Why yes, there is a vast world devouring monster with its tendrils encircling all of us, and it's plainly visible once you notice it, and it's everywhere. But you come off as insane when you try to tell other people about it.

Is SCP-3125 an allegory for capitalism? Shit.

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[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Marx wasn't a big fan of religion, he just saw it as largely a tool wielded by the monarchs (and now capital) to enthrall the workers to their masters. Which is largely a correct reading of Christianity's role in feudal and primitive capitalist Europe.

Religion also played a large role in Colonialism through missionary stuff.

Once you actually analyze Marx's criticism of religion, he's not really criticizing the concept of a God, just the material consequences of the religious superstructure as he had seen is in Europe, America, and the colonies.

His call for an atheist state was more a call for an abandonment of the religious superstructure that had intertwined itself into European politics. Basically a more clear version of the American separation of church and state idea.

You can also see how this actually played out, with the church serving as a bastion for anti-communist activity in the USSR, even today American churches are used as NGO agents of American capital interests, same as the colonial missionaries. There's a reason the religious superstructure of America has shifted so heavily towards prosperity gospel and mega-churches, because religion is not a revolutionary force, but a blank slate that will be used by the existing political economic order to enforce and entrench it's hegemony.

[–] alexei_1917@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago

"Cold War Christianity" was probably the best known in the West result of this phenomenon, and it's still fucking up multiple countries. There's sort of this narrative in a lot of churches of "the Holy Cold War" and the Cold War as essentially a modern Crusade. It's kind of funny when you take a step back, but if you were raised Catholic, you know exactly what I'm trying to say and the deep "mundane horror" I'm getting at. It's a hell of an interesting "if you know, you know, and if you haven't lived in and seen it, you'd probably think I'm completely insane". I could absolutely write fiction set in a highly reactionary Catholic school, drawing from the horror I perceived attending one, and have people who've never attended one call it either funny or a very strange take on horror as a genre, while people who have just nod and say "yep, that author's one of us".