/lit/ - Literature

>>21623485

The idea expressed in this quotation is correct, regardless of whatever other political or historical contexts associated with Feuerbach.

>>21623485
What exactly is the point of discussing the theological perspective on a doctrine that's explicitly anti-religious?

>>21623510
>implying anything humans do is areligious

>>21623485
Feuerbach was the most reddit motherfucker in history. God I hate him.

>>21623485
Feuerbach was a crypto-Christian and Marxists hate him except for what Marx took.

>>21623510
Marxism is materialistic and anti-spiritual but it IS a religion in terms of how it has been practiced for at least a century. Marxists even predict revolutions the same way evangelicals predict the rapture

>>21623517
Filtered. He's a very subtle thinker and not at all the atheist material he's taken for. Just read one of his works instead of learning about him through descriptions of Young Hegelians.

>>21623485
Marxism and Christianity have more in common than they do apart, structurally they are almost identical.

>>21623544
Different gods.

>>21623532
revolutions actually happened

>>21623553
Structurally, they are the same.
>Both subvert local heirarchy
>Both promise utopia
>Both spread via the downtrodden and the poors
>Both began by jews
>Both claim to be the only means to a better place
>Both have their holy book
>Both are globalist
>Both require full obedience
>Both require submitting to their authority
>Both have their competing branches which kill and hate each other
>Both claim X is not really the real thing
>Both are build on the suffering of others
>Both have an inner group that is not subject to the same rules as the massee
I am aware of cosmetic differences.

>>21623579
They have diametrically opposed teleology, just compare a Gothic cathedral to any form of Marxist architecture. And if you think architecture is cosmetic then you don't know anything.

>>21623588
That's more functionally useful than a Gothic Catheter. If they would have been building those things in the 1300s, imagine where we would be today.

>>21623579
The "cosmetic" difference being that one has as their god the God of the Bible, the other Satan/Lucifer/Prometheus/man. This was what OP suggested and he is right

>>21623485
marxism is popery you dumb fuck

>>21623595
Not gonna bother proselytising a human roach.
>imagine where we would be today
It took you a single century to starve and murder over 10% of the world's population so I'd rather not.

>>21623621
Anon that wasn't me, I didn't do any such thing and wouldn't. But if they liquidated 10 percent of the population l, I fail to see how they would have starved. Seems like doing so would unburden their feeding requirements. Simple as, no?

>>21623485
No, it’s reformist liberalism.

>>21623588
>cosmetic difference

>>21623598
Both have a two stage heirarchy that one can not ever ascend to. The outer party which is the lay person and the inner core who rule it and are soley responsible for intepretating the scriptures and literature. At the top is a figure who can do no wrong.

>>21623485
>theology

>>21623562
So did battles and famines and all kinds of shit implicated in predictions by religions? But typically it is not the case that religious prediction or prophecy is "perfectly" fulfilled, rather events are just interpreted as fulfillment of prophecies. But I think that anon's point is that the Marxist tradition imitates a pattern found in religion, which is the orientation towards a coming event. But the orientation towards the coming event, which is a social event, makes it so that it is hard to suggest the event was actually foretold because the desire for the event to happen causes people to create it or see it where they desire it to be. You can still see many Marxists play this out, anytime there is a large enough protest they claim it as being foretold by Marxist historiography (not in the sense that it was written in a book exactly, but in the sense that the spirit of Marx's categories animates this or that large event). But again, it is hard to distinguish between this identification of the event as urther vindication of Marxism, or as simply the continuous writing of an alternate history that is vying for power in competition with mainstream liberal history.

>>21623621
>starve and murder over 10% of the world's population so I'd rather not.
Are we talking about Christianity or Marxism here?

>>21623598
the bugman showed itself

>>21623706
>battles and famines and all kinds of shit implicated in predictions by religions
in any recent centuries or just the mists of time?

>>21623510
But to answer this, I don't agree with the OP that Marxism is "luciferian" because that feels like an attempt to call it "satanic" as an insult, but the point of drawing out the parallels to theology is exactly to recognize how certain secular theologies cordone of their belief systems from the past by calling what was in the past properly "religious" and what they're doing "scientific" (or something similarly "real"). The "anti-religion" of Marxism is a manner of identifying a historic break, rather than making a real distinction. What happened in the past was crazy religious nonsense, what we're doing now in modernity is real stuff. There is a development occurring, and one of the markers is that we now know that what people were talking about in the past was silly bullshit, but the proletariat and the movement of history through class struggle into communism is real.

