At last, Richard Dawkins gets interesting …

(ht by)

 

Australian Marxist Review: Watch this site as well

The reason? I have an article called ‘The New Old Atheists’ published in the journal of the Communist Party of Australia, namely the Australian Marxist Review. I received the print copy today, but the internet version (in volume 50) should be up soon.

 

Now for some more substance: Marx, atheism and faith

While Marx admitted that he had a particular dislike of Christianity – ‘so specific is my aversion to Christianity,’ he wrote to Lasalle – and even though he is guilty of occasional moments of crass materialism, he also argued that atheism is not a prerequisite for socialism.

One reason was theoretical, for as Marx points out already in his response to Bruno Bauer’s program to abolish religion, atheism is ‘the last stage of theism, the negative recognition of God’. In other words, atheism is really a theological position; one needs a God whose existence can be denied. He goes one step further in an astute couple of sentences in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. He begins with this very same argument – atheism is theological since it is a negation of God in order to focus on the existence of human beings (Feuerbach did as much). But then Marx argues that we need to move beyond the opposition of theism and atheism: ‘Atheism … has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in need of such a mediation … Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion’. Abolition here is of course Aufhebung: socialism is the sublation, preservation and lifting to another level of religion. One does not need atheism as a basis for socialism; rather, it is sublated by socialism. Or as Marx put it more prosaically and somewhat quaintly in an interview with the Chicago Tribune:

‘You and your followers, Dr. Marx, have been credited with all sorts of incendiary speeches against religion. Of course you would like to see the whole system destroyed, root and branch’.
‘We know’, he replied after a moment’s hesitation, ‘that violent measures against religion are nonsense; but this is an opinion: as Socialism grows, religion will disappear’.

Another reason for distinguishing between atheism and socialism was tactical. On one side Bakunin and the anarchists wanted the International to declare itself atheist, abolish cults and replace faith with science. Marx comments dryly, ‘As if one could declare by royal decree abolition of faith!’ On the other side there were plenty of accusations that the International was precisely as Bakunin had wanted. I do not mean the scaremongers of state repression, but former comrades such as Jules Favre and Mazzini, who stated that the International wanted to make atheism compulsory. Engels repeatedly points out that atheism is not part of the socialist program. In a similar vein Marx, in his interview with The World, replies to the question,

‘And as to religion?’
On that point I cannot speak in the name of the society. I myself am an atheist. It is startling, no doubt, to hear such an avowal in England, but there is some comfort in the thought that it need not be made in a whisper in either Germany or France.

Does this mean that the communist movement took the position of freedom of conscience for its members? Here Marx is ambivalent. In his Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction he argues that religion is the inviolable ‘subjective frame of mind’, at least as far as religion itself in concerned. It is part of a longer argument against religious censorship by the state, suggesting that the state censor usurps God’s sole role as judge of the heart. The reasons why such an argument was made in the context of censorship are not difficult to determine – the preservation of at least some domain that is free from censorship (the ‘kingdom within’), as well as the characteristic inversion whereby the censor turns out to be the one guilty of defamatory and offensive judgement.

It is of course a position that is all too common today: religion is a private matter that is no-one else’s business. My initial reaction is that he merely buys into the privatisation of religious commitment that is by now almost universal. Religion ceases to have any communal or social presence: all that counts is one’s relationship with one’s God. So we find one politician after another responding to the latest social comment from church, synagogue or mosque: stop seeking the media spotlight and mind your own business, which is the cultivation of souls and religious experience. Is this not a deeply liberal position in which the individual is sacrosanct? We can at least account for Marx’s argument by pointing out that it comes from an early text before he had taken up communism.

Later on, be blasts the very idea of freedom of conscience as a tired old liberal catchword. For example in Critique of the Gotha Programme he writes that what freedom of conscience should mean is that ‘everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their noses in’. He goes on to state that it actually means the toleration of only certain types of religion, which is nothing less than ‘unfreedom of conscience’. And it certainly doesn’t include the freedom to be liberated from religion itself.

There is actually more here than at first seems to be the case. Marx does appear to dismiss the whole idea of freedom of conscience as an irredeemable liberal position, but then he takes another step. This position is actually not freedom of conscience at all, for if it was then one should be able to hold whatever religion one wants or indeed dispense with the witchery of religion completely. It is as if he is saying, you want freedom of conscience, then here it is … in full!

In a situation in which the thought police of Germany persecuted any one who opposed state power and the church, Marx must be consistent and argue that the socialists should not exercise the same type of censorship. Even more, a fully collective program does not seek to impose the will of either the one or the many over the other. What we end up with is a dialectical point: rather than throwing out the baby of freedom of conscience with the bathwater of liberal ideology, a fully collective program will enable the full realisation of freedom of conscience. And that applies as much to religious belief as to anything else.

 

On a more serious note: the critique of idolatry

Since I am in Canberra and writing a lot, my thoughts are full of these sorts of things (is Roland becoming a dull boy?)

