This is a pretty bizarre report which shows the pernicious nature of religion in society. Evidently the potential vice-president believes not only that witches exist but they need to be hunted down and run out of communities. The reporters politics are those of the Democratic faction of the capitalist party.

Gods do exist, in a certain sense (I use the word “gods” as a gender-neutral term that includes goddesses). Humans create them in their own image, though without being aware of doing so. The fact that gods are male or female in itself strongly suggests that they are creatures of the human imagination. But they infest the mind as powerful, capricious and mysterious beings who demand endless worship and praise, reverence and obedience, devotion and propitiatory sacrifice. The gods in the head of the believer thwart the development of confidence, self-respect, rational enquiry and independent judgment.

In this way the idea of domination and submission is imprinted in the psyche as a model for relationships between beings. That model is then readily applied to social relationships – to the relationship between man and woman, master and slave, and so on. The Moroccan scholar Fatna A. Sabbah has shown how this works in the case of Islam in her brilliant (pseudonymous) study Woman in the Muslim Unconscious (Pergamon Press, 1984), but her analysis applies equally well to the psychology of “God-fearing” Jews and Christians.

The imaginary world of the divine, in turn, draws its inspiration from the real world of human power structures. God is “king of the universe”, the archangels and angels are his ministers and officials, and the devil has the job of running the Gulag.

Isn’t it nice to have a few days off from work, warming the cockles of our overgenerous souls after spending the past year producing large sums of wealth for the parasite class, singing Santa songs by the hearth, drinking mulled wine and pretty much anything else that will get us tipsy, opening our presents, and living those few golden days of celebration that we would wish for the other days of the year as well? But these holidays will end all too soon. We have barely begun to relax in our holiday mode when the alarm clock awakens us once again and we are back in the traffic. Back to returning home in the evening to a mail box as stuffed with bills as were the stockings with gifts just a few brief days ago.

There are so many things worth celebrating, for sure. Our children’s birthdays. And a thousand victories for slaves, minorities, workers and women. But the birth of a baby who likely never existed and who spearheaded a movement whose work ethic seemed to fit in rather nicely with the decline of slavery and the rise of capitalism?

Capitalism requires a censoring of egoism since its basis is the benign production of profits for the ruling class by us, the idiot wage slave class. Never mind that the egoism of our employers is not in question, we who produce their wealth must slavishly do so with a sense of pride and joy. And then the rich have the cheek to expect us to give generously from our hard-earned but meager wages and salaries to a host of charities that promise to somewhat alleviate the suffering of fellow workers who would not be suffering in the first place if most of the wealth we produced went to us, the producers, instead of to them, the owners.

Atheism—thank god—is gaining in popularity and in converts. Books by atheists have been appearing on non-fiction bestseller lists, such as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. Even Christopher Hitchens, who has been cheering on the US imperialist crusade with his Christian comrades in the 101st Keyboard Brigade, has cashed in on the trend with his new book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

These prominent atheists have pointed out the ill effects of religion on society and exposed the errors and outright stupidity of religious thought. Such efforts are all-too necessary today, unfortunately, especially in countries like the United States, where politicians cannot even order a cup of coffee without declaring: “God bless America.” It is encouraging that atheists are now confidently voicing their ideas and that their criticism of religion has struck a chord with so many people.

If anything, though, the “new atheists” take religion too seriously, extending their criticism to the point that religion seems to be the fundamental cause of many—if not most—of the society’s ills. Dawkins, for instance, depicts an epic struggle between religion (evil) and science (good), while effectively detaching both from the society in which they exist and function. He and others overlook capitalism and the role that religion and science play within this system of production for profit.

When, Bill Clinton visited Nigeria, he snubbed the predominantly Muslim north by dropping from his original itinerary a visit there where Sharia Law was in the process of being revived. But the Muslim leaders of the North, already apprehensive about Clinton’s visit, had organized a massive protest demonstration, which took place on the very day the US President stepped on to Nigerian soil on 25 August 2000. Clinton visited Nigeria for purely economic reasons. If, therefore, he and the advocates of Sharia harboured a mutual distrust, then one may not be wrong to suggest that behind the Sharia façade lingers an economic motive. To understand this possibility better a brief history of Northern Nigeria is necessary.