What is at stake in that kind of debate is exactly whether Marxism as a political project is animated by something that really exists, or whether it is writing a history and manufacturing the world it vehemently believes in as a matter of faith. Supposing it was the latter, that doesn't discount Marxism as a project, but you will see that Marxists resist the association and insist on the reality of Marx's categories. The reason is because that is important to the project, the belief in the categories as ontologically real. It can't just be that we believe in communism as good and that is the faith, although I don't doubt that many communists are just direct devotees of communism, but people who identify as "Marxists" are often devoted to the reality of Marx's categories. The reason being that Marx's categories are supposed to define the roadmap to communism, because we don't actually know what communism is. The more free form communists just believe in the promised land, the kingdom of heaven, but Marxists scoff at them because they've scientifically analyzed the history of human society and have realized the true nature of communism and the struggle to fulfill it. If you dismiss all of that then they're just left with the riffraff of well-meaning but ultimately "ignorant" communists out there (the ones Marx himself was arguing with and calling utopians and idealists). They want to know what communism is, which I'd definitely analogize to trying to understand God or divinity.

>>21623485
Marxism has a way better understanding of religion than religion has of itself that's for sure. Imagine for example not understanding that the Church was primarly an economic and political institution during the entire Middle Ages instead of solely being a theological institution.

When real power politics came into conflict with the Church, it's not like the Church said "Well leave it up to God", no, it became insanely pissed off and tried to have people either killed outright or excommunicated for heresy, like during the investiture controversies between the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor.

>>21623775
Well sure, there are the evangelicals and their obsession with Israel. Or ISIS and its attempts to kick start the end times. But what is important to these kinds of people is that they don't have a death wish, they think the end times is the sign that paradise is coming for the faithful. But I was generally referring to older practices. I'd still compare secular events like the contemporaneous analysis and hisoticizing of color revolutions and whatnot to old oracles and prophecy. There is an attempt to suggest that some event is caused by the lack of deference to the will of the people or something like that, so the event was foretold by democratic political theories, and alternatively events that do not align with the theology of the instigator are often reinterpreted as failures of properly observing the theological beliefs. Like the ousting of Gaddafi or something similar leading to an illiberal hell hole in the aftermath. Liberal thinkers will observe this and suggest that the original liberal impetus to destroy the state was "correct" or "justified", but that the collapse into barbarism was not BECAUSE of the injustice of the destruction of the state, rather the lack of true observance of the principles that justified the destruction of the state. There wasn't a proper observance of ritual, so God was displeased. Clearly the liberal principles can't be wrong. That is heretical talk, you'll make everyone uncomfortable. But perhaps they were misapplied? Maybe we thought we were doing God's will, but we found out we had failed by our own hubris and imperfection. But now we have learned, and perhaps this will help us in spreading the word of God better next time.

>>21623848
Those people might not have a death "wish" but they certainly have a death drive. You don't leave a decent middle class life to go into a war zone unless you have a desire to experience death.

>>21623579
Add Nationalism as well:
>Subverts the local heirarchy (of multicultural state)
>Promise utopia (of a national state)
>Is spread via the downtrodden and the poors
>Began by jews (Talmud)
>Claims to be the only mean to a better place
>Has it's holy book
>Requires full obedience
>Require submitting to it's authority
>Has it's competing branches which kill and hate each other (nationalisms of different nationa-states)
>Claims X (the global market) is not really the real thing
>Is globalist
>Built on the suffering of others
>Has an inner group that is not subject to the same rules as the masses (the Party)

