Socialism And Religion الإشتراكية والدين

An awesome Cross-post from Isteraky Thawry(A Revolutionary Socialist)

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One thing that annoys me continually is how some socialists seem to think that there is no bigger issue than religion, and no more important thing to condemn. I decided to write something about this ridiculous mix up of priorities, because I was just reading two "socialist" essays, and the whole time the authors couldn't just shut the fuck up and talk about the issue about which they were supposed to be writing, instead they had to make constant sarcastic or condescending references to religion. Now I am not religious at all, not even a little, but I don't see why some socialists feel that they need to constantly force their unsympathetic atheism on others. I agree that religion is used as a way to control people and to shut them up, but this doesn't mean that someone who is religious is controlled or silent. That would be like saying that anyone who is bourgeois has to be reactionary, when Marx and Engels were themselves bourgeois, and they revolted and betrayed their class and worked for a proletarian revolution. I mean I really don't see why many socialists feel they need to exclude any and all believers from their ranks, I personally see no contradiction between religion (on a personal level) and socialism. The socialists who speak like this remind me of what Ulrike Meinhof (one of the leaders of the Red Army Faction) wrote in The Urban Guerilla Concept:

"When reading the texts of various left-wing organisations, we discovered that their activism is in reality a trivial competition between intellectuals, judged by an imaginary jury, which by definition contains no ordinary workers on it because of the complicated jargon they use. The winner is whoever manages the smartest interpretation of Karl Marx. For such people the embarrassment of being caught out quoting Marx incorrectly is far worse than the hypocrisy of their own political activism. Their page footnotes are more accurate than the membership numbers they give for their organisations. They fear the charge of ‘revolutionary impatience’ much more than being corrupted through the nature of their bourgeois jobs. They devote time to do a long thesis on Lukacz [30], but are wary of being inspired too quickly into activism by Blanqui. Their internationalism consists of point-scoring various Palestinian commando groups. Acting as the advocates of ‘true’ Marxism – they beg money from rich friends in the name of the Black Panthers. The money they get is used to ease their guilty consciences, this being more on their minds than any “Victory in the People’s War” – this is not a revolutionary intervention."

I think this is an excellent way of describing what I am talking about, because to me it seems as if the socialists who constantly talk of religion and criticize it more often than they do capitalism are the same type of "intellectual" socialists that Meinhof talks about above, i.e. they have their head up their ass and cannot bear to think realistically or moreover think in a non-bourgeois manner, nor do they ever do anything usefull to work towards a socialist revolution.