The critique of idolatry (as in Isaiah 44: 9-20) gives the impression, on the surface at least, that idol-worshippers are simply deluded, for they worship an oddly shaped block of wood, a chiselled piece of stone or perhaps a polished metal icon. However, if we shift perspective from the polemicist to the so-called worshipper of the idol, then the idol itself becomes a mere symbol or pointer to the deity, a tangible, earthly marker of the god’s connection to this world. The idol worshipper does not think of this statue or that icon as the god itself; no, it is a finger pointing to the deity. Consider the first and second commandments together, for they reveal this precondition of the critique of idolatry. The second commandment forbids the making of any graven images, while the first commands one not to have any other god before Yahweh. These two commandments are not discrete items, for they flow into one another: one should have neither other gods nor idols, for they are intimately connected. In other words, there is a signifying link between god and idol, deity and representation, and the one who shows reverence for the idol does so in order to honour his or her god the whom the idol directs one’s attention.

The polemicist steps and breaks the signifying link between object and god. He or she is not so much a conqueror of the neighbouring tribe, scoffing at the god of the vanquished who was little use in the battlefield or success in seduction, but is more likely to be either a monotheist or atheist (the two share more ground than they care to admit). Both may say: that piece of wood points to nothing, for there is no god to whom it refers. Ergo, all you are worshipping is that block of wood, which – I would like to remind you – comes from a tree, half of which you used to make that shelf and half that silly object you worship. Can’t you see how stupid it is to worship a clump of wood or stone; it does nothing, says nothing, thinks nothing. It just sits there and you worship it. Both monotheist and atheist come after the fact, responding to an existing polytheism that must – they feel – be negated.

But they do of course differ on one point, for the monotheist argues that all gods apart from one’s own are unreal delusions, while the atheist points out that the monotheist’s claim falls under the same logic. So the atheist observes that the monotheist must be consistent: if you are going to break the signifying link of all others, then you must carry that logic through to your own religion. Those images in your church, the crucifix on the altar, the Bible you read, or indeed that Christ is God’s presence on earth, are all forms of idolatry. You set up a signifying line between them and your God, whether Bible or Christ as revelation, icon or crucifix as symbols of your God, or even the word ‘God’ or ‘Yahweh’ itself. But your God does not exist, cannot be experienced or verified, heard or encountered in any real sense, so you too are an idolater, worshipping a text, human being or nicely polished object. You are, the atheist goes on, no better than the teenager who lovingly polishes his first car and spends all his money on it, or those who look up to flawed leaders to bring them victory and the promised land.

The fallback position for the monotheist, especially in Judaism, Christianity or Islam, is iconoclasm – or rather (since iconoclasm assumes an existing image to be smashed) a ban on images in the first place. For this reason the mythical second commandment (for it comes from a political myth) is so powerful: one is not permitted to make any image whatsoever, not of anything on the earth, in the seas, or in the heavens. Without such a representation, there is no hook-up for the signifying line, no possibility to set up a connection between earthly object and super-human being. Instead, one must direct one attention to God alone. And without a signifying link it becomes impossible to break such a link. One can hardly pull out the chain-cutters to sever a chain that does not exist. So, responds the monotheist, your argument has no bite; I am not an idolater.

Of course, the monotheist would have to admit that there have been more than a few slip-ups in the ban of images. Witness the synagogue with its symbols – menorah or star of David – or the church with its crucifixes, stained-glass windows and iconography. And one cannot escape the reliance on holy scriptures which are felt to varying degrees to be the revelation of God or – at a minimal level – the written experiences of those human beings who have experienced God. The histories of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are overflowing with moments when people became enamoured with an earthly representation of God, but the monotheist could respond in a way that is consistent with the critique of idolatry: these are examples of disobeying the command against graven images, which is an exceedingly difficult command to follow consistently.

 

What is Theology? A Conversation with Miss Marx

The conversation rolls on – between me and Miss Marx that is – on what theology actually might be. Miss Marx weighed in with ‘Roland and Theology’ (here), which I’ll partially reproduce:

Okay, so we know what Roland thinks theology isn’t. Is there anything positive to be said about what it is, on his use of the term? Yes.

[O]nce we move past the assumption that religious belief [in a god?] is the core or perhaps the overarching unity of theology and realize that it is one part and by no means a necessary one, then theology shows all its other colors. It deals with nature and the environment (creation), with the human condition (anthropology), why the world is the way it is (harmatology), the problem of suffering, the nature of the human subject
(via Christology), the nature of history, hopes for the future, how human beings might live together (ecclesiology), and the nature of mythology (the central stories with which theology deals).

In the end, then, it looks like when Roland uses the term “theology” he is talking about a combination of certain types of ontology, anthropology, existentialism, and constructive social philosophy.

I think any disagreement between him and I would be semantic beyond this point. I wouldn’t use the word “theology” in this way, but if he wants to, that’s fine with me. When I’m criticizing the presence of “theology” in religious studies, I’m talking about something other than these things.

So, a brief response from me to Miss Marx: I think there’s a way forward on this issue and it might be as follows. Instead of defining each discipline by a core idea, I prefer to think of disciplines as intersections of various lines. So theology is isn’t defined by explaining belief in muscled fairies, but by intersections of the sorts of things I mentioned – history, environment, human condition, hope, social questions, mythology etc. Or as you put it, ontology, anthropology, existentialism, and social philosophy. You could do similar exercises with each of these disciplines or approaches and come up with similar results. I reckon you could do the same with literature, architecture or even physics.