I’m an interested bystander in this discussion, but it occurs to me that, if Communism is a religion, and non-supernatural Buddhism is also a religion, then it would help the discussion if someone could list specific similarities between these two things. (Of course, I accept the possibility that they may be non-intersecting subsets of a larger set)
This is an earnest request, not a jab at either side in the debate. Just trying to oil the wheels here.
Can’t think of a good lead-in, so I’ll just get right to addressing these claims from Bertrand Russell.
No. Dialectical materialism is a philosophy born of the human mind, and used as a tool for analyzing and understanding the world. It has no independent existence outside our heads, and exerts no physical influence over the world by itself. It is no unseen cosmic force; it is a simple human idea.
Ridiculous. First off, who the hell prophesied his arrival? Moreover, unlike Christ, Marx didn’t think just having the right ideas would save humanity’s souls. Changing the world takes action, and that can’t be done by one single individual.
A worker can be full of nasty ideas like bigotry and sexism and Islamophobia just as easily as a Goldman Sachs executive. Nothing about a worker’s class position in society in and of itself makes him or her more noble or venerable.
Political parties have been the focus of people’s aspirations and hopes for as long as there have been people to have aspirations and hopes. It makes as much sense to say the Democratic Party is the church of American liberalism.
Yeah, if we thought the revolution would take care of everything on the day after and we could just hit the cruise control. Tearing down an old society and building a new one takes conscious, planned work on everyone’s part.
This one doesn’t even make any sense.
As with the Second Coming, the Millennium is supposed to happen without any real effort on our part here on Earth - Christ just shows up and everything’s hunky dory for those who believed. Achieving a global commonwealth of the type I’d very much like to see doesn’t happen that way. Conscious, planned collective effort on the part of everyone in society is how that comes about.
Mathematicians cite Newton and Leibniz. Biologists cite Darwin. Astronomers cite Galileo and Kepler. Are math, science, and astronomy therefore religions? What, in and of itself, is wrong with going back to the source material to bolster one’s arguments?
This one deserves a simple “Cite?” What does Russell provide as examples to back this up?
That, plus veneration of a prophet and/or god figure, eg, Lenin.
Generally, people are selfish.
They’re selfish in a quasi-altruistic fashion: they will do things for others, naturally, but they will also naturally favour their family over others’ families, their village over other villages, their region/racial or cultural affiliation over that. (Not denying the existence of genuinely wholly altruistic souls here, just saying they’re in the minority.)
In other words, it’s normal for an average member of the population to want to better themselves, their status, their material worth, and that of their family. Call this the Natural Profit Motive.
Communism attempts to upscale individuals’ quasi-altruistic behaviour to extend to the whole of its society or system. Consciously, or unconsciously, people simply aren’t motivated by this. If they work bloody hard at the steel mill or if they just do the bare minimum, they will get the same reward. So they tend just to do the bare minimum. (Qv. my experience in China in 1992, when the waiter asleep on the table told us to fuck off and find another restaurant for lunch - he’d get paid whether he served us or not.) It attempts to remove the Natural Profit Motive.
But generally, people still possess the Natural Profit Motive. Most individuals still want to better the situation for themselves or more likely for their family, but find they have no legitimate means so to do. Add a controlled economy that is unresponsive to market need, leading to shortages, and you have a situation that is even more likely to breed it: if I steal and hoard bath plugs now, when they become scarce I’ll become rich! Rich I tell you! Almost instantly they begin to indulge in black market practices (qv. chapters on shopping in Cuba, per The Cuba Diaries).
The second means to get on is to join the Party, lick the right asses, and ascend to the point where they get a more favourable education for their kids; a better apartment perhaps; maybe a limo.
So the authorities now have two serious societal problems to achieving their ends: demotivation, and corruption. How to counteract them without rewarding anyone financially?
How about trying to get people to emulate people who aren’t corrupt or demotivated. Step in the model worker: e.g. Alexei Stakhanov or Alija Sirotanovic.
So while Altruistic Joe Q Honest is ploughing away trying to become more like Alexei for the good of all, Asslicking Ivan Aparatchik has got himself into a position of authority.
New major problem: the best way to counter corruption is to punish people for corruption. But when party authorities are the people most likely to have corrupt and selfish motivations, and obviously the people who run the police will be in this position, how will this be positively enforced?
