(Written 2013)

‘All of a sudden atheism is fashionable… Throughout the western world people are buying the books of Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Michel Onfray… More and more people are choosing to turn down the theological thermostat.’ – Phillip Adams[1]

‘The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man, hence the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.’ – Karl Marx[2]

Introduction

A few years ago, the International Socialism Journal published two essays on the topic of the Marxist analysis of religion, one in 2008 by John Molyneux[3] and the other in 2009 by Roland Boer.[4] Both were of high quality and invaluable contributions to the task of re-establishing the classical Marxist position on the topic, which has involved primarily a detailed differentiation between the genuine Marxist viewpoint and the name-sake Stalinist distortions.[5]

One would have assumed that since Molyneux and Boer had created such a lively, fascinating and informative dialogue with their essays, that there would’ve been further contributions made to the discussion by others, perhaps from different points of view and in different publications.[6] However, somewhat strangely, no further major pieces have been published since then. Does this mean that the international socialist movement has nothing more to debate and discuss on the matter? Or, more likely, is there a continuation of the old Stalinist-esque denial that this issue isn’t important enough to warrant such discussion?[7]

There is overwhelming evidence coming out of the Arab Spring that shows that having the right political analysis and positions on religious matters is crucial to when involved in a mass movement based on the struggles of the working class and poor masses. This isn’t the place to go through the entire record and details, but suffice it to say that this has been especially true in Turkey[8] and Egypt,[9] where questions of religiosity have threatened to destabilise the movements and have allowed the more conservative forces to be strengthened.

This essay wishes to make a contribution to the dialogue which Molyneux and Boer had had in the ISJ, so that the discussion on religion within our movement can continue; and then maybe later expand, deepen and mature. Part of this essay will involve re-emphasising some of the key points which were made in the previous works, which will involve some unavoidable overlap. Beyond that, it seeks to deepen the discussion into creating a more ruthless and intense Marxist polemic against the New Atheists (ie, Dawkins, Hitchens, et al).[10]

(Image taken from <http://www.socialsciencecollective.org/marxism-religion/> accessed 12 December 2013.)

New Atheism and the problems it causes

New Atheism has gained influence particularly among the swampy-liberal students and academics on university campuses, as well as other centres of middleclass professional intellectualism. It’s a “quasi-radical” theory because it uses leftwing rhetoric and slogans to make itself attractive and supportable, but has egregious rightwing political attitudes on most issues.[11]

Nearly ten years since its ideological inception, New Atheism has become a frustrating and troublesome thorn in the side of the Far Left (though, not yet reaching the level of being seriously painful, haemorrhaging or mortally dangerous). Across their websites and Youtube channels, these big-A Atheists will regularly produce and distribute their hateful, mud-slinging, uncreative and repetitive anti-religious propaganda material.

Such material always contains their aggressive and snobbish assertion that a supposed eternal antagonism exists between atheists and religious believers. Assertions like that seem almost deliberately designed to sabotage socialist activities. For we socialists are ‘irreconcilable’ small-a atheists,[12] while the vast majority of humanity is religious in one form or another. If an eternal antagonism really did exist, all of our attempts to recruit, agitate and gain influence amongst the masses would be a futile endeavour. In other words, because they and we share the tag “atheist” in one form or another, the risk is for socialism to be guilty by association of the New Atheists’ vile intellectual and personality traits, leading to a collapse in our activities.

Take for example New Atheism’s extreme elitism: The Atheists are an educated, privileged minority who know how the world actually is, and they turn their noses at the god-fearing, semi-literate and superstitious riff-raff; looking down on the masses from their ivory towers, showing nothing but condescension and pity, self-assured that their position of privilege and intellectual superiority is assured for time immemorial.

Typical of this mindset, and quite upfront about his feelings, Phillip Adams wrote,

‘I grow oh, so bored with the sugar bags of mail from people who’ve inherited their Christianity from their parents, whose depths of understanding comes from Bible stories and images of the crib in shop windows at Christmas-time. They’re like people who vote from habit, without beginning to understand the issues, totally reliant on the how-to-vote card issued at a polling both.’[13]

If these kinds of ideas were able to infiltrate and germinate within a socialist organisation, then it will invariably decay from within and deform into a sectarian swamp. It will disconnect itself from the working class masses and decline into a state of cultish irrelevancy. That’s how dangerous these big-A Atheists are, and the more popular they become, and the more widespread their ideas get to be, the greater the problems they will cause for us socialists. No one can any longer afford to ignore the menace of New Atheism.

As of yet, New Atheism hasn’t been able to achieve any kind of tremendous, mass support in any country in the Western world; it is still an insignificant minority when compared with the world’s leading political force, ie social democratic reformism. Nonetheless, the movement has been able to rise up to the level of competent relevancy on the international stage, and that is an undeniable fact. This means that atheism is capable of being used by the Western ruling class as an ideological weapon in order to justify persecuting religious minorities and divide-and-conquer any mass struggles that arise.

The strongest and most undeniable evidence that demonstrates New Atheism’s influence is in the sheerly incredible book sales data. Following on from the original best-seller works published in 2006 and ’07, there have been dozens of other works written, all of them selling as well as, or better than, the predecessors. Despite this glut of literature – which involves more or less just saying the same thing over and over again but in a slightly different way – there hasn’t appeared to be any stopping these books’ massive selling power. As Kimberley Winston reported earlier this year, ‘Publishers [have] universally found [the New Atheist books] hot sellers and magnets for major media coverage and awards.’[14]

But let’s be fair here. Even if these books are being written, published, bought and read, what really matters is the impact that the movement has on the real world’s affairs, ie political consequences. A couple of examples should suffice to show how reasonably politically significant the New Atheists are.

There was the Reason Rally held in the US in 2012, which was a national convergence to Washington, DC, during the spring. Its guest speakers included Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher, two internationally famous Atheists. Original reports said that between eight and ten thousand people attended the rally, though later reports suggested that the real number was actually closer to twenty. The Huffington Post reported on the event:

‘Atheists and nonbelievers gathered on the National Mall [on] Saturday (March 24) in a bid to show politicians, voters and even themselves that they have grown into a force to be recognized and reckoned with… Indeed, thousands came out for what organizers dubbed The Reason Rally and billed as the largest-ever gathering of nonbelievers in one place. They stood in a steady and sometimes heavy rain as speakers, singers, writers, comedians and activists charged them with channeling their common rejection of God into a force for political change… Also visibly different was the composition of the crowd, which was largely under the age of 30, at least half female and included many people of color.’[15]

Whichever number you take for attendance, getting that many people to Washington certainly isn’t something to be sneered at and disregarded, and this is testament to just how far these ideas have been becoming popular amongst some sections of the American population. But the numbers nevertheless are not very impressive when compared to many other nationally-converged rallies that have happened in recent years. In fact, the Reason Rally is dwarfed in comparison to many other, much more progressive, convergences.

The other example is the recent hullabaloo of anti-Islamic trolling manufactured by Richard Dawkins. Following on from Christopher Hitchen’s proud and rich tradition of saying something offensive and controversial just for the sake of getting the media to pay attention to you, Dawkins wrote onto social media the following illogical and bigoted jab: ‘All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.’[16] (Both Owen Jones and Nesrine Malik did make an attempt to argue against Dawkins’s claims. But the problem for them is that ambush-marketing isn’t about facts and rational arguments, but media exposure through artificial controversy, hence Dawkins’s trolling.) The fact that Dawkins is able to get into the media with certain regularity is what allows him to maintain a certain influence, which means that he’s unlikely to disappear into the dustbin of history, where he in all seriousness ought to be. The point is that the media didn’t just choose to ignore this case, but gave him the media exposure he so sought, and is reflective of the celebrity status he’s been able to build and maintain for himself.

