculiar to Christian society, which demanded its liberation from the heavy yoke of the church. Nor is it the result of the conflict between the “national” state and a church with a universal vocation. For during the Reformation, the church is in fact “national” in its various forms–Anglican, Lutheran, and so forth. Nevertheless, the new fusion of church and state does not produce a new theocracy, but rather, one might say, a religious secularism. Secularism, even though the reactionary ecclesiastical forces fought it, did not root out belief. It even, perhaps, reinforced it in the long run, by freeing it of its formalist and mythological straightjackets. Christians of our time, whether or not they are intellectuals, have no problem accepting that humankind descended from apes and not from Adam and Eve.

I’m not going to comment on everything as many others have already covered different aspects but I would like to humbly point out a couple of things which I hope you can use for self-crit. I apologize on advance for the length and to clarify that I am trying to say this from a place of total good faith—for lack of a better term—and not as an attack on you personally.

Primarily, the materialist perspective on religion which Marx discussed was that critique of religion was the necessary initial complement to critique of capitalism. This is because everything is colored through the religious, especially at those times, and you can’t move on to critique material conditions when you’re following an idealistic ideology that tells you not to do that for several reasons. However, that doesn’t necessarily entail opposition to religion or the requirement to stamp out religion. Critique can occur as a process of edification. It’s very possible, and I think highly likely, that even if we lived in a communist world that religions would exist but simply in a different form—potentially how religious comrades hold them now.

Secondly, and building off the first point, it seems to me that you are specifically attacking a certain concept or expression of not just the religious in general but Christianity in particular. You conceded in various comments that you have personal trauma with Evangelical churches. I also grew up around Evangelicalism, so my empathy on that front. However, despite your aversion to it, you are still carrying evangelical cobwebs and doing work for them. You are reinforcing fundamentalism when you state, as if a fact, that you cannot “pick and chose” the Bible and that “the Bible” itself is very clear on this. I would assume you have enough knowledge to understand that “the Bible” is a collection of books and letters written over thousands of years apart by different individuals and communities that were also tampered and changed many, many times over. When you say that “the Bible” says you can’t pick and choose verses, I would ask you: Which book says this? And at what point in development was the canon when this was written? Highly likely that this verse in question is the one from Revelations. Either way, it is only self-referential; i.e., it is the author telling you not to mess with the text he wrote in particular. There’s no possible way that, let’s say as an example, a verse from Paul’s epistles is telling you that Revelations must be accepted as it is, or even that the Gospel according to John is absolutely true, as neither yet existed at the time of his writings. Nor that an older text which didn’t know of the existence of an earlier text, or perhaps even rejected it, was advocating for the said earlier text as authoritative. We have to understand that canonization is something we retroactively project onto the texts. There is no reason not to be able to “pick and choose”, there is no reason why fundamentalist theology is automatically correct, there is no reason to believe that these Scriptures are the Divine Literal and Infallible Word of God. These are fundamentalist dogma. We know and should say these are written by human beings. When we read in “the Bible” that we shouldn’t alter a single letter, we should be able to understand this is the author trying to assert authority for this particular text, and there is no reason why we should necessarily cede the point. If we look at the Church Fathers there was no issue in “picking and choosing” because they did not have fundamentalist brainworms about the issue. This is a relatively modern problem and interpretation. It was initially absolutely acceptable, and expected, to take the Bible not as a literal Word of God but as metaphors and so on which could be analyzed and critiqued—much in the same style as Judaism in rabbinical tradition.

Further, the modern concept of “homosexuality”, etc. did not really exist at that time. So much so that you would be hard pressed to find the word anywhere. So we are, once again, doing the work for the fundamentalists when we immediately concede that Christianity as such is anti-LGBTQ, etc. Of course, it’s not impossible that some individual, let’s again use Paul, had some reactionary views on the subject that made it into his texts but that is, once again, one individual or maybe even a later interpolation to that individual’s texts by someone else. And I’m not fully convinced of this for Paul, anyway, given some of the historico-linguistic issues with this but that’s another topic entirely. What we can definitely critique is the role which institutional Christianity, in its ecclesiastical expression post-Constantine, has served with the oppressive interests of various ruling groups since that time. This is different from Christianity as such.

Lastly, the ontotheological concept of the Divine, in the form of “God” some man sitting on a cloud, is not a particularly well-developed concept. There are many issues with it deserving of critique. However, that again doesn’t necessarily mean it will resolve in total disbelief. It can dialectically resolve itself in the development of a higher form of the Divine. There are already different concepts of the Divine that certain people may develop after initially applying materialist, textual, historical, philosophical, and theological critique to religion. When we just take as fact that “God” in the Bible is the God of the Evangelicals, as you do, then you are once again giving them a major victory. Usually reddit atheists and such attack an ontotheological concept of God, which is easy enough to critique, but they once again cede ground as if it is the only way to formulate a concept of the Divine. It is, in fact, a very crude concept and shows everyone involved to be thinking on elementary terms when this is the crux of the discussion and critique. But it catches the atheist and the fundamentalist in the very same trap when atheists argue against it by using its own inherent and self-serving logic. The people warning that religion as such will coopt religious comrades are often the ones recuperated by this very fundamentalist line.

So, you seem to have an aversion to a fundamentalist, reactionary ontotheological concept of Evangelical Christianity as it is found (usually) in the US. I don’t think anyone here would disagree with you on there being major issues in that line of thinking. Christianity is far older than that and has so many different expressions that it is not possible to generalize it all under your particular critique. And it seems to me that you never developed a critique, or rather understanding, of Christianity beyond what you experienced at home which you are still reacting to even though you think you have an objective critique of Christianity or religion in general. If you want to reject religion from your life, cool, more power to you. I don’t believe in proselytizing and personally don’t care much about comrades’ religious beliefs. I haven’t seen this on Hexbear at all. But at least try to develop a concept of it beyond what you were taught in order to unlearn those things so you don’t actually reinforce that trauma unintentionally on yourself and others. And I mean this with total due respect, I just see this often and want to point out how it is still affecting you and your critique because I have gone through it and I also see how others continue to struggle with it.

OP, I have a similar upbringing to you. I stopped being a Christian once I saw the Bible for what it was: just a bunch of letters written by people many centuries ago for various reasons; containing all sorts of beliefs and biases that people living 2,000 years ago had. I feel like that helped give me tremendous clarity as to what it is. I think the absolute pinnacle of morality and philosophy it contains is the Sermon on the Mount… and that, at best, is just meh. There’s just not much there. And if you want to say church tradition and philosophy is just as important as the Bible… well that’s a whole other can of worms to open.

I’m willing to admit that there are many people who follow a Christianity that isn’t necessarily reactionary. But frankly that whitewashes just how reactionary and detrimental it has been to human progress even in areas where things like liberation theology are strong.

And frankly, I love my comrades (❤️) but if you didn’t grow up in Evangelical Christianity you can’t really get just how horrible and destructive it is to people at an individual level and for society. I deal with this IRL with people I know who weren’t raised in it and are all like “oh it can’t be that bad” or “yeah but there’s still good parts too why focus on the negative”?

Edit: said another way, if you love Marvel movies and they mean a lot to you, have at it. It’s a valid way to spend you time. But that’s not gonna stop me from thinking it’s useless slop at best.

No Gods, no masters.

Christianity is also just a boring religion and out of all the beliefs you can have, why the fuck would you go with it? Boring lore, evil rules, and a cruel and sadistic God (just one, but also 3?) Fuck that noise.