Re: Felix Morrow on religion

[Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2/24/07, Doyle Saylor <doylesaylor@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Greetings Economists,
> On Feb 24, 2007, at 8:06 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > In the USA, Marxists might, for instance, aim for separation of church
> > and science instead.  For most denominations of most religions have no
> > problem reconciling their faiths with science in practice and only
> > Christian fundamentalists have trouble doing so.
>
> Doyle;
> Science isn't sexy enough.

Well, science can be sexy, I think.  It is true that it never seems to
grip people's consciousness in a way that religion does, but most
religions in the world, excepting perhaps die-hard Christian
fundamentalists, have reformed themselves in a way that they have
become compatible with science, which is an index of its own power as
well as capitalism's.

> It is a cultural question.  Prohibition (a
> religion based moral movement) lost on the 'wild' living gin drinking
> (gin medicates depression and the blues) masses who couldn't be
> repressed.  Socialist culture has to offer something Christianity can't
> which is freedom from religious strictures the masses crave.

The other day, I was reading William James' "The Moral Equivalent of
War" (at <http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm>), as it was
mentioned by one of the MRZine contributions that I was editing.  He
was a pacifist, but he thought that he could understand why a lot of
people are attracted to war and the military and that, to win over
people who are into war and the military to a new way of life, the new
way has to offer attractive values that people do find in war and the
military.  Among the values may be the idea of service, and the
discipline (of which certain strictures may be a part) and sacrifice
that take to perform it well.  The same can be said about religion and
science.

James also said, "Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the
aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents. Do that
first in any controversy, says J. J. Chapman, _then move the point_,
and your opponent will follow."  That seems to me to be a sensible way
of communication, perhaps most useful as we think of the relation
between Marxism and religion, science and religion, etc.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>