All in all, the prima-facie evidence suggests that the movement cannot be ignored, but has to be acknowledged, studied, critiqued and criticised. Of course, to provide a comprehensive and holistic rebuttal of the entire ideology would take far longer than this essay. As such, the purpose here isn’t to fully overwhelm and discredit the New Atheists, but to provide some discussion about how we can start fighting back against them, disproving their arguments and debunking their claims, in the long-term hope of having them disappear entirely from the international political scene.

Historical materialism, consistently and properly applied

During his brief speech at Marx’s grave, Engels made the following remark about his former collaborator’s intellectual accomplishments and legacy:

‘Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.’[17]

As biological creatures, humans must be able to achieve subsistence before doing anything else, and this means they must conduct the necessary activities in order to get food, water, sleep, etc, in order to stay alive. This is the most basic assertion that materialism can make and yet is so often a revolutionary one. It readily understands that subsistence is the first task when being a biological creature living in a world ruled by matter – rather than one ruled by ideas, spirits, theology or Absolute Spirit.

Achieving subsistence isn’t a chaotic, irrational process. Rather, in order to get their food and shelter, humans must operate within definite, rational and empirically verifiable routines of labour, cooperation with each other and coordination of materials. This can then be generalised out to an understanding of the overall ways by which they live. Human material relations conducted for the purpose of subsistence will inevitably form the nucleus of social life, around which all their other activities will revolve.

Marx and Engels wrote,

‘The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.’[18]

A couple of pages later, they then add to this by saying,

‘The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must be in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other’s imagination, but as they really are; ie as they operate produce materially, hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.’[19]

It is the material circumstances of humans which will shape all other areas of their social life. This means that human relations, including society in general as well as its specific spheres, associations and institutions, are formed out of the economic system that’s in place. This then allows us to understand that politics, culture and jurisprudence, etc, are not abstracted, supra-societal phenomena, but ones that exist only through deep and entrenched ties within the material reality on the ground.

Human habits, such as worshipping a religion, or institutions, such as a church and clergy, don’t spontaneously appear without having definite points of origin, nor are they implanted upon us from some force from another dimensional realm. On the contrary, these arise, emerge and develop through the specific material circumstances of the economic mode of production. This process can then be scientifically observed, collected and analysed, so that a generalised explanation and theory for how this happens can be established, hence historical materialism.

Molyneux quoted from Marx,

‘The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’[20]

Materialism argues that not only are all real, physical products and human relations the consequence of material circumstance, but, furthermore, this rule is to be extended upon the domain of ideas. These too don’t appear out of nowhere, nor out of the ethos, nor are they attained by us from some source outside of our realm. Rather, they are drawn from, and grasped through, these economic relations and circumstances. As Dan Swain wrote, ‘The ideas in our heads are a direct consequence of the material condition in which we live.’[21] Everything that humans think is not arbitrary, but specifically relates to the material realities of life, and hence the characteristics and nature of the latter will invariably determine the characteristics and nature of the former.

Again, as Marx and Engels wrote,

‘The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour… Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men if their actual life-process… We set out from real, active men, and in the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises… [M]en, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking.’[22]

The point of going through all of this is to show that, in Molyneux’s words, ‘Religious ideas, like all other ideas, are social and historical products… It is not enough to view either religion as a whole or any particular religion as simply a delusion or folly that happens to have gripped the minds of millions for centuries.’[23] This is what’s meant by Marx’s claim that, ‘The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man.’[24] Marx was, of course, echoing the claims which Ludwig Feuerbach had already made a few years earlier, when he (Feuerbach) wrote that,

‘The beginning, middle and end of religion is MAN… The fundamental dogmas of Christianity are realised wishes of the heart – the essence of Christianity is the essence of human feeling.’[25]

If we are to properly study and understand the theological doctrines of religion, then we need to appreciate the fact that their origins lie not in supernatural realms beyond time and space, but are drawn immediately from human material circumstances on Earth. In the next section, we’ll extend this further, by looking at exactly how and why religious ideas come into the human mind, and what material genesis can be found for them.

And as Boer aptly added, ‘[T]he key is not dismissal (in light of the reality of material circumstances) but explanation of religion.’[26] A unilateral dismissal of religion, concluded from the epistemological falseness of their doctrines, is not on a grossly unscientific form of behaviour, but is highly likely to lead one down the road of misanthropy. Only by understanding the material source of religion can we begin to understand it properly, and only then can we figure out the strategies and tactics involved in working politically in relation to it.

The New Atheists’ alternative idealist methodology

The Marxist view of religion is far superior to the New Atheists’, because the former is consistently and wholeheartedly materialist, as has just been demonstrated; while the latter is not, as will now be. In fact, in contradistinction, much like the other theories that originate from the professionally intellectual middleclass, New Atheism will make regular and lazy detours from materialism into idealism, and correspondingly fails to properly grasp the subject matter at hand. This inevitably leads to their misanthropic prognoses that comply so comfortably with mainstream bourgeois prejudices. As Molyneux remarked, the most objectionable aspect of New Atheism is, ‘the reactionary political conclusions that flow from the weak methodology.’[27]

Despite having written piles upon piles of literature on the subject of religion and its place within society, the actual methodology that New Atheism uses for understanding it is actually very simple and can be summarised within a couple of sentences. And from this method, we will be drawn into this ideology’s disturbing underbelly, viz its idealism, crypto-religiosity and inherent rightwing political conclusions.

Step one, go through the religious text and find an incriminating quote, especially involving the condoning of an abhorrent act or the commanding of humans to commit such an act; it doesn’t matter how obscure or irrelevant the quote is theologically, as long as it’s written within the text. And considering how the religious texts are ancient, eclectic and completely inconsistent, finding a quote to serve whatever ends is very easy. Step two, find an example in real life of a religious believer committing an abhorrent act. Step three, draw a line between the first two steps and assert that the one caused the other: hence, that it was the content within the religious text that caused this person to commit that abhorrent act. That person’s religiosity only needs to be understood factually; under no circumstance is there the obligation to providing the proof of causality; by simply juxtaposing the two, the casual link is implicitly ascertained and then taken as a priori. And, just in case the conclusions aren’t drawn well enough already, there involves hyperbolic, aggressive and sometimes offensive declarations about the evilness of religious ideas and how religious believers are dangerous people.

Let’s take this quote from Sam Harris, who follows this procedure exactly:

‘The answer to this question is obvious – if only because it has been patiently articulated ad nauseam by bin Laden himself. The answer is that men like bin Laden actually believe what they say they believe. They believe in the literal truth of the Koran. Why did nineteen well-educated middle-class men trade their lives in this world for the privilege of killing thousands of our neighbors? Because they believed that they would go straight to paradise for doing so. Is it rare to find the behaviour of humans so fully and satisfactorily explained? Why have we been so reluctant to accept this explanation?’[28]

Before we analyse Harris’s scientific methodology, let’s first correct the facts of the case study which he’s chosen to use. From when he stopped being a CIA agent up to when he died, Osama bin Laden had always asserted that the reasons behind his Jihadist terrorist activities were political, not religious. It is therefore completely wrong for Harris and other Atheists to claim otherwise. Al Qaeda regularly made ‘explicit political demands such as the removal of US troops from Saudi Arabia.’[29] Furthermore, the number one reason for bin Laden’s actions were his opposition to US support for the state of Israel; here he is in his own words: ‘The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you [the Americans] are the leaders of its criminals… It brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine, as it was promised to them in the Torah.’[30] Not only did bin Laden not justify his behaviour using religious justifications, and instead used political ones, but in fact what he did do was challenge the legitimacy of the Zionists, whom indeed do justify their behaviour using religious justifications. We should be asking our Atheist opponents: shouldn’t you consider bin Laden an ally of yours rather than an enemy?

