I went to Vietnam a couple times. If you hang out downtown in the city, you might get a random Jehovah’s Witness or Seventh Day Adventist* try to chat you up. “Oh, we can’t do missionary work out in the open, so we just do one-on-one conversations like this”. Despite the lack of “Jesus saves, die sinner” signs in Hanoi, you can definitely find Catholic and Protestant churches in Vietnam.
The Western press likes to piss and moan about settler nation missionaries that go, without proper visas mind you, to spread their Western versions of Christianity to the DPRK, only to get deported. So am I allowed to enter a white people country without a visa to stir up trouble and expect no consequences???
I’m the furthest thing from an expert on Myanmar. I get everything I know from Burmese friends. But if you look into the minority people situation, many of them are being heavily proselytised by the worst of the Amerikan type. I don’t want the Pat Robertson’s the world anywhere near struggling people.
*I’m definitely not saying that JWs and SDAs are anywhere near the worst as Christian sects go.
That’s my view on it. Religion in general is a very important factor in the lives of a lot of people throughout the globe, and for the most part most religions have some aspects that could map to socialism
Trying to insist on hard and fast atheism with people like that will cause pushback, where liberation theology could be used to get them on board with socialism and move later to an atheistic form
I think it’s pure idealism to think that a social phenomenon that predates class society will somehow go puff as soon as class society is abolished. Religion predates class society, so obviously whatever human need or social function it fulfills isn’t attached to class society.
Religion predates class society
Not exactly. Worship yes, but religion as institution everywhere tended to be the cornerstone of class society, archeological findings in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Americas clearly points on priests being the first unproductive class that started to exploit others and eventually also got political and military power and became aristocracy. Getting rid of classes and private property will not liquidate religion but it will greatly weaken it. On the other hand there would be very much need to help this process before liquidation of classes, since religion could be very much again a catalyst for the class society.
I guess my question would be what’s the difference between organized worship and (organized) religion. In a communist society, people would be far less alienated from each other and much more likely to participate in collective activities. This would range from creating art to playing sports to cooking to to collective study, but this could easily be applied to something like worship. It’s extraordinarily unlikely that people would do so many productive and recreational things collectively but choose to worship individually. And with any collective activity, there’s always going to be de facto veterans and leaders, so in the context of collective worship, this would lead to a de facto clergy.
I don’t really want to speculate anymore since we obviously aren’t close to a communist society, and I’m not making a definitive claim that worship/religion is an inherent part of the human condition. I just think people are getting way ahead of themselves when they say, “let’s abolish religion lmao.” Let’s focus on getting to socialism and communism first before we even think about abolishing religion.
The changing base recreates the superstructures upon it. I don’t disagree that it may not go “poof” and disappear, however the liberation of production and centralization of power in the hands of the workers creates new paradigms that may or may not undermine the foundation that foments religious belief I the first place.
This is also what i think, but note that historically religion was catalyst for class society, so i ccanot imagine classless society with priesthood existing in any form.
