I was listening to some writings on Marx by Lenin the other day and as far as I understood it: materialism is the idea that consciousness is a byproduct material interactions within reality as opposed to the idealist conception that reality only exists within and as a construct of consciousness. Marx extended the materialist conception in dialectical materialism to consider social interactions and structures as material conditions that are also required to produce consciousness. Lenin also writes of Marx’s belief that religion and theology is inherently idealist, and that ideas like agnosticism that tried reconcile religion and materialism were reactionary or a “shame-faced way of surreptitiously accepting materialism, while denying it before the world”.
the above paragraph is of course a gross oversimplification of idealism, materialism and dialectical materialism, and may be partially or entirely wrong. I found the original text to be quite difficult to comprehend and this is just how I understood it, so if I’m wrong about anything please correct me.
moving on, it seems to me that many Marxist-Leninists think that one of many contributing factors to the decline and collapse of the USSR was the suppression of religion, especially as it did not seem to be particularly effective given how quickly religion returned after the collapse. with all the aforementioned in mind, I have a few questions:
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do you think that religion is antithetical to dialectical materialism?
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was suppression of religion in the USSR enforced out of a belief by the party that it contradicted the principles of Marxism–Leninism?
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would a socialist state with a party that strictly adhered to Marxism–Leninism but allowed religious freedom among its citizenship be stable?
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would a hypothetical state be able to cultivate material conditions that lead people to willingly give up religion, if said state decided that religion was a threat to its sovereignty?
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have you personally experienced any cognitive dissonance from simultaneously holding religious and Marxist-Leninist beliefs?
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I haven’t read/listened to a whole lot of theory, what literature would you recommend to better understand dialectical materialism?
I know this is kinda off topic, but do you think some form of transhumanism could theoretically solve this if everyone could just back up their consciousness and live forever? I suppose there is always the potential for said immortality to be fallible, and I doubt anybody would survive the heat death of the universe, backups or not. despite this, I think it could be an interesting thought experiment.
typing this out has also lead me to consider: does the prevalence of religion correlate with the prevalence of death? at risk of rambling on, I bet this question could be applied to reality, do regions or time periods with high mortality rates also have high rates of theism?
perhaps the material condition that enables religion is death. I will have to think about this.
No, backing up my consciousness isn’t me. My conscience that I experience is an expression of my brain’s interrelating neurons. Copying that into a computer doesn’t change that.
yeah, maybe someday we will have the proper hardware to like ship-of-theseus our brains into something more artificial/durable/easy to maintain, but i don’t think binary/digital computing will ever work for that.
Yeah, so Tielhard de Chardin thought about this and turns out no increasing the fundamental amd material union of mankind with itself and the logos of reality is in fact a very religious thing to do.