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?
When the Catholic church was an important political power of the feudal societies, the revolutionary bourgeois developped criticism of religion to be able to separate politics from spirituality and claim the freedom to build a liberal capitalist society.
How is it now? On one hand you have far-right sects and religious orders that clench to reactionary ideas, but in the other you have billions of people who are oppressed by the imperial core and have been raised in a religious tradition. For a lot of people, like the Muslims in France, Islam is weaponized by the colonialist factions to demonize them. A lot of leftists fall for it. Outside of the imperial core, great parts of the masses won’t listen to anyone who doesn’t respect their religion because their religion is part of their culture, part of themselves.
My conclusion is : far-right religious factions must be dealt with because they are reactionary not because they are religious. Faith must be respected so that people aren’t alienated from their culture. No organisation should ask religious people to renounce their faith as long as they are willing to use dialectical materialism and refrain from using scriptures to participate in debates.