Origin of the Specious

In an attempt to show up the motivations behind the current wave of religious funamentalism, Reason Magazine discovers Origin of the Specious:

Political scientist Shadia Drury, a passionate critic of Strauss, puts it this way: 'For Strauss, the ills of modernity have their source in the foolish belief that there are no harmless truths, and that belief in God and in rewards and punishments is not necessary for political order....[H]e is convinced that religion is necessary for the well-being of society. But to state publicly that religion is a necessary fiction would destroy any salutary effect it might have. The latter depends on its being believed to be true....If the vulgar discovered, as the philosophers have always known, that God is dead, they might behave as if all is permitted.'

Thus, to preserve society, wise people must publicly support the traditions and myths that sustain the political order and that encourage ordinary people to obey the laws and live justly. People will do so only if they believe that moral rules are divinely decreed or were set up by men who were inspired by the Divine.

Kristol restated this insight nearly five decades ago in an essay in Commentary dealing with Freud: 'If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without...let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine--for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish.'

Emphasis Mine

Here, the emphasis is on religion as a tool of social control, not as personal choice. This utility alone makes it desirable to the Capitalists as they enjoin us to defer our satisfaction to the after-life.

Marx expressed a contrary idea that:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people

Karl Marx: Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in: Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February, 1844

Here, we have a clash of two contrary ideas in how to approach religion: social control; or acknowledgement of suffering. The rulers want the social control without acknowledging the suffering.

Marxists today should approach religion as a personal choice not as a tool of social control. We should not seek to obliterate religion but as to acknowledge a person's fundamental right to religious expression.

Atheism should not be seen as a sign of intellectual superiority either to be hidden from the sea of believers, or to be flaunted in front of them to condemn their ignorance.

For me, I choose to remain a Catholic in spite of the Church's official persecution of Communists. Although, I have been treated with benign indifference by the local Catholic community. This counts as tolerance.