Christianity

Martin Thomas is right that some mental illness “hurts” the sufferer (“Facebook, CPA, and socialism”, Solidarity 302, 6 November 2013). The person who is depressed knows they are depressed and does not like it. But a person experiencing psychosis — delusions and hallucinations — may not know they are psychotic and does not necessarily experience subjective suffering. Most of the suffering that such people experience is due to the specific content of their psychosis and the way they are treated by the society they live in. The social context has a large bearing on the content. In our society...

There are striking parallels between the conventional Left's attitude to Islam now and the way the Communist Party used to relate to Irish Catholic immigrants in Britain. I had some experience of that. For a while, over forty years ago, I was involved in the work of the Communist Party among Irish people of devout Catholic background in Britain, people from the nearest thing to a theocracy in Europe, where clerics ruled within the glove-puppet institutions of a bourgeois democracy. Hundreds of thousands of us came to Britain from small towns, backward rural areas, from communities of small...

Over the past weeks, there has been an online outcry against an article AWL published in 2006 which has been attacked as “Islamophobic”. Over our next editions, Solidarity will feature debate and discussion on the article and the issues. Here, we reprint (abridged) a statement from the AWL Executive Committee in response to the outcry, and carry a letter from an AWL comrade. Future editions will carry further debate. Much of the recent online response to a 2006 AWL article on Marxists’ attitude to religion and religious fundamentalist politics has acted as a reminder of how disoriented much of...

All debate on this topic is listed here Much of the recent online response to a 2006 AWL article on Marxists’ attitude to religion and religious fundamentalist politics has acted as a reminder of how disoriented much of the British left is on these questions. With little sign of comprehending what the article argues in many cases, or in some cases of having read it at all, some have claimed that the article is “racist” and “Islamophobic”, i.e. bigoted against Muslims. Let us be clear: Muslim and Muslim-background people in Britain today face oppression and discrimination, both in terms of...

This poem seems to be about the post-Darwin retreat of religious conviction; yet it is thought to have been written in 1851, eight years before Darwin published his epoch-making book, The Origin of Species. It is interesting to compare it with W B Yeats' “The Second Coming”. The sea is calm to-night. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;--on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd...

Click here for a range of articles that were part of the controversy sparked by the republication of this article *** (Adapted from the introduction to Workers' Liberty 3/1: Marxism and Religion - January 2006) In many countries, religion and disputes about, or expressed in terms of, religion have long been central to political life — in Christian Spain, Portugal, Ireland, or the USA; in Muslim Iran or Algeria; in Lebanon; in Israel-Palestine. Today, since Islamist terrorists attacked New York on 11 September 2001, religion, or concerns and interests expressed in religion, are at the centre of...

In many countries, religion and disputes about, or expressed in terms of, religion have long been central to political life — in Christian Spain, Portugal, Ireland, or the USA; in Muslim Iran or Algeria; in Lebanon; in Israel-Palestine. Today, since Islamist terrorists attacked New York on 11 September 2001, religion, or concerns and interests expressed in religion, are at the centre of international politics to a degree without parallel for hundreds of years. We have not, as in Francis Fukuyama’s thesis after the fall of the USSR, reached “the end of history”. We seem to be reprising long...

A few weeks ago the BBC published an article on how to eat for less than £1 a day, in reference to the Global Poverty Project’s challenge to “Live Below the Line”. Others have explained better than I could why the diet suggested in the article is totally unrealistic (for example, it is not possible to buy a quarter of a courgette). There’s a good blogpost on atheltheunread.wordpress.com. Last week, the BBC published a follow-up article with “Readers’ Stories” of living on little money. A few of the stories included phrases like “my dog eats better than me”, “porridge week”, “it is very lonely...

The American writer Ralph Emerson once said of an acquaintance that “the louder he talked of his honesty, the faster we counted our spoons”. I have the same instinct when I hear conservative commentators pontificate on human rights. Writing on the Huffington Post site on 16 January, Mike Judge (Head of Communications at the Christian Institute), claimed that while Christians are “free to wear a cross at work, they are not necessarily free to believe in marriage”. He was commenting on the cases taken by four British Christians to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) claiming that they had...

The violence of some of protests outside US and other embassies against the 'Innocence of Muslims' film will have horrified all democrats and socialists. So dismayed were secular-minded Libyans with the killing of American diplomats in Benghazi they organised counter-demonstrations. The protests were relatively small in most cities in the Arab world, Africa, and south-east Asia, but larger in some places (like Kabul, Monday 17 September). The Kabul protest will have been fuelled by resentment against the NATO forces, the corruption of the Afghan government, and much else. But the religious...