As good materialists, there are no such things as ideas-that-are and ideas-that-are-not, so the notion of religion - and any other fiction, incidentally - is invalid. Thoughts are *stuff*. There are mental situations that we have that correspond to brain states, and these brain states are mediated (note that I did not say caused) by the world beyond our senses. There are no right and wrong thoughts - it is an evolutionary process, where some ideas cause us to be more successful and some less, and so we learn by keeping better ideas and abstracting from them into new ways of approaching the world.
Religious and other wilder notions are just as real as other thoughts, but they are abstractions from previous experiences that now correspond to nothing beyond the senses, and lead us into harmful behaviour when we act on them, in the same way that we can fool the senses into thinking that something isn't painful, or is edible after all, and thus cause ourselves harm with mistaken notions. Our thoughts are real things, and we can no more become full members of a post-capitalist society with half our mind locked up in religious thoughts driving us to behave in subservient ways, than we could dance freely with one foot missing.
We simply have no way of divining an otherworldly realm or deity, and anything that we say about such things is merely self-revelatory. When you say something is heavenly you mean you associate it with feelings of pleasure - that is all. When you are taught a system of this world and also heaven and hell, instead of just dealing with the world as you find it you now separate out things-that-exist, things that exist-on-a-cloud, and things-that-exist-in-the-dark-under-the-earth. It is done by someone boxing up your mind, preparing you to tolerate unpleasantness and paying you back with your now-corrupted imagination telling you the misery you experience now, instead of being something to rebel against now, is a preparation for pleasure instead of pain later. A latter-day version of this, of course, is delayed gratification, which though now an ostensibly secular (and inexplicable) habit, would never have been possible without the necessary brutalising concepts first being worked up by religionists.
Similarly, when we say that there is a God to love and obey we mean in the abstract that we have a very real master or masters on this earth that we should love and obey. Real thoughts are abstracted from to create new, also real thoughts, that no longer correspond to our interests. Our rulers turn our own minds against us, in the way that some of the bodies' invaders turn our own immune system against us.
The business of overthrowing religion is thus directly our business - it is not just a fetish. The process of inculcating God is the process of turning a child into a worker. The process of teaching heaven is the process of blocking that child's valid expectations about how their world should be - now if they say simply that they should be happy, they are talking not just politics, but religion.
The process of revolution is the process of restoring these real thoughts in the human mind, reintegrating the personality and creating not just a worker who has overthrown capitalists to work capitalistically for a global or state profit, but a worker who has overthrown the chains that bound their mind to capitalistic ways of thinking and thus overthrown their worker status - someone who, like the child they once were, can pursue their happiness on this earth with no gods and thus no habit to love masters. Someone no longer a worker, but a free human being - something the world has yet to see.
This is also why we are more than atheists. Atheists take religion seriously - that a healthy human mind can confront the notion of religiosity and merely accept or reject it as point of fact, the answer to an existential quiz. We communists do not. Religion is an abstraction of the mind that is inculcated in us that directly or indirectly supports the class system - this and previous ones - and is part of what is meant by the ruling ideas being the ideas of the ruling class - not just that we as otherwise perfect thinking creatures hold some strange notions, but that our very mental being has been deformed - religion does not just make us think like workers, it is the deformation of a human being into a worker.
Religious education is like the foot wrappings of a Japanese woman of the Shogunate court: once the damage has been done she cannot merely accept or reject stunted feet. She may even come to see her deformity as dainty: in the same way that women who have had their clitorises cut off often go on to internalise the process as being Godly and inflict the same torture on their female children (try cutting boy's cocks off as an induction ceremony and see how far you get with that as a quaint custom).
Our revolution is the violent overthrow of these constraints on our minds. Religion is at the core of this - the secular institutions that bind us today, when traced back, usually have fairly immediate religious causes and religion is the well at which they are renewed. Or have you not seen the recent jubilee? Worldly authority -> monarch -> head of the national church -> man in sky. But you no longer have to be a member of the C of E to be fully bamboozled by the notion of habitual deference to authority: you can simply shout "Gawd love er!" with the rest of the fools. But monarchy is a derived product of religion (incidentally, one worked by the monarchs themselves against the church to divide the spoils: but that's a different story).