It won’t be.
So what other way can the Fearless Leaders fix this shit? Since they can’t make people feel good by rewarding them, and punishments are not meted out to the right people, why not make people feel bad if they don’t do something that the system wants them to do.
Love.
Love and devotion are also natural human emotions. And the majority of the world ploughs them into religion. But wait! Religion has been outlawed. Damn!
So what devotion can motivate the model worker, and turn the corrupt worker away from the black market?
Since the system is already perfect, then everyone must love the system. And if the system is perfect, then the leader must by implication be perfect.
Now we have an aswer: why do Aleksei and Alija work so hard? Because they are devoted to [insert leader here]. Why does Joe Q Honest not stockpile those lightbulbs? Because that would hurt [perfect leader here] and the system.
This policy grows. And grows. Pretty soon it’s scary to say anything about [perfect leader] at all; eventually people become so caught up in it that they worship said leader (qv. Chinese peasants burning incense, praying and laying flowers at the feet of the Mao statue in his mausoleum). Essentially they go completely mad, exhibiting behaviours that are pretty much unimaginable - outside a religious context.
And thus Communism becomes a religion, usually unsupernatural, but sometimes supernatural. Without the cult of personality, the whole thing would fall apart, because it’s again attempted to replace normal human behaviours with artificial ones, and that never works.
Mao, Pol Pot, Lenin, Kims Jong Il and Il Sung, Stalin, Castro, Ho Chi Minh (against his wishes) - few of them are immune. And when they do become immune to deification, that’s when the system crumbles - Brezhnev onwards to Gorbachev.
Please. Those “strict definitions” are because believers have a habit of trying to equate atheism and communism so that they can call atheists mass murderers, and trying to equate atheism and religion so that they can claim atheism is just as illogical. Then when someone points out how much Communism looks like a religion, suddenly religion has a definition that conveniently rules out Communism. This is about the willingness of believers to twist everything they say.
In other words, just like Yahweh.
The difference is that math and physics aren’t taken on faith, it is perfectly acceptable to point out that Newton was wrong about something.
I don’t think calling communism a religion is accurate but I think observing the similar characteristics is useful. If we abandon the hands off religious beliefs habit and examine them in the same way we examine any human belief I think we’ll see a lot of overlap in how human consciousness and belief systems function. They may help us discard unnecessary myth and discourage the rejection of science.
IMO it also helps in dispelling the meme that religion as a belief system is somehow worse than the rest. I think we as a people are developing and evolving and that is reflected in changes in our belief systems and the subtly shifting balance of beliefs.
Nonsense. Religion is backwards and baseless. It is stagnant, only dragged forward intellectually or morally by external forces. It is brutal; amoral or outright malignant. Which are more similarities between Communism and religion, I’ll add.
Religion has a long history of being wrong about everything it claims. How can a belief system with a record that bad not qualify as worse than others, the ones that are on occasion actually right? Oh, “we as a people are developing and evolving” all right - but that is only in the face of the determined resistance of religion to all human moral and intellectual progress.
I give up. Any definition of religion that doesn’t include gods, souls or spirits is just silly to me, and I think, to most people. I believe most of you would come around the moment a political movement was granted tax exempt status.
Sure, you could characterize a political ideology as irrational or a movement as cult-like, but that doesn’t make it a religion.
I suppose you could argue that, like Humpty Dumpty, you can have words mean whatever you like. Fine. But then you would have to answer the question: what do you call actual religion? You know, that thing with the gods and the salvation of your soul after death and all that stuff, if we can agree that such a thing exists. Maybe we could call an actual religion a bjefmupfschnutch, and reserve the word “religion” to mean “any belief system whether religious or not”, but I fail to see the point.
I’m a little bit sad that debates here so often end in calls for the opponent to define every single word he uses. In some cases, the definition of a term is questionable and relevant, but usually, there is a commonly agreed meaning.
Surely we can do better than that? If, say, two politicians spent most of a televised debate arguing about the definition of a single word, would we not deem them fools?
How about making it a rule of this forum to just use the definition in, say, Merriam-Webster or Wikipedia, and then we can skip the silly that-word-doesn’t-mean-what-you-think-it-does and go straight to the real debate?
Well, both posit a general all-explanatory world-view that transcends any individual life. And in both cases the world-view is not merely an intellectual proposition, it is something that should guide the personal life and actions of anyone who accepts it.