>>21623848
Incidentally I also think this implicates the obsession with defining proper democratic procedure for liberals. The vast majority of these people don't really question the connection between ideological concepts like "the people" and "sovereignty" and such, and the districts or representatives or whatever that have become their standard of fulfillment in reality. Observance of democracy is made real by the process of quantifying its observance, by making it a thing capable of being "rigorously" observed. Literally a play acting of science to make as feel comfortable that what we are doing is much more rational than the people who just had dynasties and caste systems. Look at all the charts and numbers! Look at the professional campaign managers! We can really see with our tools and our eyes the performance of the sovereignty of the people. And we can measure its absence too, which means we can identify heretical political rituals. Those who don't observe proper ritual are illegitimate, morally repugnant. They literally deserve to die, they're an intolerable affront to politics. But again, the particular expression is made up. It is asserted that it accurately represents the self-evidently correct belief in sovereignty of the people, and there are occasional attempt to further quantify this correctness by manufacturing indexes of human happiness and the particular rituals of "democracy" or whatever. But it isn't clear how what we are doing by propagating this ideology is any different from what people did in the past. The point isn't actually spreading the correct political beliefs, but rather to reassure ourselves that our political beliefs are correct so that the state remains justified. Though I don't mean to imply I'm an anarchist or something, I'm not. It just appears to be the case that this is a deeply human behavior, to continuously theologically justify our social activity to reproduce it. We need to do that because we need to understand why it is OK for some people to die and suffer without the group intervening to prevent it. We have largely exited our struggle with nature itself, which is to say we don't worry about failed hunts or harvests, but as social animals we seem to retain the need to rationalize why sometimes the group needs to make sacrifices without causing a collapse in faith in the group. So we create narratives to identify people as morally polluted, or to suggest that innocent people died for a better tomorrow (paradise, the promised land, whatever). The truth is likely that there is no better tomorrow. The group has no cosmic justification, we are simultaneously its prisoners and its beneficiaries. We need it and we fear it.

>>21623801
>Primarly an economic and political institution

Not primarily imo.

>>21623943
Yes primarily. The Church owned more property in the Middle Ages than the State, one of the biggest reasons for secularization to begin with was European kings beginning to expropriate the land the church owned in order to promote economic growth and to fund wars.

>>21623485
Marx was more like Jesus than Jesus.

>>21623866
I'd gree with that, people desire death. I've never read Freud so I dunno about the actual intellectual history of the term "death drive", but the apparent sense of the term seems like a real phenomenon. People seem to put themselves in danger happily, to seek mortal danger. While a part of this is encouraged by propaganda and proselytizing of righteous paths to death, they only seem like they're effective techniques of social engineering because there is some part of many people that is searching for something to die for. The innocent expression seems like "adventure", which may or may not be dangerous, but often includes risk because it entails confronting an unknown. The risks of war often draw people looking for "adventure". But if I were to tie it into what I said here about how humans seem to process their belonging to social groups:
>>21623938
My impulse is to think of people seeking righteous or glorious death (which seems important to many in those cases, there is a desire for the manner of death to be seen) as an adaptive behavior that is on the flip side of the innocent victim. The innocent victim needs to be explained, or potentially avenged when they can't be adequately explained. The explanation of the death of the innocent is how we assure that the faith in the necessity of the group remains, and we all need to observe the death of the innocent and mourn it for the proper reasons to reassure us that the group is whole and uncorrupted. But we also need people to die for the group willingly, so there is the desire to be seen dying.

>>21623995
Sacrifices to Moloch to the Wicker man etc. served that purpose. Marx is so much like Jesus he wants no one to die and is willing to take from the excellent to give to the mediocre. They're the same type of Jew.

>>21623995
>death drive
Is simply decadence.

>>21623848
>I'd still compare secular events like the contemporaneous analysis and hisoticizing of color revolutions and whatnot to old oracles and prophecy.
There is a loose connection in the sense that one puts stock into having a kind of transcendental source of authority but I would distinguish between the oracular-prophetic, and the technocratic "expertise" (or modeling-based) method of predicting results and blaming outcomes. The oracle is overtly mytistical and marginal and it is this sacred aloofness that enables to oracle to peer into the future (contextually to the audience of course). But the sort of academic/scholar/state department type you have in mind as a continuation of the oracle is someone who thinks in terms of a model/copy distinction. They aren't relying on gnosis or prescience or their reputation of accessing this through their proximity to a divine source, but believe their model is so powerfully real it can override what actually exists. In that sense they are theologicla because these are the very same powers reserved to a god, to be the ultimate model for all images. So if you believe Libya can be run the same way as Indiana can if you open a few schools and give them a parliament, you are not an oracle but something even more dishonest, someone who believes what he is making up himself.

