The Religion Trap People say: “Our problem is that we have to ‘get right with God.’ ‘The Lord’ will provide—he won’t let us down.” Love is giving the best of yourself! An Action!!!!!!!!!! Time For An Awakening If praying to Jesus, or Allah, did any good, then the past 20 years would have been decades of great advance for African-American people—because Black people have been praying like never before! But instead, these have been two decades of horror and despair: the pumping of crack into the ghettos and the promotion of the fratricidal drug trade as the way out for the youth and, with that, the nightmare imprisonment of huge numbers of African-American youth, along with the pervasive, never-ending harassment and brutality, and the constant threat of murder, at the hands of the police; the further rotting out of the inner cities, drained of jobs and resources; the heightening oppression and degradation of women, in thousands of ways; the demonization of Black people in the dominant culture; and so on. All this praying has done nothing to prevent these horrors. But it cuts way deeper than that. Religion is just wrong. It tells people to seek make-believe causes (“straying from the path of God”) for the real problems people face and to fight make-believe enemies (“the devil”) instead of the real-live ones who must be defeated. It tells people to put their faith in make-believe non-existent saviors—instead of understanding the world as it is, struggling to change it, and building unity on that basis. Religion, even the most “progressive” type of religion which includes a call to people to stand up against oppression, nevertheless in the end preaches to people that they cannot really understand reality and overcome oppression and win liberation on their own, but must ultimately rely on some non-existent god (or gods) to lead them to salvation, if not in this world, then in the next. In short, religion is a chain on people’s thinking. Ask yourself this: Why have the oppressors, since slavery days, not only allowed but overall encouraged and supported the Black Church, helping to build it up as a key institution in Black communities, working with it and promoting it as a “refuge” for Black people? And why, today, are the churches being given all kinds of money to set up “prison ministries”—while the educational opportunities in prison are being cut? On top of all that, today the ruling class of imperialists is building up a core of reactionary fundamentalist preachers, including among African-American clergy, as part of a Christian-fascist movement designed to get people to support all kinds of reactionary and oppressive actions and relations, to fight in, or to actively and aggressively support, wars against oppressed people in other countries, in the service of the U.S. empire, to clamp down further on resistance to all this within the U.S. and make this already heavily repressive society qualitatively more repressive. Of course, many religious people do stand up against oppression, and the revolutionary movement should unite with such people. But religious thinking cannot set the terms for the struggle, and those who do understand the importance of taking a scientific approach to the causes and cures for this oppression need to step up and help people get emancipated from these mental chains. It’s time to get rid of this poisonous nonsense about “God will provide” and “Thank you Jesus” or “God willing”—time to quit saying “I’m blessed,” look reality in the eye, and recognize instead: “We’re oppressed!” And then set about joining together in the here and now to do something about it.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 03:21:42 +0000
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