Don’t want to throw a spanner in the works, but how has that not been happening here? People aren’t disagreeing about the definition of a category, but rather, the membership, or otherwise, of a prospective item in that category.
The argument here appears (to me) to be focusing on whether some, any or all of the attributes of communism are sufficiently similar to the (I think largely accepted) attributes of religions to warrant its inclusion in that category. You can’t get to a decision on that without discussion.
Therefore you have a motive to twist the definition, much as some religionists do.
God is beyond the mortal by definition. She or he may be an invention (IMO is) but isn’t supposed to be. Dialectical materialism is credited to Marx, if I recall.
And thus for economics, sociology, and philosophy. And theology, for that matter. What’s your point? You can’t pretend that all new ideas in math or physics are immediately accepted.
The reason atheists (and, I assume, communists) “bristle” at the comparison to religion is because that argument is merely step one of a larger argument, one we’ve seen hundreds of times before:
Atheism is just another religion! Therefore, my (theistic) beliefs are just as valid as yours!
Since my (theistic) beliefs are just as valid as your (atheistic) beliefs, one of us has to be wrong. I have a book which says I’m right, so your beliefs are wrong!
Prophet!
Since this is clearly a bogus line of reasoning, it’s best to nip it in the bud when it starts.
Economic forces are essentially impersonal and unseen, and, if not “cosmic,” do operate on a scale beyond the personal and social lives of individuals . . . Are you suggesting that Russell is confusing the concept of dialectical materialism with the processes it purports to describe? Perhaps he should have said “Yahweh = Economic Forces”?
If so, that was an easy mistake for Russell to make – and also a trivial one.
I remember going to help at a homeless shelter that was located in the basement of a church. They offered a warm “safe” place and good food to the homeless, served by volunteers from the church and paid for by church donations. I was standing there in line handing out rolls when I realized how brutal and malignant the whole thing was. I wondered if I should stand guard that night to keep the Christians from torturing the homeless onto converting or possibly just killing them in their sleep and eating their still warm hearts. Then I thought…nah, that’s nonsense.
All true, no doubt. However, Communists who take power do often seem to assume that victory is sufficient, and that once the “capitalist integument” is burst, the next steps after that will be plain and obvious, and the optimal order will just emerge of itself like crystals growing in a solution.
It is that kind of unexamined subconscious assumption that underlies such astonishing hubris as Lenin proclaiming post-Revolution, “We shall now proceed to build the socialist order!” In a wrecked, backward, agrarian country, guided by an ideology which gave no actual prescriptions for the nuts and bolts of a socialist economic system and which had already spawned multiple incompatible schools of thought and action, leading a party of political intellectuals who had no experience in government or industrial management, trying out a highly complex socioeconomic program that had never been attempted before in human history, Lenin thought they could just do that.
Yes, it was heroic. But hubris often is.
Yep,
When I think of religion I think of an organization with a fairly defined set of beliefs and traditions that relate to man’s theoretical spiritual nature.
Organizations can share may share certain characteristics perhaps to the point of being religion-like , and that may be helpful in understanding human thought and patterns of belief, but that doesn’t make them a religion.
But I think religious people are far more likely to fly planes into buildings than work in soup kitchens. It’s a wonder we have any tall buildings left.
First, not everyone has the time or skill to become a pilot. And second, do you think abortion clinics bomb themselves? There’s a lot to do in God’s name, you know.
So, back to the question of Buddhism, is it a religion? I’ve heard more often that it is not, and that they also welcome non-theists who seek earthly enlightenment too. People who say this claim it’s a system of spirituality focused on easing suffering in the here and now rather than one seeking to glorify a god-figure. So…do all systems of belief that exist primarily to improve the lot of man = religion?
I never go in them for just that reason.
The definition in Merriam-Webster or Wikipedia or the definitions? I know there are some people on this board that like to cherry pick specific definitions that they like and insist those are the correct ones but language and meaningful communication doesn’t work that way. Read all of the definitions in Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia for religion without glossing over what you don’t like and you’ll find your cookie cutter definition is too narrow for the two example sources you picked.
In the Wikipedia article on religion, Theravada Buddhism is included. There are over 100 million Theravada Buddhists. A little about Theravada Buddhism: