All the religions practised in the world today, including numerous spin-offs, divisions, and breakaways, have their origins in the remote past of humankind’s primitive, tribal, superstition-ridden emergence. In a world with no recorded learning, no libraries, museums, schools or the mass communication of ideas, crude concepts about the world, nature, and men and women’s part in the scheme of things were handed on through experience, as it was understood at the time, from generation to generation.
Where no rational or scientific explanations for natural phenomena existed, everything was endowed with spirits that might act to the good or detriment of savage people who were at the mercy of nature. Thunderstorms, volcanic eruptions, falling trees and the human life cycle ending in death were all awesome, fear-inspiring phenomena as were the light and warmth-giving sun and moon in the sky above.
Means of influencing the ‘spirits’ responsible for natural events, led to the growth of rituals and myths.
With the development of the idea of the ‘soul’ arising from indigenous people dreaming of deceased comrades, the foundation was complete and ready for the emergence of a sect of specialist keepers of the rituals to fasten themselves on the back of suffering humanity. These are, of course, the priests. From witch doctors and holy-men, they had expanded their role from the dissolution of primitive society through all the stages of class society, to become the agents who bestowed gods’ blessings on successive classes of plunderers, war-lords, and exploiters. Today they stand as the self-appointed intermediaries between the ignorant faithful and the god or gods who remain as the few modern survivors from primitive spiritualism.
Belief in the idea of the soul took hold in the minds of primitive peoples. It endowed the natural world with spirits and led to ancestor worship, the earliest form of tribal deification of the dead that provides the key to the fear, control, and escapism of modern religions.
Without this human-made phantom named the soul, the idea of life in another world after death could not have existed, and the priests would have been denied their most potent lever for fear, control and manipulation.
In their self-appointed role as mediators between believers and their gods, Christian priests have found the fear of eternal damnation a powerful weapon. The promise of eternal bliss after a life of submission and obedience on earth has placed great power in the hands of those believed to be instrumental in deciding such matters.
Thus, resurrection and reincarnation, in one form or another, are central features of modern religions.
“He who believeth in me shall not perish but have ever-lasting life” is a self-evident piece of nonsense, the perpetuation of which has paid dividends to successive centuries of the ruling class by keeping the exploited on their knees. Ever-ready with a helping of pie-in-the-sky, the priests have been party to and beneficiaries of the exploitation of the masses. They and their churches owe their survival to being the ready hirelings of ruling classes.
Among the more sinister aspects of religion is the lack of any scruple about polluting the minds of children. As soon as they start school the process of mind- poisoning begins.
This amply demonstrates the value of religion to the ruling class whose over-riding concern is for profits. A docile and compliant working class is vital to the success of the modern capitalist class as it plunders the world while exploiting wage-labour for profits.
The wars that the system of cut-throat competition engenders, involve workers being called upon to slaughter each other in conflicts which have no interests of theirs at stake. Take the war in Ukraine where bishops bless the troops of both warring parties. The part played by religions in appealing to the “just” causes of the gods to sanction the bloodletting has been an invaluable asset to the rival capitalists of the world.
In perpetuating the myths of resurrection and life after death, they promote belief in a better life cut short by war in the real world. For workers, who lose their lives in the wars of capitalism, such wars are made more acceptable if the finality of death can be removed from their minds.
This belief was a creation which took hold in the minds of primitive peoples. For them it endowed the natural world with spirits and led to ancestor worship, the earliest form of tribal deification of the dead, a belief that provides the key to the fear, control, and escapism of modern religions.
When the Socialist Party of Great Britain first published the pamphlet Socialism and Religionit was only necessary to expose the Christian religion as the agent of the capitalist class, and it is true that the socialist case against Christianity can be, by extrapolation, seen to apply to all religions. In fact, the forthright statement of Marxian Historical Materialism – that men and women must first produce in order to feed, clothe and shelter themselves before they develop ideas and belief system – shows that religion has no existence independent of men and women if one religion is demolished, they are all exposed as empty myths created by men and women.
It is now over a century since the Socialism and Religion pamphlet first appeared, and it is an indication of how the world of capitalism has opened up since then that nearly 10% of the people now living in the UK are from parts of the former British Empire. In the national census of 2001, over three million people registered as Muslims, making Islam the second largest religion in Britain.
Where church attendances in Britain were declining, Hindu temples and Muslim mosques now thrive, and yet more brands of Christianity have become evident as former colonials have brought their colonial oppressor’s indoctrination with them.
People from the West Indies and the southern United States are descendants from ancestors who were abducted from Africa and bought and sold as slaves to work on the sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations of the Christians who owned them. These people have nothing for which to be grateful to Christianity. For more than a hundred years, since the abolition of slavery in 1865, people have suffered the most brutal prejudice and discrimination at the hands of white Christians.
Both Christianity and Islam engaged in slavery. In embracing these religions, workers are denying their own dignity as people. Like their white fellow workers, they have become wage-slaves. Religion sanctions this degradation also.
None of this has necessarily increased the amount of religious activity in the world but it has certainly moved it around.
What has intensified is religious extremism and bigotry. For instance, in the breaking up of India into two vast countries threatening each other, we now have two nation states confronting each other, with the nuclear technology of modern capitalist warfare, over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Hindu India and Islamic Pakistan both have nuclear weapons, and religion is used by both as a pretext for killing each other.
The Socialist case applies. As workers, the Indians and Pakistanis have no country so which of their ruling classes gains control over Kashmir is not their concern. They should abandon the religious and nationalist nonsense used by their masters to set them apart and gain an understanding of Socialism so that, in harmony with their fellow workers world-wide, they can rid the world of war, hatred and religion.
The same argument must also be applied to the Jewish State of Israel which, as the client-state of the United States, uses religious bigotry to “justify” decades of hi-tech militarism against Palestinian Arabs. God, as always, is on the side of the big battalions.
The ‘chosen people’ myth is not far removed from the ‘master race’ concept. The aim of territorial expansion and many of the methods are much the same. Destruction of poor people’s homes in Gaza and the killing of their children is a shabby role for religion to play and exposes its promoters for the capitalists and adventurers they in fact are. Genocide by any other name. As we write, the localised war over oil and trade routes which has led to massacres of Israelis and the destruction of much of the Gaza Strip are drawing in other belligerent powers like the United States, Iran and Britain.
The gods of Judaism and Islam are merely a reflex that provide a cover for the United States and its client state in their struggle for control of Middle East oil on the one hand and incipient Arab nationalism, striving for independent existence, on the other. Yet Jewish Israeli workers and their Muslim Palestinian counterparts have no interest in being duped by religion and nationalism into killing each other for the ambitions of their rival ruling classes.
The same interplay of forces can be seen everywhere in the world where religion holds and justifies capitalism. The ugly twins of religion and capitalism coexist with poverty, hatred, misery, and war. Only the establishment of socialism, a world free from the twin poisons of nationalism and religion on the one hand and wage slavery on the other, will allow people to think and act in the common interest; an association, “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Communist Manifesto).
