http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/TasteAndSee/ByDate/2006/1839_Meditations_After_a_Monday_at_Barnes_and_Noble/

But although I’m agnostic and see the vices and severe flaws of religious extremism, as well as the advantages the of separation of religion and state, I’m VERY reluctant to categorize ALL kinds of religious belief as being inherently flawed and the absence of religious faith as being universally better. I would not want to live in a society like the Soviet Union where religion was banned or strongly discouraged even though I myself am not a religious person.

Sam Harris seems to imply that religion is universally a bad thing … but I suppose I’ll have to read his books to get a better idea of where he’s coming from.

For those of you that hate religion and Christian fundamentalism due to bad experiences with religious nutjobs, harsh upbringing, or the Christian political right wing trying to break the separation of church and state, I do sympathize. But I’ve lived in the USA all my life, spent time in California and Texas. I’ve seen Christians believe and act on a wide spectrum of ideals from racism, intolerance, to “end of the world” obsession, to racial harmony, community outreach, selfless charity work and disaster relief. From mindless consumerism and total disregard for the environment to environmental conservationalism. Christian fundamentalists have seemingly been at war with science and yet many of the great scientists, inventors, and philosophers throughout history were Christian.

So I guess I’m trying to say it’s not fair or accurate to say that religion always leads to bad things. Just like people get carried away with religious extremism, people can get carried away with religion phobia as well and unfairly blame all kinds of social ills solely on religion when underlying causes are usually far more complicated. I kinda like this site but do think some people take anti-religious sentiment too far. Whether Sam Harris does or not … I guess I’ll have to read his book.

No pure system, whether it is capitalist, communist, democratic, socialist, or whatever, can survive. A working system will HAVE to have aspects of all of them to work. It may slant in one direction as ours does toward capitalism. It is just a matter of degrees. I would NOT want to live in a mostly socialist system. Nor would I in a fully capitalist one.

I, in fact, agree with you. Marx and others consider religion as a tool used by authoritarian governments of all kinds. He believed (incorrectly) that the more socialist a government is, the less authoritarian it is. He also believed that in a non-authoritarian government would not see any advantage in maintaining or promoting religion. Thus, to Marx, more socialism leads to less religion.

I should not have written ‘anti-religious sentiment’ but, perhaps ‘non-religious government’.

I’m not so sure about socialism and anti-religious feelings. Although I can’t confirm this, I think that a lot of early Christian societies are seen now as communistic in nature, as the believed in communal use of goods. There were also groups like the Diggers, who believed that the earth belonged to every one. I know for sure that the idea goes back a lot further than Marx, but he is certainly the most responsible for the current concept.

I think Marx’s idea came from looking at older feudal societies, and seeing the obsession with religion then as a way to control the peasants. For him religion may have still been a tool to simply distract people from their state of oppression, only now the capitalists were using it instead of feudal lords. His “revolutionary class consciousness” could not proceed until people cast off this set of ideas justifying their current misery.

But at the same time, communism in Marx’s eyes and modern socialism are not the same thing. Modern socialism keeps the government, and in fact gives it more power in the form of welfare policy. I saw a study not too long ago that said as people became more economically secure, the percent who believed in religion and its tenets went down. It might just be that greater security leaves no pressing need to believe in God (with America being the exception, apparently), leaving the European socialist countries, who have expansive welfare and insurance policies, feeling both more secure and less God-fearing.

You can get some insight into whether or not you’d like Sam Harris on his website (http://www.samharris.org). He’s got lots of essays/articles he’s written and interviews he’s given posted.

The main concept he is pushing is that religion should be subject to the same evidence based inquirey that all other facits of human discovery are subject to. One of his examples is that if you tell someone that 1+1=3 or that his wife is cheating on them, he requires proof, but if you tell him that eating a cracker every Sunday makes a deity happy, he doesn’t require any sort of investigation into the claims. Harris says that this is dangerous because this lack of reason and rationality causes people to become suicide bombers or ignore rational evidence that their religious beliefs are actually hurting people like Catholics do with African condom usage.

He also suggests that we should scientifically explore religious experiences. He says things like meditation can help people understand stuff better; but he says that people who use prayer need to realize that they could have an experience just as profound by gazing at nature or through other religions- that the experience isn’t in any way related to the dogma of their institutions.

-Karl Marx, the father of socialism

Socialism and anti-religious sentiment have gone hand and hand since the idea was invented.

Perhaps it has to do with the poor finally being freed of the promise that their reward is in death. If one doesn’t believe in the afterlife they are more inclined to do all they can to make their life better. Participating in the political process by the poor would certainly result in a more socialist-natured state. Once the gap between rich and poor is made smaller everything should fall into place; lower crime rates, greater equality, etc.

Of course an anarcho-capitalist would wholly disagree. They’d affirm the idea that the people are simply worshipping the state. The state is much more worthy of worship than god at least. The state exists (though again, the an-cap would disagree).

It would be an interesting thesis though to track the development of one of the more atheistic states. What was the series of developments that led to their current success? Hmmm.