Let’s have another quote from Harris, just to make our understanding of his point-of-view absolutely clear:

‘The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?’[31]

Now let’s get to Harris’s methodology. In the first quote above, his aim is to show that Islamic theology is responsible for causing Jihadist terrorism. Step one, find an incriminating quote from the Koran; again, theology doesn’t matter, as the quote merely has to be written down in the book to count as being a central tenet of Islam. Step two, we already have our religious person who has committed an abhorrent act, ie bin Laden. Step three, drawing the link between the first two steps, and saying that the first causes the second. Again, not worrying about evidence or causality, but simply aggressively asserting this claim to be a priori. In summary, because of the methodology that the New Atheists employ in their scientific critique of religion, they have thus proven correct what they original set out to prove, namely that Islam is to blame for Jihadist terror. Religious ideas are responsible for the abhorrent acts that get committed in the world, hence we need atheism in order to end all these acts, and make the world a happier place.

Sam Harris is not alone in this kind of intellectual behaviour. Richard Dawkins, in his respective book, showed that he completely concurs with Harris by writing, ‘[T]hese people actually believe what they say they believe… Only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.’[32]

The shorthand Marxist response is to call Harris’s process an idealist one, because his starting point is always human ideas, ie the religious texts, and from there he deals with the consequences within material reality.[33] To be idealist is to abandon the principles of science, for no longer do the material facts on the ground matter for discovering and understanding, but instead the only issue at hand is what thoughts go on inside humans’ heads. The other thing that is abandoned is causality, because the ideas existing in any person’s head at any moment in time is empirically unverifiable, thus opening the door wide open for baseless claims and counterclaims. How can these New Atheists, especially Richard Dawkins, justify being such ardent and committed scientists and materialists in the natural sciences and yet be idealists in the social sciences?! Why isn’t the man who prides himself so much for his science feel ashamed at this putrid methodology that he is willingly participating in and encouraging?!

Adding more to this point, we can now see that New Atheism is committing gross and blatant plagiarism in stealing from religion the dominant methodological principle by which the latter operates, namely that, as we’ve already been discussing, of idealism: the notion that thoughts shape and dictate matter, that the psychical controls the physical, etc.

It’s already common knowledge that theological doctrines are idealist, because they argue that a person’s faith in something – ie the act of belief without evidence, but simply through sheer willpower and emotional passion – is the ultimate assertion of that thing’s truthfulness, regardless of the material facts that actually exist. Here is Feuerbach explaining the role that faith plays in religion:

‘[F]aith is nothing else than confidence in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws of Nature and reason – that is, of natural reason… Unlimitedness, supernatural-ness, exaltation of feeling – transcendence is therefore the essence of faith. Faith has reference only to things which, in contradiction with the limits or laws of Nature and reason, give objective reality to human feelings and desires. Faith unfetters the wishes of subjectivity from the bonds of natural reason; it confers what Nature and reason deny; hence is makes man happy, for it satisfies his most personal wishes.’[34]

New Atheism clearly doesn’t go that far, for it doesn’t totally abandon a recognition somewhat of the importance of physical reality in determining and understanding the human existence. Nevertheless, through its borrowing of religion’s analytical methodology, it reproduces and reinvigorates central features of idealism into its own body of thought, and becomes inevitably no better than its religious opponents.

One of these borrowed features is that personal conviction of an independent thinker is more important than societal understanding through inquiry that may influence that thinker. Religion argues that a person’s belief in the existence of God is what will determine their fate when it comes to the afterlife: it’s about that individual person, with their thoughts inside their head, confidently proclaiming something to be so through thinking and mental resolve alone. The more complicated and nuanced aspects about why and how humans believe in certain things – the impact that evidence has on someone’s ideas; ideas and opinions changing over time; a fluidity between two separate points of view; etc – are not brought up whatsoever in the discussion. This of course creates a false equivalency between adherents and material force, which is that the more people who follow and believe in a particular idea is directly what determines how much certainty that particular idea has of being truthful. The psychical affects the physical by the sheer weight of number of believers: Christianity is highly likely to be true because it has so many followers, while Ancient Egyptian must definitely false for it no longer has any one following it; and so on and so forth through that logical line of thought. New Atheism uses this concept of personal conviction when discussing their goal of converting people away from religious beliefs to atheist ones. Again, the entire question is whittled down to the crude and overly-simplistic notion of personal conviction – confident proclamation of an individual’s thinking mind, isolated from the external influences or internal conflicts of contemplation of evidence. This personal willpower is strong enough to supersede all other factors in understanding and explaining why someone would believe in something; the scientific method is abandoned and all we are left with is mimicry of religion’s behaviour.

For the purposes of this essay, one example will have to suffice. Early on in his book, Dawkins goes through various famous scientists, including Einstein and Hawking, who would use the word “God” in their writings when describing the natural world around them. These religious quotations were then taken advantage of by certain theologians as evidence that these scientists were religious adherents. (And, as the false equivalency asserts, the more followers to their church means more force to determine their religion as physical truth.) Dawkins then countered those claims by showing that, when it came to epistemological matters, these scientists were strictly atheistic; but they were using colourful language and religious imagery in order to explain their human emotions when faced with the aesthetically amazing and beautiful natural wonder. As Dawkins aptly wrote, ‘Einstein was using “God” in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious metaphor.’[35] Dawkins thereby concluded that, contrary to the view of theologians, who were so ‘eager to misunderstand and claim so illustrious a thinker [as Einstein] as their own,’[36] these famous scientists were/ are, in fact, all atheists.

What Dawkins failed to realise is that by debating the theologians on their (the theologians’) own terms, he had implicitly agreed with their logical underpinnings, which is that the ideas inside a person’s head are more important than the material facts in the real world. In other words, personal conviction in adherence to something is more important than the physical reality. By aggressively and passionately claiming that these scientists belonged to the side of atheism and not theism, Dawkins was willingly participating in the game of idealism, which involves the winning and losing of adherents, conversions and the false equivalency. Despite this gaping problem with his mode of operation, Dawkins is incapable of noticing that he did anything wrong, and thus is left looking utterly twofaced and incapable of self-awareness. When attacking religious believers, he correctly presents a materialist view of society, ie that a person’s faith in a religion ‘has not the smallest bearing on the truth value of any its supernatural claims.’[37] But then, if that’s true, why did Dawkins, just one page earlier, enter into a polemical tussle against theologians on whether or not certain famous scientists were religious?! If a person’s adherence has no bearing on material reality, why waste time on trying to claim that certain people followed one set of ideas or another?! This is quite clearly hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty, for Dawkins was willingly to snub his nose at illogical behaviour whenever his opponents did it; and then, he’s blissfully ignorant when he himself commits the same sin.

But to simply use the label idealist and leave it at that is, polemically speaking, not going far enough, and in fact lets the New Atheists somewhat off the hook. Going back to that Harris quote, there is a far more poignant point that needs to be made. Firstly, we must ask where religious ideas come from: if you reject materialism, then you reject the answer being that the ideas come from within material reality, and you are therefore forced to say that they come from without reality. Secondly, religious ideas must enter into the human mind, be it through reading the holy texts or listening to a sermon; in any case, the ideas come into the human brain, and it’s only then that they can start effecting human decisions and actions. Thirdly, when this infiltration takes place, the religious doctrines are capable of subverting the human mental defence systems, ie logic and reason. Fourthly, once those barriers are out of the way, there is then a clean pathway for the humans to commit those abhorrent acts in the name of this religion. Let’s ask ourselves, What do we get if we consider this entire process altogether? We get a form of Satanism: an evil spiritual entity that springs forth from the supernatural world, enters into human affairs, infiltrates our minds, and gets us to commit adherent acts which otherwise we wouldn’t. In other words, in the name of anti-religious criticism, the New Atheists have re-introduced the truthfulness of a religious fundamental principle. It’s as though a pacifist made the argument that the only way of eliminating all violence in the world was for us to find all the violent people in the world and to severely assault them!