>>21623995
Both Marx/Jesus and the human sacrificers are decadents. They want to slander nature by assigning to it their own values, instead of evolving to its conditions.

>>21623995
Tho just to be clear, in case it isn't, when I say "desire death" I mean more indirectly. I think the vast majority of people don't want to die, but death is a means to an end. It is often a way to achieve glory or to literally be paid in the afterlife with paradise or something like that. Seeking death is usually for something, but I think it is clearly a theological phenomenon most of the time because it can easily coincide with a pure fear of death. Most people do not seem to simply want death, that is called suicide and is rare. But they can want death with benefits. But those "benefits" are abstract, they're the concept of being seen to have a glorious or righteous death. They're in the realm of belief about what is a glorious or righteous death. But in more purely secular terms death is just death. You die in a war or you die of a heart attack, you're dead either way. If there is no after life you can be paid in nothing, your subjectivity is extinguished. The differing valuation of one death or another is based on its significance to an imputed other, the thing watching your life and measuring it. The thing may be embodied in certain tangible examples, we see each other and know we watch each other, but our more theological conceptualizing seems to often assume that these are only examples of what watches us. We continuously imagine incorporeal observers, pure observers, of our lives. Real people are just instances of the observer. We often imagine God, but more secular modern people seem to fall back to fears of moral pollution, which has been a common concept in many other societies. They fear somebody will sniff them out, that even if nobody sees their moral failure it is somehow accumulating in a trash heap wafting all about the community, and eventually it will be discovered.

>>21624071
Dying for others comes from narcissism. Te only true altruism comes from am abundance of strength and the strong don't need to die.

>>21623485
No. Communism is derived from Christianity.

>>21623485
Marxism is more of a Hussite movement. It wishes it was radical reform but it is mired in implicit Lutheranism.

>>21623485
You're not just incorrect, you're also stupid. I mean that sincerely. You're not a very smart person and you never will be. For your entire life, the majority of the people in every room you enter, are smarter than you are. The problem with stupid people is that they are helpless to help themselves, and if they are given the opportunity to make decisions, they will inevitably hurt themselves and the people around them. This is what makes stupid people not just ridiculous, but also dangerous. You are a dangerous stupid person, which is only amplified by your courage to speak. I am afraid there is no cure for stupidity (you're born with it, and a good portion seems genetic).

Here's my best suggestion, as a smart person, to a stupid person, who needs help. Find the help you need from experts. DO NOT TRUST YOURSELF. You are stupid. You will have to rely on those more educated or more understanding of the world. The hardest part for you, will be deciding who is the "expert" or who has the right advice. Luckily, I have a solution for you. Ask other people in the field of expertise, who they feel are worthy of your time and energy. Other people (smarter than you) will be able to tell the differences between intelligence where you cannot. They will be able to perceive the blind spot. For example, if you need advice on buying a home, talk to other people who have purchased home (but this is key) ONLY take advice from people who have a proven track record of success and who they suggest speaking with.

Not all opinions are equally valid. Your opinion is worthless, so to help add value to your actions you need to find opinions that are trusted and held somewhat valid by your smarter colleagues and peers. You will be unable to help yourself otherwise. You simply do not have the mental capacity for the kind of abstract thought required to process the information at higher levels. Please don't feel bad. The majority of the world is in your situation and they can't help it either.

>>21624086
>>21624107
The evangelicals want to destroy the world and so do Marxists. Thank goodness they're too stupid to realize they're natural allies.

