Greetings Economists, On Mar 8, 2007, at 8:50 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
Marx and Marxists have often thought that religion is basically either a ruling-class ideology to facilitate exploitation or a sigh of the oppressed substituting heaven for an earthly kingdom or both. There are both aspects in religion, and those aspects may disappear if exploitation and oppression can be done away with (which doesn't seem possible any time soon), but in all likelihood religion predates the rise of class society and will probably outlive it, how to face death -- one's own or others' -- being one of the questions that religion may be better equipped to address than science.
Doyle; I think religion is more threatened than ever by not so much the Marxist thought as by erosion of the boundary between mind and body. The soul being outside the body is still a sort of religious province. A counter zeitgeist being the hivemind or boundary free knowledge culture. Can this supplant religion? I think so. The great religions success are about the theory of great bodies of people united by the thought of the central figures of the religion. The anti-materialist content just allows a fertile ground for finding ways to empirically use practical techniques to bind together the network of minds. Network theory of communications that boost carrying capacity band width, and content structure directly challenge the religious realm. A hivemind is the end game for religion. Doyle