And just in case there was the possibility that we were being too harsh on Harris or misinterpreting his words, we have that second quote of his to work from. There’s more than enough evidence here to conclude that Harris isn’t prepared to deal with the facts pertaining to religion and its role in the world, like a mature and rational journalist would. But instead, all he wants to do is to turn religion into a caricature and then mock it incessantly. Harris presents religion as Venom Symbiote, who invades your body and mind, corrupts your ideas and feelings, and then turns into an agent of evil. It’s time we started mocking Sam Harris incessantly for actually believing in such superstitious, childish nonsense.

Facts?! Who needs facts?

The New Atheists come into the religion debate with the preconceived agenda of proving that, in the words of American socialist Phil Gasper, ‘religion is the root cause of many of the world’s intractable conflicts,’[38] and because of this, they are more interested in finding ways of getting the evidence they need to prove their argument correct than finding the objective, demonstrable truth on the matter. The misrepresentation of Osama bin Laden’s politics and intentions, which we went through just before, is very typical of New Atheist behaviour.

For this little essay, there isn’t the space necessary to document each and every example of this occurring – there are simply too many instances of New Atheist trickery, distortion and dishonesty to fully record. So, instead, we must limit ourselves to one, namely the Indian Partition.

To begin with, Dawkins bring up one of the staple anti-religious arguments that the Atheists employ, namely that of religious wars, ie wars started and conducted for religious reasons. He wrote,

‘Religious wars really are fought in the name of religion, and they have been horribly frequent in history. I cannot think of any war that has been fought in the name of atheism… Even more plausible as a motive for war is an unshakeable faith that one’s own religion is the only true one, reinforced by a holy book that explicitly condemns all heretics and followers of rival religions to death, and explicitly promises that the soldiers of God will go straight to a martyrs’ heaven.’[39]

On this occasion, Dawkins decided not to merely state this claim categorically as a truth and leave it at that, but gave his readers the decency of providing some evidence for such a claim. As per such, he wrote this,

‘[W]ithout religion there would be no labels by which to decide whom to oppress and whom to avenge… From Kosovo to Palestine, from Iraq to Sudan, from Ulster to the Indian sub-continent, look carefully at any region of the world where you find intractable enmity and violence between rival groups. I cannot guarantee that you’ll find religions as the dominant labels for in-groups and out-groups. But it’s a good bet. In India at the time of partition, more than a million people were massacred in religious riots between Hindus and Muslims (and fifteen million displaced from their homes).’[40]

All we need to do is provide the most elementary of historical summaries of modern India and Dawkins’s assertion about the Partition fall into pieces. For centuries under British colonialism, the amount of Hindu-Muslim sectarian violence was very low and played almost no role within the wider national polity. There were vast parts of India where it was taken for granted that people of different religions could and would live, work, do business and play together. Here’s Tariq Ali’s description of Lahore in 1943: ‘It was a cosmopolitan city: Muslims constituted a majority, with Sikhs a close second and the Hindus not far behind. Mosques, temples and gurdwaras dominated the skyline in the old city.’[41] At no stage during British colonialism were there any sectarian pogroms, for it simply wasn’t believed that religion was something to fight and kill for. All of that changed from when the Partition was announced, when the state of Pakistan was declared to be formed, which triggered the political division of India. It was then that the ‘orgy of barbarism’ occurred, creating a time when ‘[f]ear overcame rationality.’[42] In other words, the cause (remember that a proper scientist always uses evidence to explain causes of phenomena) of the India Partition nightmare wasn’t religion per se, but the politicisation of religiosity: India is for the Hindus and Pakistan is for the Muslims. Religion in general, let alone Hinduism and Islam specifically, shouldn’t be blamed for what happened, as the real responsibility lies in the founders of Pakistan and the instigators of the Partition, namely Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League. As for ideological responsibility, it was clearly a religious-based nationalism that caused the insanity within the masses which incited the nation-wide sectarian pogrom. It’s therefore more proper that we blame the ideology of nationalism than religion for what happened. And let’s not forget that nationalism is the same ideology that brought us the great bloodbath of World War One, where French soldiers and British soldiers were killing German soldiers, where the killing was made on behalf of the motherland, where the only difference between friend and foe was their nation of citizenship, where millions were sent to their graves under the banner of these artificial entities called “nations,” etc, etc. One can’t help but wonder, Why aren’t we hearing any brutal condemnations of nationalism by our New Atheist opponents?

Rather than face up to their intellectual poverty, the New Atheists prefer to accuse religious believers of suffering from such. Here is Richard Dawkins saying something that, in all honesty, should be direct at himself:

‘Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book… Only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people… [T]hey are motivated…by what they perceive to be righteousness, faithfully pursuing what their religion tells them. They are not psychotic; they are religious idealists who, by their own lights, are rational. They perceive their acts to be good…because they have been brought up…to have total and unquestioning faith.’[43]

New Atheism starts from the position that religion is the source of the world’s problems, and then tries to shift the evidence around in order to prove that claim correct. Not only is this methodology dishonest and highly unscientific, but it is, indeed, a form of fundamentalism, because no matter what actual evidence is provided, the end result claimed is never going to change. Even when faced with the criticism right up at his face, Dawkins cannot realise how hypocritical he is for accusing others of the very sins which he himself is committed.

This hypocrisy happens more than once. In the new paperback preface to his book, Richard Dawkins took the opportunity to rebut the assertion that he was ‘just as much of a fundamentalist as those [religious followers that he] criticize[s].’ In response, he wrote, ‘Fundamentalists know what they believe and they know that nothing will change their minds… It is impossible to overstress the difference between such a passionate commitment to biblical fundamentals and the true scientist’s equally passionate commitment to evidence.’[44]

The New Atheists’ misanthropy

Earlier on, we looked at how the New Atheists, in order to show how religion is the cause of the abhorrent acts in the world, had to present religious ideas as this Satanic entity. Religious doctrine was a supernatural spirit that comes from outside of our human realm, enters our minds, perverts our senses and then forces us into committing these acts of evil. In other words, in trying to prove their argument that religion is the great problem in the world, the Atheists have to re-introduce a religious concept, and thus, in the process of disputing the believers in the supernatural, become themselves believers in such.

We also looked at how the New Atheists are extremely elitist, which is a reflection of the class position they have within society, ie the professional intellectual middleclass. They see themselves as an enlightened minority that stands above and beyond the unwashed, superstitious, semi-literate riffraff. This elitism starts to creep into misanthropy, because the feelings of disregard and condescension that they feel towards the vast majority of humans become very strong.

If we then combined these two observations together and fuse them into one, then we’d get a religious concept that is deeply misanthropic. In other words, we’d get the Original Sin. And wouldn’t you know it, our New Atheist opponents are guilty of capitulating to this very concept.

Let’s explain how. To begin, as has already been explained, New Atheism is not consistently materialist but instead regularly retreats into idealism. Without having a stable and comprehensive scientific methodology to call upon, they are unable to provide a thoroughly materialistic understanding of human history and society, and so are incapable of finding a material, concrete, empirically verifiable origin for human religiosity. Because of this, it’s impossible for them to locate religious ideas within an historical finiteness, so that it can be seen to exist only within the specific, relative and measurable parameters.

