Educating The Bishops

Tommy Sheppard, SNP MP for Edinburgh East, has upset the Catholic Church in Scotland by suggesting that the country should have a secular educational system and that faith schools should gradually disappear. The Socialist Party unlike the SNP who distanced themselves from Sheppard's remarks, are not fishing for votes and thus need not soften their criticism of religion.

Religion must be subject to the same scrutiny as any other belief and cannot hide behind the idea that they are personal. Religion is a social, not a personal matter and the Socialist Party holds that religion is incompatible with socialist understanding. For socialists, the struggle against religion cannot be separated from the struggle for socialism. Our criticism of religion is part of a struggle against the ideas that hinder the socialist movement. We need to remember that. 

Religion is not simply a jumble of confused ideas. It is a powerful weapon in the hands of the capitalist class. It divides us and blinds us to the class action that is required to overcome the menace of capitalism. Our position on organised religion is that religion is debilitating to the mind of the worker and thus to the progress which we wish to make as workers in advancing our interests. 

Religion performs two essential functions. It buttresses the established order by sanctifying it and by suggesting that the political order is somehow ordained by divine authority. Its sanctification of the existing social order makes it a counter-revolutionary force. Yet it consoles the oppressed exploited by offering them in heaven what they are denied upon earth. By holding before them a vision of what they are denied, religion plays at least partly a progressive role in that it gives the common people some idea of what a better order would be. But when it becomes possible to realize that better order upon earth in the form of communism, then religion becomes wholly reactionary, for it distracts men from establishing a now possible good society on earth by still turning their eyes towards heaven.

While religion is no doubt a useful means of dampening social discontent, it would be mistaken to exaggerate how effective it is today. It seems safe to say that the key ideology propagated by capitalists is not religion, but nationalism such as propagated by the SNP, which is more effective in blinding workers to their class interests and chaining them to a system that turns their blood and sweat into profits. 

A Worker’s Prayer
If in this wide-spreading universe, there be a Great God of Justice, hear me!
Stiffen my watery spine: harden and straighten my loose and foolish mouth; put fire into my dull eyes.
Even the beasts of the field, even the despised mule hitched to the plow, struggles that their life may be better.
Redden my blood with the courage of man. Help me despise my own image in the mirror if willingly I clutter up the path of progress with my stupid meekness.
Unstop my ears to hear. Open my eyes to see the glorious earth that can be made by One Big Union, the abundance for all that can replace the private plunder of a few.
The sum of my prayer is: Give me sense enough to want plenty, and grit enough to go after it, for myself, my children, my wife, my fellow workers. Open the windows of my brain to the glory of it.
A Blind Worker