“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” - Marx, (Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law)
Today the spread of atheism is unrelenting, so much so that Christianity itself is becoming increasingly secularised. That far fewer people believe in God or Christ nowadays is some sign of progress. There is no “true” Islam or pure Buddhism, there is just the endless variety of ways humans try to interpret their world in order to act in it. Religious groups have a notorious history of stifling dissent by any means possible, even if, in Britain, nonbelievers are no longer persecuted, tortured and killed and that is because the superstitious myths and rituals with which religion cloaks itself are no longer taken seriously by the majority of the population. But there are countries where the heads of religion are still able to wield considerable power and influence. To belong to a different faith or to question that religion and try to have a reasoned discussion instead of blindly accepting its "rules" is to take great personal risks. To be a good Muslim is to possess a religious outlook that offends against the most elementary requirements of reasonable thought. And a society inhabited by unreasonable workers is one which is safe for the minority who prey on ignorance.
Religion is the badge of the mentally enslaved. It uses a cloak of mystification to reinforce its authority by promising a mythical afterlife as a reward for blind obedience and by making threats of eternal punishment, backed up by intimidation and persecution for those who do not submit. It has been a useful tool in the hands of the ruling classes to keep their subjects subservient. With their beliefs based upon “holy scriptures”, the religious looks at the world, embracing that which reinforces the beliefs, retreating from experience which conflicts with them. New knowledge, untried feelings, novel perspectives must be first mistrusted, then banned. Nothing must interfere with the dogma. But dogmatism is fragile. It is upheld by denying all other images than those which reinforce it.
Sharia-compliant Islamic banking is apparently expanding with even non-Muslims switching to Islamic banks. Islamic theologians, following in the footsteps of their end-of-Middle Ages Catholic and Protestant counterparts. In the Middle Ages, the dogma of the Catholic Church banned usury, defined as charging money for a loan. Well, but not quite. Sharia law condemns the appearance but not the substance. Capitalism is sharia-compliant.
There are no reasonable grounds for belief in the supernatural, or in gods, just as there are no grounds for belief in the existence of pink elephants, leprechauns, fairies or flying pigs. Socialists actively oppose all forms of religious superstition not only because such beliefs are unscientific and act as a barrier to understanding the society in which we live and its historical development, but also because of the socially divisive nature of religion. Workers who suffer from the delusions of religion are prepared to kill their fellow-workers in time of war; there are churches in America where blacks are not allowed; women are often considered subordinate to men and the Catholic Church will neither allow its women to become priests nor decide how many children they will have (although many Catholics now ignore the Pope's ruling on the latter).
Let us for a moment entertain this religious fantasy that the world and all of us who inhabit it are the children of a Holy Father (very rarely Mother) — never seen, but ever feared — who rules over us and must be obeyed to the letter of his commandments. Now, it tells us something about the condition of millions of workers if they can be persuaded that they are little children in need of an invisible Father, but let us examine the Christian conception of fatherhood. God, The Father (he also works as a Son and a Holy Ghost) tells us that certain forms of behaviour are wrong. Some of his children disobey the God-Father and do what is "wrong". His fatherly response is to invent a fearful, painful disease which will wipe out vast numbers of his children, thus teaching them to obey him in future. But according to the Christians, this is precisely what we should expect a father to do: the only way to teach workers the right way to behave is to kill off a few of them for behaving the wrong way.
If God was a real parent he would need to be given help by others less deranged than himself; his children would need to be taken into care. That is what those who think they are God's children need: to be taken into care — not the care of another phoney god-image but of themselves. Transcending religious folly means learning that we are not little children destined to obey a master, but that we are capable of controlling our own lives. The Marxist materialist method allows us to understand both how humans come to create the ideas they hold, and how to change the world for ourselves. Workers must one day learn to believe in themselves. That they can really make a new and better world. And that nobody else can do it for them. We need to look to a genuine worldwide movement that offers the prospect of establishing a genuine global community through common ownership of the wealth of the world. Our materialist understanding is that by changing the way we live will change ideas and that will be liberating. Religion has always been about forcing people to conform in their ideas. The conformity required is that which meets the needs of the profit-stealing ruling class. No self-respecting worker will fall for it for long. Let us exercise our freedom to live as brothers and sisters and learn to live together as a human family of equals. As well as referring to religion as "the opium of the people", Marx called it "The self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again". The religious mentality exists in those workers who have not yet discovered the essential, exhilarating fact that we are the gods. We must make the future out of the material conditions which surround us: gods, prophets, bishops, gurus and mullahs are the illusory masters who people invent to tower over them. The socialist transformation of society will banish the capitalists from the earth and the gods from the skies—or to be accurate from the minds of men and women, where they have exercised their pernicious fantasies for too long. Those who choose to believe in powers beyond will be free to do so in a socialist society. Indeed, without the state to adopt this or that religious dogma as the official one, religious believers will be freer than they are now. Freer, but never free to tell others what to do. It will take more than a divine injunction from one of the “anointed” to tell socialists what we can think, say or write.
Nevertheless, the danger presented by religious fundamentalism is a real one. It threatens us as socialists at least as much as it threatens all other “servants of Satan”. Our ability to spread our ideas depends on the tolerance of minority opinions. Moreover, people whose minds have been addled by belief in magic, miracles and divine texts are unlikely to be receptive to socialist ideas. So we cannot say: “It doesn’t matter which group of theologians rule; they are all equally bad.” Of course, it matters. Socialists share a certain amount of common ground with non-socialists concerned to defend democracy and secularism. However, we must not jeopardise our identity as socialists by joining broad atheist blocs that accept the continued existence of capitalism. Only socialists, by holding out the prospect of real community, can act effectively to undermine the illusory religious community.
A world of free access and production for use not profit is ours for the taking. Make it so!
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