The only alternative is to find a source of religion which transcends material conditions, which is not relative but encompasses an infiniteness of human history, ie which is supra-historical, has no beginning and will, in all likelihood, have to end. This means that once you’ve discovered your source for human religiosity, there is absolutely no avenue available to redemption, ie for a way in which humans can overcome their religiosity and liberate their minds from such superstitions. If that happens, then humanity is condemned to be permanently in a state of suffering, not being punished for a crime that it committed, but because of a permanent, irreconcilable flaw within its very essence of being. It doesn’t matter what specific flaw or problem we’re dealing with specifically, this has become the new Original Sin, ie a problem with humanity that condemns it to an eternity of suffering and misery, forever unable to purify itself and return to the Garden of Eden.

The New Atheists will re-introduce the concept of the Original Sin by making hypotheses concerning the source of human religiosity. These will, of course, contain plenty of their trademark elitism and condescension. But more than that, these hypotheses will suffer from the Atheists’ regular detour away from materialism and into idealism, which means that often their explanations for the source of human religiosity will have nothing to do with the material facts on the ground, but will instead involve the ideas inside the mind.

Firstly, we have religiosity thanks to humanity’s “fear of death”, ie the believing in God because of paranoia over our mortality. We long for an afterlife; for it’s only through heaven can we overcome the limitations of biological bodies and live on as spirits. Phillip Adams wrote,

‘Although broadly agreeing with Dawkins, Hitchens et al in their enraged critiques of religion as a malign force, a great destroyer of human hope and psychological health, a progenitor of wars and genocides, I’m more forgiving of the religious impulse. I’ve always been aware of the poignancy in religious yearning, recognising the overwhelming primary of the fear of death. It is this fear that built the pyramids and the cathedrals, that drives our sciences and our arts.’[45]

And secondly, we have humanity’s “ego centricity,” ie humans are so self-centred that we have no humility. In reality, humans and Earth are completely irrelevant in relation to the vast space of the universe and its history. And yet, because we have such big egos, we are convinced that we are in the centre of all existence, and that God, the guardian of the entire universe, is intimately concerned with our affairs.

Again it’s Adams who wrote,

‘All religions come from man’s absurd egocentricity, from his planetary xenophobia, from his arrogant sense of being at the centre of things. The fact is that man is, in cosmic terms, a brief and inconsequential life form, living on a minor planet in a common-or-garden solar system in an off-Broadway part of the galaxy.’[46]

Joining in with this line, Dawkins wrote,

‘[W]hat presumptuous egocentricity to believe that earth-shaking events, on the scale at which a god (or a tectonic plate) must operate, must always have a human connection. Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity on his mind, care a fig for petty human malefactions? We humans give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our poky little “sins” to the level of cosmic significance.’[47]

Religiosity and alienation

The classic quote from Marx on religion comes from his “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in which he wrote,

‘Religious suffering is at the same time the expression of real suffering and the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation.’[48]

Our world today is surrounded by human suffering, with one unable to turn one’s head without being confronted with yet another display of poverty, pain, tears, coldness, sickness and horror. If we’re lucky, we get to experience the humiliation of wage labour, which involves being grounded down by the monotonous repetition of the labour process; and if we’re unlucky, we are considered superfluous and refuse, dumped into the dankest of corners of society, struggling to stay fed and stay warm, unable to experience even the most mild of joys in the world. And so, in order to get by in this world, in order to tolerate the deep and painful heartache of being alive, humans will seek consolation in religion. As Marx’s quote makes clear, because we live in such a miserable, disgusting, “heartless” and “spiritless,” world, we need to find some sort of route in which our dignity and humanity can be revived, and this requires religious mysticism, for when reality is nothing but pain and gloom, the only option left available is that of the supernatural and immaterial.[49] As Molyneux wrote, ‘[R]eligion is a response to human alienation – man who has “lost himself”. But this is not an abstract or ahistorical condition; rather it is a product of certain specific social conditions.’[50] (Those social conditions, ie class divisions within society, can always be empirically verified, making this a consistently materialist analysis and explanation.)

The term alienation is given to situations in which humans don’t have control over their lives, but are in fact dominated over by some external force, such as the unreliable, unstable and infinitely cruel capitalist mode of production. Because they don’t have control over how they are to live their lives and what they are to do with themselves, they are incapable of living full, rich and empowering lives, but instead must live as something which they don’t want to be. This impotence, dissatisfaction and frustration is then translated into mental consequences: alienation in the material world thus affects the ideas that humans have, ie how and what we think, both about ourselves and the world around us. Just as before, how it was said that all human ideas are drawn from material circumstances, this is furthered by showing that those ideas which are direct symptoms of alienation are also drawn in that way, hence humans will often experience fantasies, phantoms or other mystified beliefs are a consequence of the alienation they suffer from.

It’s here that we can understand religious ideas as being products of human alienation. As Paul Siegel remarked, ‘Both magic and religion have their origin in humanity’s lack of control over nature. Religion, however, also reflects humanity’s lack of control over the forces of society that resulted from class domination.’[51]

One of the most important theological concepts which provide such “heart in a heartless world” is the love that God has for all of humanity. In our daily lives, living under the yoke of oppression and poverty, there is a tendency towards the misery and humiliation reaching such an extreme level that the experience starts to de-humanise us. Because we are not living a happy life, and hence because we are not able to fulfil our human desires for happiness, love, companionship and creativity, we begin to feel unhuman-like to such a degree that our humanity, for intents and purposes, disappears. We begin for forget entirely about the beautiful things in life that make us human, such as happiness and love, and before long all that encompasses our existences is the droll, disgraceful misery of reality under capitalism. Once de-humanised, we feel ourselves as worthless and pathetic, as our suffering is internalised into a feeling of self-hatred. The misery that we suffer by our physical bodies begins to seep into our souls, and so we begin to feel our spiritual essences corrupted by the suffering, until we lose our humanities altogether and are reduced to vile, corrupted monstrosities. Spiritually speaking, we begin to actually believe that there is something wrong with us, and so we actually deserve to suffer like this, as though such a fate was fitting for such revolting and depraved things as ourselves.

A remedy for this situation is to be told that someone out there, ie God, still loves us. He still considers you as a human being and He feels sympathy towards your suffering. At a time when your life is filled with nothing but darkness, suddenly God’s love is what provides some light, to give you at least a small hint of what true happiness may be like. Because the love of God is not subject to material circumstances, this means that it can defy them, and this means that God’s love can be a permanently reliable and stable form of relief, hence no matter how low you sink, you will always have God there to give you a helping hand. And because the love of God is such an inexact, fluid and amenable concept, no matter what your specific suffering is like, God’s love will always be there to help you get by.

Lenin agreed with much of this line of thinking, and wrote,

‘Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.’[52]

And Feuerbach wrote the following, describing the Incarnation, ie Christ as the Son of God:

‘In prayer I involve God in human distress, I make him a participator in my sorrows and wants. God is not deaf to my complaints; he has compassion on me; hence he renounces his divine majesty, his exaltation above all that is finite and human; he becomes a man with man; for it he listens to me, and pities me, he is affected by my suffering. God loves man – ie, God suffers from man. Love does not exist without sympathy, sympathy does not exist without suffering in common.’[53]

As was already said before, religious ideas are the practical expression of human alienation. The fact that we humans don’t control our lives, but are forced into unpleasant situations, is what allows religiosity to grow inside our minds and to spring forth as these supernatural phantoms. Religious ideas are designed in order to fulfil the general desires of humans which cannot be fulfilled under a life as miserable and pathetic as that of class-divided society. As such, theological doctrines are made flexible and adaptable enough so that they can always adjust themselves to the specific woes and sufferings that they’re dealing with at hand, which guarantees that there will always be fertile applicability between their sermons that are given by the clergy and the masses of people whom they’re appealing to. But this process goes in the opposite direction as well, for the specific forms and shapes that religious phantoms appear within the individual human mind happens to be a direct reflection of the material hardships which are suffered in real life. In other words, humans project their heartaches, misery and sufferings onto the religion at hand, so that the specifics of the supernatural phenomena are always mystified forms of real life events and circumstances.