But we as a Party - as a movement - can for the moment get by simply by rejecting religious candidates. Just as monarchy is a derived product of religion, itself a derivation of the basic relationship of master and slave, so our rejection of religion is a derived product of our attempted overthrow of all such conditions, which at the end is a freeing of the mind...
SimonW
Religious and other wilder notions are just as real as other thoughts, but they are abstractions from previous experiences that now correspond to nothing beyond the senses, and lead us into harmful behaviour when we act on them, in the same way that we can fool the senses into thinking that something isn't painful, or is edible after all, and thus cause ourselves harm with mistaken notions. Our thoughts are real things, and we can no more become full members of a post-capitalist society with half our mind locked up in religious thoughts driving us to behave in subservient ways, than we could dance freely with one foot missing.
We simply have no way of divining an otherworldly realm or deity, and anything that we say about such things is merely self-revelatory. When you say something is heavenly you mean you associate it with feelings of pleasure - that is all. When you are taught a system of this world and also heaven and hell, instead of just dealing with the world as you find it you now separate out things-that-exist, things that exist-on-a-cloud, and things-that-exist-in-the-dark-under-the-earth. It is done by someone boxing up your mind, preparing you to tolerate unpleasantness and paying you back with your now-corrupted imagination telling you the misery you experience now, instead of being something to rebel against now, is a preparation for pleasure instead of pain later. A latter-day version of this, of course, is delayed gratification, which though now an ostensibly secular (and inexplicable) habit, would never have been possible without the necessary brutalising concepts first being worked up by religionists.
Similarly, when we say that there is a God to love and obey we mean in the abstract that we have a very real master or masters on this earth that we should love and obey. Real thoughts are abstracted from to create new, also real thoughts, that no longer correspond to our interests. Our rulers turn our own minds against us, in the way that some of the bodies' invaders turn our own immune system against us.
The business of overthrowing religion is thus directly our business - it is not just a fetish. The process of inculcating God is the process of turning a child into a worker. The process of teaching heaven is the process of blocking that child's valid expectations about how their world should be - now if they say simply that they should be happy, they are talking not just politics, but religion.
The process of revolution is the process of restoring these real thoughts in the human mind, reintegrating the personality and creating not just a worker who has overthrown capitalists to work capitalistically for a global or state profit, but a worker who has overthrown the chains that bound their mind to capitalistic ways of thinking and thus overthrown their worker status - someone who, like the child they once were, can pursue their happiness on this earth with no gods and thus no habit to love masters. Someone no longer a worker, but a free human being - something the world has yet to see.
This is also why we are more than atheists. Atheists take religion seriously - that a healthy human mind can confront the notion of religiosity and merely accept or reject it as point of fact, the answer to an existential quiz. We communists do not. Religion is an abstraction of the mind that is inculcated in us that directly or indirectly supports the class system - this and previous ones - and is part of what is meant by the ruling ideas being the ideas of the ruling class - not just that we as otherwise perfect thinking creatures hold some strange notions, but that our very mental being has been deformed - religion does not just make us think like workers, it is the deformation of a human being into a worker.
Religious education is like the foot wrappings of a Japanese woman of the Shogunate court: once the damage has been done she cannot merely accept or reject stunted feet. She may even come to see her deformity as dainty: in the same way that women who have had their clitorises cut off often go on to internalise the process as being Godly and inflict the same torture on their female children (try cutting boy's cocks off as an induction ceremony and see how far you get with that as a quaint custom).
Our revolution is the violent overthrow of these constraints on our minds. Religion is at the core of this - the secular institutions that bind us today, when traced back, usually have fairly immediate religious causes and religion is the well at which they are renewed. Or have you not seen the recent jubilee? Worldly authority -> monarch -> head of the national church -> man in sky. But you no longer have to be a member of the C of E to be fully bamboozled by the notion of habitual deference to authority: you can simply shout "Gawd love er!" with the rest of the fools. But monarchy is a derived product of religion (incidentally, one worked by the monarchs themselves against the church to divide the spoils: but that's a different story).
But we as a Party - as a movement - can for the moment get by simply by rejecting religious candidates. Just as monarchy is a derived product of religion, itself a derivation of the basic relationship of master and slave, so our rejection of religion is a derived product of our attempted overthrow of all such conditions, which at the end is a freeing of the mind...
SimonW
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