I hear a lot of people talk about how we need to look at religion from a materialist lens and that religion is incomparable with socialism. But I think we need to seperate the two. Religion is about the metaphysical so it’s hard to look at it from a materialist lens. While politics deals with materialist matters, so it’s necessary to view it with a materialist lens. And it’s not like atheism is fully materialist either, with ‘nothing after death’, and ‘universe starting without a god’ being metaphysical explanations as well. And humans are naturally spiritual and to deny that, makes it harder for socialism to be accepted by people. But of course that doesn’t mean we should tolerate the reactionary aspects of religion. We should combat it whenever necessary.
What’s your opinion?
I think that one philosopher said it best (paraphrasing because I’m no good at quotemining): in order to make religion less shitty, we need to do something about the shitty conditions that gave rise to it.
I don’t think metaphysics is real though. The material world is all there is. When I say there is nothing after death, I mean that the chemistry inside your body that makes you alive stops functioning, and that’s all that happens.
EDIT: to be clear, I’m not anti-religion. It’s just that powerful people have a habit of using religious thinking for self-aggrandizement, shutting down criticism, and for justifying exploitation. It’s not a coincidence that missionaries came hand in hand with colonizers