Karl Marx, Hero · 7 October 2008

Spoiling my chances of running for President, one blog post at a time.

Actually, I didn’t write what follows below. It’s from Gregory Rodriguez at the LATimes. Very good. I've worked with the data he discusses and he's right that there's a lot of fear in there. A lot.

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The debate between faith and atheism leaves too little room for figuring out why humans believe.

Forget Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. These atheists du jour have nothing on the most famous anti-theist of all time. Good old Karl Marx is still the most eloquent and thoughtful nonbeliever, and his “religion is the opium of the masses” is still the best one-liner in the business.

But as famous as that zinger is, it’s too bad that most people have never read the sentences that come before and after it. Marx was a whole lot more sympathetic to religious faith than most people give him credit for. He saw religion as a source of solace that should only be abolished until the sources of people’s pain—an unfair economic system—had been eradicated.

“Religious suffering, “ he wrote in 1844, “is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”

Marx wasn’t just another hater of religion as a childish fantasy or a retreat from rationality. He saw faith as a symptom and not the disease, and he was interested in faith not in terms of right and wrong but because of what it told him about the human condition.

That’s a far cry from the tenor of today’s brand of assertive atheism. According to surveys, atheists make up only about 4% of the U.S. population, or about 5 million adults, who tend to be more educated and affluent than believers. But thanks to a slew of bestselling, God-debunking books and Maher’s new film, “Religulous,” in which the comedian lampoons religious beliefs, atheism has never had a higher profile in this country.

And, of course, you could ascribe at least some of the resurgence of assertive atheism to a backlash against evangelical Christians and the way they have assertively injected religion into civic life.

The fury of the debate between faith and atheism leaves little room for an inquiry as to why 90% of Americans say they believe in God or a supreme being and more than 40% say they attend religious services each week. These days, a typically silly argument between a believer and a nonbeliever revolves around whether religious extremists or godless communists murdered more people in the 20th century. Like so many other public debates, the one over religion is dominated by extremes.

A new study out of Northwestern University, perhaps without really meaning to, gets at something much more interesting. It starts to provide data and insight that add to our ability to understand what Marx was getting at—not if there is a God and not whether it makes sense that humans should believe, but simply why humans believe.

The study, by psychology professor Dan P. McAdams and researcher Michelle Albaugh, was aimed at finding out about the religious sources of political leanings. They interviewed 128 devout Christians in and around Chicago, and they avoided the usual questions of “How do you know God exists” or even “Why do you believe?” Instead, they asked their subjects to describe what their lives and the world would be like if they did not have faith. In other words, what would the world be like if Christopher Hitchens were right and there were no God?

The study analyzes the results mostly in terms of political divisions. It found that politically conservative Christians described a godless world “as one of incessant conflict and chaos, expressing strong apprehension regarding people’s inability to control their impulses and the attendant breakdown of social relationships and societal institutions.”

Liberal Christians, on the other hand, had a different set of concerns. For them, a world without God would be “barren or lifeless, lacking in color and texture, an empty wasteland that would not sustain them” and in which they would feel lost.

All of the respondents generally imagined life without God as “entailing fear, sadness, interpersonal isolation and loss of meaning and hope.”

The political findings are intriguing, but not nearly as interesting as the way the question and the answers it elicited get at deeper, core issues. It appears that we do believe out of need, but it’s not, as Marx suggested, primarily because of material deprivation. Instead, it looks as if faith answers fear, and many different kinds of fear, which we can begin to delineate in some detail.

In the end, even these specifics don’t intrigue me as much as this fact: Zero-sum arguments about faith and faithlessness just go round and round, generating heat and no light. It’s better to return to real knowledge and fundamental questions. Rather than arguing over the existence of God, rather than playing believer-nonbeliever gotcha, we learn a whole lot more if we just keep asking ourselves—in as many new ways as possible—why it is that so many of us feel compelled to pray.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Comment

1. Dubya snorted cocaine and is purported to have had multiple-partner sex wherein he was not the sole male. If that didn’t get him excluded from the presidential running then your submission of an article on your blog that favors Karl Marx and atheism probably won’t bump you out of the running either.

   Does Marx address why so many people pray? Does he really ascribe it simply to fear?

   Posted by: Carl · Oct 7, 06:52 PM · #

2. Oh I love you Owl, you do all my reading for me! :)

   I wonder if its possible to compare say the old native-american way of life, and the religious life of east and west? Listening to the Power of Myth again, I am struck by the connection to life and nature that the NA’s had. They seemed NOT to live in fear, and NOT to live with a sense of economic issue.

