I advocate an ontology that has no place for the sorts of entities often postulated by religion

Further issues in the background, perhaps worth addressing more explicitly, it seems, include the following:

(1) APS has a concept of religion revolving around a temporal theory of attention. One could say a lot of this, but basic familiarity with Goodchild’s use of Deleuze would suffice. This, i imagine, is what’s at stake for APS when religion is brought up. Sinthome is concerned with empirical phenomena, and thus for him APS’s theory of religion ultimately underwrites these. Yet this collapses the very concept of religion. For APS, to think of religion according to this sample of empirical phenomena is to avoid the central question of a concept of religion. Sinthome emphasizes the population-study character of religion, but it still seems there must be a concept of religion there for him, insofar as there’s something called religion he wants to get rid of.

(2) Sinthome’s critique of religion seems to be implicitly allied with a liberal political orientation. Religion is, at base, unenlightened, irrational, no? I believe APS’s concept of religion is tied to a basically Marxist orientation. So perhaps an interesting question would be what role politics plays in this? What conflicts between Marxism and liberalism are being played out beneath Sinthome’s critiques of religion and APS’s responses? Sinthome’s position, whether as critique of religion or as positive politial proposal, never seems to go beyond liberalism. discard said this on April 10th, 2007 at 9:55 pm

It’s worth emphasizing that my critique of religion is independent of the points responding to your point 2 above… These are philosophical commitments, that are secondary to considerations of populations and social movements. I can say that philosophical I advocate an ontology that has no place for the sorts of entities often postulated by religion. I really have no idea where APS stands on these issues. Does he believe in a transcendent god? The soul? The afterlife? We’d disagree. Does he believe in some sort of divine world-system based on ecology? I’d be inclined to say that I just see no reason to think of that as divine or relating to God, but that I certainly endorse an ecological view of being. Then our discussion would be semantic and we’d largely agree.

Anyway, the point I want to make is that my philosophical commitments don’t prevent me from holding that there can be viable forms of religious Marxism or leftist religion as populations. I can perfectly well hold that a population has a mistaken ontology and hold that they have a genuinely leftist politics. I will say, however, that apart from a couple of blips such as Martin Luther King and Gandhi, it seems that Christianity has historically been on the wrong side of political struggles and has been an apologist for the State. I wonder if there isn’t something internal to either dominant religious doctrines or the Bible that leads to this.

If I’m mistaken on this please correct me through sociological analysis of religious movements that have signicantly worked to undermine dominant class interests beyond those I’ve already cited. And please do so without invectives or personal insults. It could be that I’m just ignorant of history– there’s much history I am ignorant of –and that I’m not acquainted with these other movements. larvalsubjects said this on 10:09 pm April 10th, 2007