As Molyneux wrote,

‘[R]eligion is not just a random collection of superstitions or false beliefs; it is the “general theory” of this alienated world, the way in which alienated people try to make sense of their alienated lives and alien society. Therefore it performs the rich array of diverse functions listed by Marx: “encyclopaedic compendium”, “logic in popular form”, etc. And therefore to struggle against religion is to struggle against that world “whose spiritual aroma is religion” – this world of alienation in which people need religion.’[54]

And Feuerbach wrote,

‘Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendour of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity. Hence I do nothing more to religion – and to speculative philosophy and theology also – than to open its eyes, or rather to turn its eyes, or rather to turn its gaze from the internal towards the external, ie, I change the object as it is in the imagination into the object as it is in reality.’[55]

The only proper way for us to deal with religion is to properly appreciate both its source and the roots with which is connects itself to humans. To simply do what the New Atheists do, which is to stand on the sidelines and denounce religion ideas as immaterial and mystical, is completely inappropriate, for it gives us no thorough and comprehensible understanding on the factors and elements involved in producing the religious ideas. Only by us appreciating the fact that humans need religion for certain, specific material reasons can we begin to image a world in which human no longer have such a need, and that religious can disappear entirely.

Class struggle, socialist revolution, Shangri La and the withering away of religion

Patrick Weiniger aptly wrote, ‘As long as humans are alienated and oppressed, many will look to religion.’[56] Human religiosity and class-divided society are interconnected with each other, for this is because the former is a symptom of the latter; it is therefore impossible to create a society in which the religious ideas no longer exist while class divisions and all its horrible consequences still do. In other words, for as long as we still live under the yoke of class oppression, for as long as capitalism still is the dominant mode of production in the world, and for as long as the majority of humanity is impotent, impoverished and alienated – religiosity will remain with us; and it will continue to play a significant role within human affairs, as it does so today. Only by creating a society where humanity can control their lives and their destinies, where all oppression and subjugation have disappeared, and where the possibility of full humanistic realisation could be achieved, could and will religion vanish. To eliminate religion, we must establish a society in which the material conditions do not allow for its emergence. Because of their interconnectedness, once we’re able to eliminate class divisions and vanquish all of capitalism’s inhumane by-products, religion too will be eliminated. It will either wither away or fade into the ether, or, in Engels’s words, will die a ‘natural death.’[57] Once the world has stopped being “heartless” and “spiritless,” then there will no longer be need for finding a supernatural heart and spirit, hence no need to find religion for consolation. The “sigh of the oppressed creature” will disappear from the moment when the creature is no longer oppressed, and will therefore no longer have a need to sigh.

Marx once remarked that, ‘You cannot abolish philosophy without making it a reality,’[58] and the same rule applies to religion: to truly abolish it from all of human affairs, we must make it “a reality,” for only then will it have nothing meaningful to offer its patrons and will thenceforth become irrelevant for practical human purposes. That is to say, we must bring forth into practical reality the great aspirations of religion, thereby creating the material preconditions for its inevitable disappearance. Throughout its history, religion has always prophesised about a “heaven in the afterlife,” which will be the paradise for its meek and suffering followers at some time in the future after they die. And so, the best way for us to get rid of religion is to create a “heaven on Earth,” ie Shangri La, thereby giving the meek and suffering a paradise in the present day, without the need of having to wait until after death. This will be the point in which religion will have be rendered totally superfluous and unnecessary, for its greatest aim to aspire towards, ie heaven in the afterlife, will have been surpassed and overtaken by a greater achievement.[59]

As Lenin wrote,

‘The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by extra-ordinary events, such as wars, earthquakes, etc. “Fear made the gods.” Fear of the blind force of capital—blind because it cannot be foreseen by the masses of the people—a force which at every step in the life of the proletarian and small proprietor threatens to inflict, and does inflict “sudden”, “unexpected”, “accidental” ruin, destruction, pauperism, prostitution, death from starvation—such is the root of modern religion which the materialist must bear in mind first and foremost, if he does not want to remain an infant-school materialist. No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way.’[60]

The task of socialists today should therefore not be to polemically attack religion just on purely intellectual, factual terms, but to subvert it by assisting it achieve it’s ultimate goal, thus accomplishing its realisation. Lenin added, ‘Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.’[61] The creation of a heaven on Earth can be considered as a rallying call for humanity’s struggle for liberation and for the eventual creation of a classless, socialist society. As Siegel wrote, ‘The Marxist [says] that this [the end of human religiosity] will only be accomplished when the present society, which brings the evils of unemployment, inflation, and war, before which the masses of people are impotent, has been overthrown and a new society, in which social relationships are clear and unveiled and human beings are not alienated from the products of their labor, has been constructed.’[62]

Engels tried to provide a sketch of how this process would work. He started off by reaffirming that a socialist workers’ revolution would ‘bring [the] social forces under the domination of society.’ And from there, he wrote the following:

‘Religion can continue to exist in this convenient, handy and universally adaptable form as the immediate, that is, the sentimental, form of men’s relation to the alien, natural and social powers which dominate them, so long as men remain under the domination of these powers. However, we have repeatedly seen that in present-day bourgeois society men are dominated by the economic conditions they themselves have created and by the means of production they themselves have produced, as though by an alien power. The actual basis of the religion reflex action therefore continues to exist, and with it the religious reflection itself… When this act has been accomplished, when society, by seizing all the means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage they are now kept in by these means of production which they themselves have produced but which confront them as an overpowering alien force; when man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes – it is only then that the last alien force which is still reflected in religion will vanish and that the religious reflection itself will also vanish with it, for the simple reason that there will be nothing left to reflect.’[63]

But that’s not to say that all aspects of all religions will disappear for good from a certain moment after the socialist revolution, or even when a totally classless communist society has been constructed. What matters is that once human suffering and misery are gone, then human alienation is gone, and once that’s gone then all aspects of religion whose genesis is alienation will be gone too. However, some other parts of religion might still remain in tact. Some aspects of religion which focus on affirming human dignity and on celebrating their freedoms and accomplishments – for example, on the appreciation of humanity’s great qualities like companionship, love and happiness – could be kept in place under socialism. Furthermore, certain religious practices could be converted from their hypocritical nonsense of today into genuinely life-affirming traditions.[64]

New Atheism and their obsession with anti-religious propaganda

If religious ideas are the products of specific material circumstances, then the absence of a change in those circumstances will fail to create any change in those ideas – this fact ought to be elementary. No matter how many counter-ideas are produced to disprove and replace the religious ones, the latter will stay alive and the former will be rendered completely irrelevant. In other words, anti-religious criticism will do nothing to weaken or reduce the amount of religious ideas that human believe. Because of this, such propaganda is completely useless and shouldn’t be conducted whatsoever.

