- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
My first post in this series pointed out that reductionism is a straw man when attacking atheism. This whole article is based on it. We have to account for motion, and dialectics accounts for that - in human society at least.
The struggle between religion (and other idealisms) and atheism reflects material conditions in this society - a struggle of material classes really. The rulers of society love to promote either idealism or crass 'reductionist' materialism - both of which do not account for change. Change is what they abhor most of all, because they will lose control.
The Pirate pointed this out.
Atheism is an intelletual weapon of the working classes - even if they do not see it that way. I do not see an exclusive intellectual content to this debate, but at bottom it is actually apologists for the status quo versus those who want to grasp reality in all its HUMAN dimensions. Religion, of whatever kind, devalues actual life and humanity, in favor of 'something else', a 'higher' stuff. As such, it spits on the real and limited life we all have. And betrays reality, which is the essential thing to grasp, and in grasping it, allows us to change it.