>>21624042
Yeah, I'll clarify that I don't think there is a pure enduring form that is the oracle which has to reappear in society. Personally I like to connect many beliefs and phenomenon as "theology" because I do think that "theology" and "religion" are categories meant to carve out their opposite for modern people. The purpose of "theology" now is to distinguish reasoning about made up bullshit from reasoning about real stuff, and "religion" distinguishes ritual or systematic observance of some belief that is properly "made up bullshit", whereas politics (not quite the pefect opposite of religion, but I'd draw a connection) is now considered the more meaningful and real ritual belief structure. We split politics and religion and we got modernity. So I think of it as a transgressive move to connect theology to what are otherwise considered modern secularist political projects. Though I don't really have a point in doing so because I genuinely don't believe we can transcend this pattern of thought. If there is such a thing as "human nature", I think its boundaries are located somewhere there. We have come to really prize our rational faculties and our ability to perceive the truth of things, whereas other creatures are ignorant of truth. But I think our desire for apprehending truths or the source of truth (should it explicitly be a God or holy book or something) is exactly a pattern of our "animal" nature. It's the psychology of the human, to keep conjuring up beliefs and rituals to spread amongst each other to make us feel like we are all on the same page and the world makes sense. Everybody is mostly agreeing with me in my group, we all see the same things approximately the same way (or at least can talk intelligibly about them, which gives reason to believe we are talking about something meaningful), so I'm comfortable! I know that we know the way the world is, so I can now trust the group and we can live socially in relations of interdependence! But that is the important thing, not the actual reality of much of what we discuss and theorize. Just that we all believe it and can reinforce our beliefs in it and continuously reproduce the social world that makes us feel comfortable enough to not panic and suddenly feel like we're surrounded by hyenas.

>>21623485
Luciferian here, I hate Marxism, AMA.

>>21624107
>It wishes it was radical reform but it is mired in implicit Lutheranism.

You mean non-Protestants are mired in delusional Romanticism.

>>21623485
I don't see how. Luciferianism is a Gnostic philosophy whereby God the Father is the demiurge and Lucifer is the bringer of enlightenment to humanity who will elevate them to divinity.
Maybe you want to draw the parallel between that and Marxism for me?

>>21624119
So are you a Marxist?
>>21624146
Why do you hate it?

>>21624147
I mean Lutheranism and Calvinism are as if Papistry. Last king hung with the guts of the last cardinal. Crucify all knights. True diggers now rise.

>>21624154
Marxism is the ugly and crippled kids in class deciding to kill the pretty people so they can feel better. Christianity is that too.

>>21623485
NO, what even makes you think this?

>>21624154
>Why do you hate it?
The principle of Hell is constant chaos and competition, there is no law except power. Marxism is motivated by morality, the idea that oppressed and oppressor is a bad relationship. It wants mutual slavery of every man, but the principle of Hell is only freedom.

>>21624207
>mutual slavery of every man
Isn't that what we have now?

>>21623490
it is? if that's the case then we're pretty much fucked as a species. where were the censors during his time?

>>21624235
Man created God in the image of what he would want to be.

>>21623510
plenty. it has its saints, its doctrines, its messiah, its totally a religion as far as I'm concerned.

>>21623995
Wagies desire death.
If you're rich and don't need to work, life is so good it isn't funny.

>>21623517
I've wrote polemics against him for awhile now

>>21624138
evangelicals aren't socialists usually

>>21624239
no he fucking didn't you goddamn redditor

>>21623794
good post actually

>>21624154
>So are you a Marxist?
I don't go around calling myself a marxist even though I agree with some aspects of his theory. He was shocking right about some things, devastatingly wrong about others. Nor do I go calling myself a darwinian for the same reasons. That's intellectual cuckery. Marxism is not an irrefutable dogma even though some of his followers treat it as a religion. It has some things right, some things wrong. However because it is both a theory and a praxis (a movement) its purely theoretical errors don't just stay on the page and instead spill out and wreak havoc. Instead, those errors should be revised like a legitimate scientific theory. They are not though, because there are marxist acolytes who treat it as infallible canon.

>>21624248
>If you're rich and don't need to work, life is so good it isn't funny.
I'm a man of leisure and it's not as good as it sounds.

>>21624180
why shouldn't they. millions of men wouldn't be incels if consent was abolished.

