A pretty distorted view of the Frankfurt school and a pretty nitpicky thing with Paul. If you care for the trees, go on, I care about the forest. And philosophy is more than the Anglosaxon liberal, positivistic kind of thing.
The Frankfurt school no longer matters, having served its function as a diversion. But Paul protecting the institution of slavery really is the forest, while verses about all being equal in Christ, those are the trees.
You don't like the funky stuff, the paradoxes and the controversial stuff of continental philosophy? Your loss.
Why ever did I think that you might object to the mysticism of dialectics?
If funky stuff bothered me as such I'd laser in on that, both Hegelian and materialist, not the dead fad of the Frankfurt school.
About the Roman perversion, read the friggin' bible. Jesus wanted to basically create a big club for everybody, outsiders, women, ill and poor folks and so on. When his minions wanted to wrestle with worldly power he told them to stop. The religion became roughly the thing it was meant to be but then a Roman emperor grabbed it, combined it a bit with pagan stuff and made a state religion out of it. Now tell me with a straight face as left-winger that this is not a perversion of an emancipatory project.
If there really was a messianic Jesus (something you should doubt if you read the Bible,) then his project was no more emancipatory than the Maccabees'. If there was an historic Jesus whose message resembled Paul's gospel, then it couldn't emancipate a single slave, indeed, insisted on returning Philemon to his master. Yes, I can say with a straight face that the Romans did not pervert an emancipatory project. Constantine just bought into the best run religous franchise.
About enlightenment, I am not a particularly smart guy but I know at least one thing, that putting all your trust in one way or methodology to improve our well-being is ideological self-bullshitting. It'd be neat if the world were that simple but it ain't. And while I would call myself an enlightenment guy I do not close my eyes, ignore its dark sides and pretend that it is the golden way to heaven.
To quote Chris Hedges: "The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species."
Isn't Chris Hedges the OWS guy who's trying to split the movement, driving out the left and other militants? Well, both you and Chris Hedges, despite the false modesty, by claiming to know what human nature and its limits are, are claiming to be extraordinarily intelligent human beings. With such great minds, surely it wouldn't be too much to ask that the evidence and logic behind this conclusion (which so happily coincides with fundamental principles of conservatism of all epochs
) for us slower thinkers? It's not like you just know these things by means other than reason, right?
Do you ever wonder why nobody listen to leftists?
Leftists get listened to all over the world, and have been listened to in many periods in history. Why they don't get listened to now seems to me to have an awful lot to do with things like the purge of labor unions in the "McCarthy" era, private control of public airwaves, why a whole dreary host of reasons dating back for decades.
Did you ever wonder why dumb reactionary guys without any skills, the Reagans and Bushs of this world, are elected?
Bush wasn't dumb, he just didn't waste his time with naked logic, and went for the wrappings. He may not have been Laurence Olivier but Reagan was a skilled actor. As to why they get elected, I do believe that millions of dollars and biased electoral arrangements have a great deal to do with it.
You can play the I 'have the better arguments' card all day but as long as you do not capture the hearts of people your project is doomed to fail. Where do you think guys like MLK and the Christian leftists in South America gained their strength from and what do you think made them gain moderate power? The naked, rational leftist message or the wrapping?
Martin Luther King was assassinated. The Christian leftists in South America I recall are pretty much limited to Romero and Torres and they were killed too. In any event, I don't recall too many Latin American Christian leftist reformers in power. If this is your idea of power, then I will happily stick with rational leftist messages. I suppose you might include Desmond Tutu, but I say that Cuban (and some East German) troops defeating the South African government at Cuito Cuanavale did far, far more to reform away apartheid.
As for capturing hearts, the US people, who prefer the emancipatory message of Christianity, are completely heartless about the sufferings of Muslims. And of Arab Christians too. I think there is a direct relationship between this heartlessness and the preference for the wrappings of emancipatory religion.
No, genuine revolutionism has to drop the religion.
I am not a leftist, just a social democrat so I am opposed to revolutions (due to overpopulation and climate change radical changes are inevitable in this century but I nonetheless prefer reform over revolution). All you say with this stupid line is that you would not work together with comrades who use their religion as emancipatory tool which is from a pragmatic, 'we want to grab power' point of view even more stupid than the ignorance of the tools with which right-wingers grabbed power in the last decades.
The "pragmatic, 'we want to grab power' point of view" would indeed lead to ignoring the critique of religion. But the point is not just to have power, something an individual could far more easily accomplish by joining the Young Republicans, but to do something worthwhile with it. You aren't going to do much worthwhile if your own supporters are still bigots.
Major reforms only come along with revolutions. At the very least, it takes the threat of revolution to extort concessions from the rulers. Even those concessions, like the European welfare state will be taken away when the rulers no longer face the revolutionary threat. To be against revolution
is to be against reform. This is an embarrassment for the sincere reformers, no doubt, but these things happen when you insist on listening to your heart instead of thinking.
No, genuine revolutionism has to drop the religion.