Lenin correctly understood that anti-religious propaganda attacks would do nothing to change the religiosity of humans, and would be more likely to do harm than good. He wrote,

‘But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an “intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods. It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism.’[65]

Trotsky wrote something very similar:

‘The bulk of the people are not affected by anti-religious propaganda; but that is not because their spiritual relation to religion is so profound. On the contrary, there is no spiritual relation at all; there is only a formless, inert, mechanical relation, which has not passed through the consciousness; a relation like that of a street sightseer, who on occasion does not object to joining in a procession or a pompous ceremony, or listening to singing, or waving his arms. Meaningless ritual, which lives on the consciousness like an inert burden, cannot be destroyed by criticism alone; it can be supplanted by new forms of life, new amusements, new and more cultured theatres.’[66]

The notion of human religiosity being, in Lenin’s words, an “intellectual” question should be seen as absurd right from the moment one puts any amount of critical thought into it. Theology and religion themselves are mystical, supernatural and irrational, so it’s therefore obvious that their source cannot be from within the realm of human intellectual thought, for otherwise logic and reason would’ve stamped it out millennia ago. Instead, there must be something that makes humans turn so irrational that they are willing to believe in these mystical things, and that requires a proper investigation to discover such – ie the material, economic roots of religion. This is where the New Atheists are at their most foolhardy, for they are wholesale convinced that religion is, in fact, a strictly intellectual question and that all that needs to be done is a propaganda polemic against these false ideas and then presto – Religion is vanquished! Often, the New Atheists will design their arguments into the assertion that religion is a fetter on humanity, so that once the arguments have been made that disprove it, religion will disappear and true humanity can be released from its prison. The argument, by ignoring the debate over religion’s material origin and simply asserting it to be of an intellectual source only, thereby puts New Atheism as the vanguard of militant, progressive humanism.

For example, here’s Julian Baggini in his Atheism: A Very Short Introduction, ‘What most atheists do believe is that although there is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical, out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions, moral values – in short the fall gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life.’[67] Secondly, Dawkins wrote, ‘I believe in people, and people, when given the right encouragement to think for themselves about all the information now available, very often turn out not to believe in God and to lead fulfilled and satisfied – indeed, liberated – lives.’[68] In both those above quotes, it’s clear that criticism of religion is a process whereby the chains of superstition are broken, and that then humanity will be liberated and be able to live happy, fulfilling lives. As is acutely clear, the material circumstances pertaining to human life are completely ignored throughout.

This notion – of being able to debunk and disprove religion through strictly intellectual, anti-religious criticism – contains within it the elements of New Atheism which we’ve already looked at previously in this essay. Firstly, it acutely presents the Atheists’ extreme elitism, for they are considered to be an enlightened minority while the vast, unwashed masses are trapped inside their superstitious nonsense, so that it’s only through a direct, intellectual intervention of the former that the latter can be freed from its childish god-fearing habits; this begins to creep into megalomania as some New Atheist begin to convince themselves that they are prophets who have come to deliver upon the Earth their great message of wisdom, which, in fact, is nothing more that hyperbolised charlatanism. Secondly, it re-introduces religious concepts in order to defeat the old ones. New Atheist ideas take on the same role as God’s mighty power does in theology: both God and New Atheism come from outside of human society in order to make interventions within it; both are described as being the embodiment of purity, untainted and holy; both are capable of spreading enlightenment and salvation to the masses only via dogmatic exhortations.

Also the notion of intellectually defeating religion via propaganda is not original, but it’s an idea which the New Atheists have willingly picked up and adopted for their own purposes. One could, for example, go back to the 1840s and Marx’s breaking from the Young Hegelians, the latter of whom believed that merely through the criticising of religion could a social revolution take place in Germany.[69]

Sadly, there have been more than a few members of the Far Left – well-intentioned and radical, no doubt they were – who too have taken up this notion and ran with it, writing long and furious anti-religious works, in the expectation of being able to smash religiosity and to thereby save humanity from its mystification and mental enslavement. But, just like Lenin noted, this behaviour is actually more likely to do harm than good.

Here’s the revolutionary anarchist Emma Goldman in her article, “The Philosophy of Atheism”:

‘It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation… Man must break his fetters which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new world upon earth. Only after the triumph of the Atheistic philosophy in the minds and hearts of man will freedom and beauty be realized… Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.’[70]

Goldman was a radical and a revolutionary who committed most of her adult life in the pursuit of human liberation; her contributions are well worth celebrating and remembering. This piece of reactionary writing is therefore a source of great disappointment, but one of sectarian gloating.

Unscientific methodology reaching the point of complete shambles

In one of the chapters of his book, Phillip Adams launches an aggressive attack on religious believers who don’t take the time to properly educate themselves on the religion of their choice, including its doctrines, its history, its stories and its central tenets. Those who simply adopt the religion of their parents, simply repeat the slogans and arguments which they get given by their local clergy, and never study the matter any further or deeper, receive Adams’s enraged wrath:

‘If you haven’t tested your beliefs, you’re not entitled to them. I find I know considerably more about the Old and New Testaments than most of my Christian critics.’[71]

As that quote makes clear, Adams is confused about the behaviour of religious people. Choosing a religion is meant to be a rational decision based on being an informed consumer and yet the evidence he keeps receiving from his fan letters is that religious followers are irrational and are not well informed about their religious doctrines. There is clearly something wrong with this picture, because what Adams was expecting to happen hasn’t been happening.

That quote is quintessential of how New Atheism skews the issue to suit their arguments. They have convinced themselves that religion is an “intellectual” matter, which means that choice on religion must be a rational choice based on information and reasoning. But the evidence clearly doesn’t support this theory, because people are choosing to follow religion in an illogical, emotional manner.

For the New Atheists, they don’t start to doubt their framework of analysis; they don’t ask themselves about whether or not they were right to believe that religion is, indeed, an intellectual question; they don’t doubt the scientific methodology selected. Instead, they put the blame on their test subjects, ie the ordinary religious believers – it’s they who are to blame for the analysis not working, because they aren’t behaving in the way they’re supposed to. So in that quote above, Adams gets angry at ordinary religious followers for not being rational consumers, for not being informed about their religious doctrines, and, in general, for not behaving in the way he’s telling them they ought to.

It’s as if a scientist was studying moles in the expectation of watching them fly, but then observing that they cannot in fact fly. Rather than correcting her original “moles can fly” theory, she decides to but the blame on the mole, assuming that there’s something deeply wrong with moles which prevent them from properly flying!

In the natural science world, anyone who behaved in that way would be laughed out of the room. It’s now time that we did the same thing to Phillip Adams for his equivalent social scientific research.

Conclusion

Over a hundred years ago, Lenin made this wise remark to his opponents:

‘We judge a person not by what he says or thinks of himself but by his actions. And we must judge philosophers not by the labels they give themselves…but by the manner in which they actually settle fundamental theoretical questions, by their associates, by what they are teaching and by what they have taught their disciples and followers.’[72]

New Atheism may declare itself as a progressive, humanist body of theory, and it may claim that it is the modern embodiment of the spirit of the Enlightenment, but we will not simply accept this form of self-labelling. Instead, we will judge them by the content of their ideas and the consequences of their actions. As has been demonstrated, the New Atheists are more inclined towards misanthropy than humanity, more interested in reviving the notion of Original Sin than liberating humanity from damnation. New Atheism is an ideology of despair, for the hope of a better future has been lost, the salvation of humanity rejected as nothing but a fairytale, and the decline our world into barbarism seen as an inevitable outcome for an unredeemable race of people.

This is the complete opposite of the Marxist view of religion. We, on the contrary, still believe that humanity can undergo a redemption, that all misery and sin can be overcome, and that Shangri La, ie heaven on Earth, can be built.