   But that just seems to bring me back to your same question. Why pray, or at least perform a rain-dance or ceremony to invoke harvest and blessing.

   I think we are all really sure that we do not have control, and so we pray. Perhaps we recognise that intention reverberates in ways we do not understand.

   Posted by: Gregor · Oct 8, 04:47 AM · #

3. Gregor (IIRC) Pirsig does this in Lila.

   Posted by: meniscusmerague · Oct 8, 06:01 AM · #

4. I don’t know about Christians, but the Muslims I work with in BF, West Africa all seem to argue that believing in god gives them hope. Some of course also pray because of fear of going to hell if they didn’t pray, but I think it is still mostly about hope. When your life as full of pain ans suffering as in the case of many of these people, you need to believe sth/someone is out there looking out for your, and that you may be rewarded for your suffering in the afterlife. Otherwise there is no point in living. You got to believe in order to live. Sth like that.
   I wonder if I would have fewer (dark) moments myself if I were a believer instead of being an atheist. But I am not into worshipping Gods, gurus or anything else for that matter, so religions don’t work for me.

   Posted by: Fatou · Oct 8, 09:15 AM · #

5. Owl for president!

   Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Oct 8, 10:23 AM · #

6. I wish to throw a spanner (wrench for you americans) into the works.
   There does seem to be a problem with hope.
   It doesn’t in the end have to do with hope. It has to do with dealing with despair. Hope seems like a mortgage-backed security – looked like value, tasted like value, but apparently it isn’t. Apparently MBS (aka hope) were not really well understood. What do we understand about hope?
   Do we pray for an outcome? Or do we pray for having the strength to bare not knowing what life is, and still living in touch with our own vitality? It seems we have to pray to release us from despair, and in that sense we pray not to an entity outside ourselves, but deep inside ourselves, to surrender to (and engage in) what is.
   God is seen as a crutch, or as a saviour. I suppose the mix of these is personal authority. Not only should we be a lert. We should practice lent! :)

   Posted by: Gregor · Oct 8, 11:35 AM · #

7. My fellow ashtangis!

   As your guru president I promise to appoint a multipartisan Bullshit Control Commission of Susan, CP, Carl Sweatandfire, LIA and Fatou. In these uncertain times of Kali Financial Mental Crisis Recession Depression Democracy Yuga, you need a steady hand at the trigger. I mean tiller! Whatever that is (some cliche from times we crossed the Atlantic in boats?)!

   Owl for President. Continuing the Lineage of Birdbrains in Office.

   Ok. I want to write about prayer and hope and the understandable wussiness of belief in the afterlife. And why, in my experience, Christian Fundamentalists pray.

   Or maybe the question is… yes… how they pray.

   Owl for Professor!

   :) Really got to work. xoxoxoxoxoxo

   Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 8, 11:46 AM · #

8. Oh, I just saw Carl up there.

   Carl, Marx says it’s misery rather than fear. Present material poverty and suffering. He would be horrified to see that people living such comfortable, beautiful, self-fulfilled lives as we do still cling to religion. He thought we’d be over it at this level of economic development. But, a lot of the big-picture social explanations I love don’t really work any more—at least not beyond abstract impressionism and thought experiments.

   Anyway. More to the point. GWB was in a woman’s threesome? What? Finally, a sign of goodness in him.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 8, 06:24 PM · #

9. Maybe it’s the transient nature of being that drives people to look for solace in beliefs?

   Posted by: karen · Oct 9, 04:36 AM · #

10. Ah… you know me, a pragmatist. I see most human activity as grappling with practical problems rather than philosophical problems. Beliefs are only interesting when they’re bound up in some action… so asking whether people pray is way more interesting to me than asking whether they “believe” in god.

    Without beliefs, we are infants. Belief encodes learning (social and individual), and keeps you from making the same mistake twice. A lot of the anthropology of morality shows how moral beliefs helps humans establish trust and institutions so societies can function. Belief cuts in to chaos. Sometimes really stupidly though. :)

    Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 9, 10:55 AM · #

11. mmm.
    Difference between Trust and Belief? Trust encodes learning, belief seems circumspect in that regard. One is experiential, one is spiritual. Oh crap thats theoretical. Words that mean more than one thing are swippery.

    Posted by: Gregor · Oct 9, 11:06 AM · #

12. Twue.

    But isn’t belief theoretical until its used?

    Isn’t “I trust the market” a statement of belief?

    Working owl…

    Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 9, 11:14 AM · #

13. The transient nature of being is a highly practical problem. LOL! Sometimes I wish it were philosophical…

    Posted by: karen · Oct 9, 06:21 PM · #

14. :)

    Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 10, 12:02 PM · #

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