>>21624217
NTA, but yes. It is what much of political philosophy historically has posed as its enemy, but I think that anxiety isn't evidence of the absence of that state of affairs, or its proper absence, but its constant presence. We are always mutually enslaved, and that is scary. How do we make sure we are mutually enslaved in the right way? What is the right way? In a vague statement, the right way is whatever makes me feel comfortable that I'm not going to be sacrificed! And in the secular sense of that term, a frivolous sacrifice. I don't want my death or suffering to be the condition for social order, a gesture for the social order to continue to exist. This is a gay reference but I saw threads about the TV adaptation earlier, look at what the entire story of the Last of Us is about. A innocent victim dies at the beginning, a gesture to save the world, but society crumbles anyways. Joel's daughter dies for no reason. A new innocent victim is carried across the US to be killed and studied to make a "cure", by the same man who saw his daughter die for nothing. The anxiety about who is to be justly sacrificed, about safety in this condition of mutual enslavement, is an immense theme in literature and philosophy. The sacrifice both proves the strength of the group, because we are willing to endure the mental anguish of killing one another or letting our group members die, but it also threatens to weaken the group, because lack of faith in the power of the sacrifice can be grounds for dissolution. Friends become enemies.

In respect to Marx, the source of the heated attitudes is clear (since there is the overt call for revolutionary violence), but even in the more benign case of discussing the moral dimensions of workers and owners it gets quite heated because people feel the revulsion or anxiety associated with radically renegotiating the sense of justice in the group. The role of the sacrifice doesn't have to be explicitly presented as the slab of stone with the bloody knife etc., it's also the people who can't afford healthcare and die of some curable condition. That stuff is justified by the social order, sad but necessary death, and suddenly suggesting that it is actually the fault of Papa John for not giving enough time off or giving healthcare, that threatens to dissolve loyalties because it threatens to recapitulate prior deaths as meaningless, and therefor potentially worthy of vengeance.

So comes the debate about who really wants to enslave who. But again, we are already enslaved and generally always have been. It's the conditions of our slavery that are important to us, how we can be sure our master continues to afford us our lives rather than randomly kill us or condemn us.

>>21624140
>conjuring up beliefs and rituals to spread amongst each other to make us feel like we are all on the same page and the world makes sense
that's the meta of it all—evaluation—and once you've gotten there it's time to philosophize with a hammer

>>21624252
Refute this from Essence of Christianity

>>21624275
But who the hell is the master? There is no master. The master is the system itself.

>>21624273
>millions of men wouldn't be incels if consent was abolished
This would fundamentally alter centuries of societal norms in western culture and make ISIS at their greatest extent have appeared feminist by comparison. What you are suggesting is really the abolishing of legal personhood of women which would effectively cloister them in the homes of their male relatives or spouses. Which means their male family members will guard them and kill tresspassers like you. It does not mean every man gets a female companion. Quite the opposite. There would actually be more incels because you won't even be able to make small talk anywhere public with a woman who is not a prostitute. If there are fewer women in public there will absolutely be fewer sexual encounters between single persons.

>>21624271
Then you're mentally ill.

>>21624317
Some men need power to feel good, leisure isn't enough. What our parents accomplished is always there to haunt us.

>>21624317
I see you're still harbouring the cope that early retirement/financial independence will save you, many such cases.

>>21624335
From all things except force majeur, yes you will be saved by a positive balance sheet. Even if you think wealth is beneath you because you're "spiritual" that very attitude made Protestant merchant houses and Buddhist monasteries very wealthy since they wouldn't waste it on debased expenditures.

>>21624358
What a faggot you are. You meed to destroy the values of your parents and destroy the world they created. That's the only way to happiness.

Fuck the boomers.

>>21624374
I agree that's why I am aiming to become financially independent

>>21624392
>financially independent
I'm already there and I don't feel fulfilled.

My parents had a shit marriage so I need a great one. I need to move to a bigger city that overshadows the move they made. I need to be more famous than they were and more competent at my craft than them.

>>21623579
>Both subvert local heirarchy
hierarchy of what?

>Both promise utopia
Christianity doesn’t promise utopia, it promises paradise in the next life (like most religions)

>Both spread via the downtrodden and the poors
the poor are more likely to be religious so this would make sense

>Both began by jews
not the same as the jews of today. Talmudic Judaism comes after Christianity

>Both claim to be the only means to a better place
every ideology claims this

>Both have their holy book
every ideology has literature

>Both are globalist
Christianity isn't globalist

>Both require full obedience
>Both require submitting to their authority
you could say this about every religion + ideology

>Both claim X is not really the real thing
>Both are build on the suffering of others
>Both have an inner group that is not subject to the same rules as the massee
literally what does any of this mean?

>>21624413
Gymnastics gold medallist right here.