Re: prof combats ignorance about Islam, women

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> kelley <kcwalker@xxxxxxx> 08/25/99 10:00AM >>>

>Of course, today,  god is not around to authenticate [the words of his
disciples written in the bible], but it is Marxist to consider that there
is some discipl[e]ine involved in being a christian.


see chaz, substitue a few words and letters and look what happens.

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Charles: not.

See I just added one word, and made something said turn into the opposite of what was said. I mean if you think you can turn an atheist doctrine into a religious doctrine by selective substituting words with opposite meanings ,  and rearranging the grammar of my statement etc.  we have an extreme failure of communication here.

Or maybe you are joking. Are you kidding ? I hestitate to respond in detail because , you know, what are you talking about ?

The notion that Marxism is a discipline does not make it a religion anymore than another scientific discipline is a religion because it is a discipline. By your fantasy word change method above, you could turn modern physics and chemistry into religion. Discipline and rigor, following the essential fundamentals of a theory is NOT the definition of religion. Science is not defined by the absence of these.

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 the
fundamentalist who no longer have a living god in the body of jesus christ,
say exactly the same thing as you do.

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Charles: Exactly the same thing ? ! Are you kidding ?




 now, what you have to do, of course,
is epistemologically defend your position as truth as opposed to their
ideological dogma.  this can be done in a variety of ways and, of course,
there are arguments against each argument you could make that will
ultimately push us against a wall.  you and i have gone round on this
before.  i don't disagree that marxist analyses are corret or right or what
have you and i've made it my life's work and passion to promote such
analyses in whatever way and wherever i can.  so, in some ways it's all
academic.  nonetheless, i tend to avoid making the kinds of claims you've
made above be/c it just seems so manifesto thumping fundamentalist.

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Charles: But this equating Marxism with religious dogma, and equating disciplining oneself to the fundamentals of classcial Marxism  with Christian or other fundamentalist religion is such an old liberal hoxy, dogma it is not funny.  The liberal critique of Marxism as equivalent to religion because it is not pluralist is well refuted by Marxism. The main point is that Marxism is atheism. Liberalism is closer to religion than Marxism, because liberalism is agnostic and dualist by definition of its pluralism. It can't exclude theism because it is pluralist.

This liberal tactic proceeds by trying to tag Marxism with the characteristic of rigidity, like religious doctrine and dogma. But it forgets that SCIENCE, the opposite of religion, has rigor and discipline. The sciences are literally called DISCIPLINES.

Not only is Marxism explicitly not religion, but its birth was very much bound up with the founding of modern atheism, Feuerbach's critique of Hegel's religion ( idealism) . In fact, as Engels explains in _Socialism:Utopian and Scientific_ , materialism defines itself mainly as atheism. Most of the struggle of materialism is with religious concepts , not "idealist philosphers".

What Marxism extracts from Hegel, dialectic, is really a concept that is the opposite of God: Everything changes. God is the eternal unchanging. So to say that everything changes is to say very essentially that there is no God.
God is the idea that the more things change, the more they stay the same, that sameness being eternal and God. Marxism is that there is real change that is not circular change.

Marx and Engels time and again said Marxism is not a dogma , but a guide to action.

Marx said criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism. That God is alienated man (sic). That the religious world is an inverted illusion of the real world.  Man makes religion. Religion doesn't make man. That is the opposite of the Christian conception.

To equate Marxism with religion is fully absurd, and I use that term non-rhetorically. It is literally a clearly self-contradictory statement.

By the way, Christianity has some valid concepts, especially for 2000 years ago.  Being an idealism does not prevent a philosophy from developing some of the truth, as with Hegel , for example, or even the ying and yang of Daoism.

 Engels has an essay on Christianity as a revolutionary philosophy of the slave class during the Roman Empire. He analyzes the text of the Second Coming and  Rhapture as a coded plan for overthrowing the City of Rome. See"The Book of Revelation" by Fred, _Progress, vol. 2, London 1883) . He also did materialist analysis of claims for paranormal phenomenon (finding them invalid) . A true materialist does not dismiss claims of the paranormal a priori. There could be a materialist basis for it somehow.

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 what i
mean by that is there is no reason to think of marx's words as absolute [a
literal interp for relig fundamentalist].  all that means is that marx
wasn't infallible and so some positions he took, arguments he made,
analyses he offered weren't the best ones.  the basic assumptions and, if
you will, way of looking at the world may well be right and enduring, though.

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Charles: Marxism does not hold that Marx was infallible. If you take a look at _Materialism and Empirio-Criticism_ by Lenin , you will find the Marxist doctrine of the dialectic of absolute and relative truth. Marxism does not claim to be absolute truth because reality is infinite. Lenin uses the image of a mathematical asymptotic curve: human knowledge approaches the truth closer and closer but never reaching it.

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what is interesting to me, though, is that i don't think any feminists of
whatever stripe would ever ever appeal to a feminist author as having the
key to understanding and eradicating gender oppression.  can you think of
an author you would say same as above wrt racial oppression?  see, that's
what i think carrol meant by religious.

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Charles: For me it is Me. I'm very serious about self-confidence and self-determination. I mean who else am I going to rely on more than myself ? I think for myself. This is also the opposite of religion. I have thought about Marx's ideas critically and I think they are the very advanced relative truth of our day, especially as developed by Lenin ―-- and for me as developed by me.


Thinking for yourself doesn't mean you don't learn from others. I have learned from others , for example, W.E.B. Dubois. Angela Davis on race and gender, and many others.  A key to all three is to treat gender, race and class as single complex.

CB