References

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[1] Phillip Adams (2007), Adams vs God: The Rematch (Carlton; Melbourne University Press), pIX. [2] Karl Marx [1844], “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (2008), On Religion (New York; Dover Publications), p50. Emphases in original. [3] John Molyneux (2008), “More than Opium: Marxism and Religion,” International Socialism Journal (119; June). [4] Roland Boer (2009), “The Full Story: on Marxism and Religion,” International Socialism Journal (123; June). [5] ‘According to the myths, Marx saw religion as nothing but a false consciousness perpetrated by the ruling class to pacify the masses and aid their exploitation. Marxists are supposedly implacably hostile to religion, to political movements led by religious people and even to people’s right to practise their religion.’ (Patrick Weiniger [2008], “Not all about Opium: the Marxist Attitude to Religion,” Socialist Alternative [14 October].) [6] The most fascinating and nuanced discussion this author has found pertaining to socialist politics and religion comes from two articles published in Workers’ Liberty. These are, however, very old now, so the usefulness of their ideas and arguments today is questionable. (See Maria Exall [2005], “Secularism and Religion in a Global Age,” Workers’ Liberty [21 July]; and Bruce Robinson [2005], “Atheism, Secularism and Marxism,” Workers’ Liberty [25 September].) [7] The only example of a recently-published piece of writing from the Far Left on the topic is Jeff Sparrow’s critical historical summary of atheist politics in Australia. (See Jeff Sparrow [2012], “The Weaponization of Atheism?” Counter Punch [9 April].) [8] See Michael Kandelaars (2013), “The Role of Secularism in Turkish Politics,” Red Flag (12 June). [9] See Mostafa Ali (2013), “The Main Enemy is the State,” interview by Lee Sustar, Socialist Worker (US) (3 September). [10] The author’s inspiration for wanting to read more on the topic of the Marxist analysis of religion, and, furthermore, the writing of this essay, comes from a Socialist Alternative branch talk on the subject. (See Daniel Lopez [2012], “Marxism and Religion.” Presentation talk for a Socialist Alternative meeting in Melbourne [1 October 2012].) [11] New Atheism is very similar to, and in fact ought to be considered as the cousin of, theories such as post-modernism, queer theory, neo-autonomism, neo-environmentalism, animal liberationism and neo-feminism. These theories share so much in common, including ideological framework for analysis, historical and institutional origins, and the ability to draw rightwing conclusions from any situation, that their relations to one another cannot be denied. [12] In the famous words of Leon Trotsky, ‘I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist.’ (Leon Trotsky [1940], Testament of Leon Trotsky [27 February]. Emphasis added.) [13] Adams, Adams, pp14-5. [14] Kimberley Winston (2013), “Atheists, the Next Generation: Unbelief Moves Further into the Mainstream,” Publishers Weekly (12 April). [15] Kimberley Winston (2012), “Atheists Rally On National Mall; The ‘Reason Rally’ Largest Gathering Of Nonbelievers,” Huffington Post (24 March). [16] Quoted in Owen Jones (2013), “Not in Our Name: Dawkins Dresses Up Bigotry as Non-Belief – He Cannot be Left to Represent Atheists,” Independent (UK) (9 August); and Nesrine Malik (2013) “Richard Dawkins’ Tweets on Islam are as Rational as the Rants of an Extremist Muslims Cleric,” The Guardian (9 August). [17] Frederick Engels [1883], “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1970), Selected Works: in Three Volumes (Volume 3; Moscow; Progress Publishers), p162. [18] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (2010), The German Ideology: Part One (New York; International Publishers), p42. [19] Marx and Engels, German, pp46-7. [20] Quoted in Molyneux, “More than Opium.” [21] Dan Swain (2012), Alienation: An Introduction to Marx’s Theory (London; Bookmarks), p21. [22] Marx and Engels, German, p47. [23] Molyneux, “More than Opium.” Emphasis added. [24] Marx, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” in On Religion, p41. Emphasis in original. [25] Ludwig Feuerbach (2008), The Essence of Christianity (New York; Dover Publications), pp152,117. [26] Boer, “Full Story.” [27] Molyneux, “More than Opium.” [28] Quoted in Dawkins, God, p343. Emphasis in original. [29] Molyneux, “More than Opium.” [30] Quoted in Fawaz Gerges (2006), Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (Harcourt), p162. [31] Quoted in Dawkins, God, p316. Emphasis in original. [32] Dawkins, God, pp345,343. [33] Roland Boer correctly declared that, ‘[R]eactionary idealism [was] at the heart of their [the New Atheists’] works.’ (Boer, “Full Story.” See also Molyneux, “More than Opium;” and Lopez, “Marxism and Religion.”) [34] Feuerbach, Christianity, p105. [35] Dawkins, God, p40. [36] Dawkins, God, p34. [37] Dawkins, God, p35. [38] Phil Gasper (2009), “Marxism and Religion,” International Socialist Review (63; January). [39] Dawkins, God, p316. [40] Dawkins, God, pp294-5. Emphasis added. [41] Tariq Ali (2002), The Clash of Fundamentalisms (London; Verso), p5. [42] Ali, Clash, pp7,9. [43] Dawkins, God, pp319,343,344. [44] Dawkins, God, pp18,19. [45] Adams, Adams, pX. Emphasis added. [46] Adams, Adams, p13. [47] Dawkins, God, p270. [48] Marx, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” in On Religion, p42. [49] For those who deny the existence of class divisions in society, such as the New Atheists, this paragraph must appear as irrational nonsense. Without acknowledging that we live in a heartless, spiritless world, the requirement of such remedies to alleviate the situation would seem completely unnecessary. And, as we’ve gone through a couple of times previously, the reason that New Atheism doesn’t acknowledge class divisions is because they aren’t consistent materialists, they do not properly look at the facts on the ground in the real world, but instead prefer to operate within the realm of ideas as middleclass professional intellectuals. [50] Molyneux, “More than Opium.” [51] Paul Siegel (2005), The Meek and the Militant: Religion and Power Across the World (Chicago; Haymarket Books), p41.) [52] Vladimir Lenin [1905], “Socialism and Religion,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky (2001), Marxism, Socialism and Religion (Chippendale; Resistance Books), pp83-4. [53] Feuerbach, Christianity, p46. [54] Molyneux, “More than Opium.” Emphasis in original. [55] Feuerbach, Christianity, pXII. [56] Weiniger, “Not all about Opium.” [57] Frederick Engels (1976), Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (Peking; Foreign Language Press), p412. [58] Marx, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” in On Religion, p48. [59] Daniel Lopez is one who argues that, ‘Marxism completes the aspiration of Christianity.’ (Lopez, “Marxism and Religion.”) [60] Vladimir Lenin [1909], “Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky (2001), Marxism, Socialism and Religion (Chippendale; Resistance Books), p91. Emphases in original. [61] Lenin, “Socialism and Religion,” in Marxism, p86. [62] Siegel, Meek, p58. [63] Engels, Anti-Dühring, pp412,411,412. [64] Acknowledgements should go to Naomi Farmer, a comrade of the author’s, who first made this point in conversation. [65] Lenin, “Socialism and Religion,” in Marxism, p86. [66] Leon Trotsky [1923], “Vodka, the Church and the Cinema,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Leon Trotsky (2001), Marxism, Socialism and Religion (Chippendale; Resistance Books), p126. [67] Quoted in Dawkins, God, p34. [68] Dawkins, God, p22. Emphases in original [69] Marx and Engels famously wrote this analogy to mock the Young Hegelians: ‘Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistics brought him new and manifold evidence.’ (Marx and Engels, German, p37.) [70] Emma Goldman (1916), “The Philosophy of Atheism.” [71] Adams, Adams, p14. [72] Vladimir Lenin (1920), Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy (Moscow; Foreign Language Publishing House), p222.