Fulani theocracy

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope John Paul on Saturday condemned same sex marriage as an attack on the fabric of society and called on Catholics to combat what he said was aggressive attempt to legally undermine the family.“Attacks on marriage and the family, from an ideological and legal aspect, are becoming stronger and more radical every day,” the 84-year old pontiff said in the unusually strong statement.

“Who destroys this fundamental fabric causes a profound injury to society and provokes often irreparable damage.”

What hypocrisy! What utter crap! Here is the spokesmodel for an organization which has either perpetrated or condoned:

Genocide of indigenous peoples of Americas and Australia
Subjugation and whole-scale theft of entire continents
“Perpetual Slavery” for African peoples
Sectarian wars against peoples who didn’t share their vision
Insisted on and enforced the social inferiority of women
Anti-Semitism
Anti-democratic movements such as fascism

As well as many more despicable acts

Scientific socialism rejects the delusive concepts that make up religion. This does not mean that socialism is committed to any fanatically narrow conceptions of rationality such as characterized some nineteenth-century materialisms. It means that socialism is opposed to superstition in any and all forms. Socialists see human beings as fully capable of shaping human life, subject only to the limitations posed by the material world.

The reason for our opposition has three principal points of focus, historical, philosophical, and social. Historically, religion has always been allied with the authority of the state, and the state has always been the instrument of power of a ruling class. The role of priestly classes in antiquity, such as in Egypt under the pharaohs, is not particularly germane to a discussion of the alternative to capitalism, but if we consider the institutions of religion at the time of the first development of capitalism the case is plain enough. From the Middle Ages even up to the nineteenth century the Church commanded real political power, and it played a role in the control of territories. The Church could dictate what human behavior was allowable and what human ideas were allowable, and worked hand in glove with political rulers in support of such statelike political forms as then existed. In Europe the Church proclaimed an ostensible ethic that posited certain obligations of the powerful toward the powerless, of the rich toward the poor, but there was never any means by which this ethic could be enforced. As capitalism began to develop, even this ethic went by the board, and religious doctrine during and after the Reformation was more and more shaped to match the ethics and the needs of the new economic forces. Organized religion, particularly certain forms of Protestantism (for example, Calvinism and, later, Methodism), quickly developed such doctrines as the divine obligation of men to become rich a notion that  both grew out of and grew up in support of the developing capitalism of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in other words, lent “religious” support to the material strivings of this new class of gogetters. A good example of this is an incident of some commercial warfare in India during the eighteenth century:

Although Comrade Rab had been invited to write this by Kerr Company, it was not published until now. They asked Rab to make so many changes that, in the end, he refused.

About John Keracher

 John Keracher was born in Scotland in 1880. He spent rhe early years of his adulthood in England, whete he was exposed to the ideas of the Social Democratic Federation. Thus, his entry into the Detroit Local of the Socialist Parry of America in 1910, soon afrer his arrival in rhe Unired States in 1909, was a natural outgrowrh of his background.

As a human being, Keracher was full of lively wit and good nature; his calm manner went unruffled by obstreperous opponents, critics; and hecklers. I can readily attest from personal experience that to those seeking personal advice or enlightenment on socialism, he was like an oasis in the desert, a quenching cactus. He was uncompromising in his principles but refrained from ad hominem attacks, and confined himself to the issues as he saw them. He relied on the logic of his arguments to counter critics.

Herbert Spencer’s concept of Survival of the fittest…Pseudo Scientists, in Economics, Anthropology, History, etc., have have probably erected more obstacles to the clear understanding of reality than any other group, for their misconceptions are tinted with the gild of scholarship.

Herbert Spencer, with his Social Statics, was perhaps the most outstanding of those scholars whose opinions and conclusions were accepted on a large scale by peoples on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain he developed quite a following, but nowhere so avid and devoted desciples as among the burgeoning tycoons in the U.S.A. Following the American Civil War, Spencers psuedo-scientific* concepts were almost universally accepted.

From The Western Socialist, January, 1948

A strange animal - man - until we get to know him. Brilliant, in a sense, he has developed systems of production, exchange, communication, and transportation that make the other animals look rather stupid. But, on the opposite side of the scale, he suffers deficiencies that enhance the prestige of every competing organism.