Subject: Re: MARXISM & RELIGION
Date: Sun, 1 Sep 1996 18:24:03 -0400 (EDT)


Ralph Dumain wrote:

> One cannot even continue such a discussion without recognizing
> that Catholicism is a reactionary, obsolete form of religious and
> social organization.  Protestantism left it behind long long ago,
> and the only reason it survives is due to its incrustation in
> underdeveloped, backward and ignorant peasant societies.  It's a
> long climb up from there, which is why it persists even in more
> advanced countries.  In the USA, for example, (I am excluding the
> Mexican-American Southwest for the moment), Catholicism was
> basically the religion of the backward peasants who emigrated from
> Eastern and Southern Europe to work in America's mines and
> factories, and those ethnic minorities perpetuated it in a
> basically Protestant country.  But even these ethnic populations
> have advanced a little.  The Pope knows that American Catholics
> are trouble, so when he toured the US, he selected the most
> backward areas and populations of the US to visit, where the
> ignorant mentality of the oppressed peasant and subproletarian
> prevails.          

Well, precisely this weberian crap is what m-undead does not want to
hear dead or alive. Could you enlighten us, Herr Professor, as to how 
your bold insights square with the fact that virtually all socialist
uprisings in this century took place in the predominantly catholic or
non-protestant countries?  Or since you appear to be not indifferent
to an aesthetic mode of contemplation, have you ever had a chance to
compare the manifestations of spiritual life, and even facial 
expressions of the "backward peasants" who are waging now
 their heroic struggle against imperialism struggle in Peruvian mountains
and Philippine jungles, with those of the protestant American workers,
let alone their corporate brethren?  Did it ever occur to you that 
what once were progressive can later become reactionary?

Vladimir Bilenkin



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