iriyan

Yes I see what you meant now. I too realized that some of the mix of local/national/ethnic traditions and religious tradition was not exactly the religion and the belief in it. I just rejected much of this early on in life.

Protestantism is politically interesting as it is the group of religions that basically evolved to overcome the incompatibilities earlier christianity and catholicism had with capitalism. Simply they modified christianity to fit the lifestyle and practices of capitalists. I didn't grow up with either of those, not that the crap I grew up was any better.

The common scheme of this complex of judeo/X-ian/islamic is that it is very individual centered, it is all about a deity having a personal relation with the believer. I know many African and Asian religions had more collective relations with the metaphysical. Native American belief systems are even more collective in nature. The entire community does rituals for the benefit of the community. On Judeochristian scripts there is an entire city of sinners and this one guy who is not a sinner walks away while the city is destroyed.

Religion may have not had such negative overtone to Marxists if it wasn't for clergy that tends to align with the powerful and the rich, so the three bodies can manipulate, exploit, and control people.

Burning without the slightest form of organization never hurt any capitalists or their puppet gov/admins. Insurance goes up for office space, cars, shops, inflation (economic development) more construction and repaid contracts handed out, and things ALWAYS return to a much worse condition than before.

Why worse? Because police has the justification for more police, for better armed police, for even more aggressive police, and this same repressive mechanism works on worker unions striking and protesting, as it is always easy to convert any protest to an "Algerian youth uprising".

The show also gives populists of the far right more leverage to affect the idiots who vote them and eventually place them in power. Cops know and feed this frenzy, abuse, but don't prevent it from happening.

Macron is too liberal, a neo-fascist is overdue from being elected in EU's #2 political/economic power.

swiftessay: undefined> They are much more focused on ritual, on human connection, on sociality, and experience of the divine. And those things aren’t at all incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how the sensible world works.

Human connection, sociality (I'd say you mean socialization) are very much material, and so is behavior, communication, etc. The "experience of the divine" is beyond those, and you seem to want to mix things in order to connect them. How does one who is not a metaphysical believer exeperience the divine? If there is such divine how does it relate and affect our material existence?

I know it is very mechanistic as is our understanding of the material world though science. Science, begins with certain axioms, assumptions if you will, and builds up on those in a rational way for which you can backtrack back to the assumptions at any point you are in doubt. Just to see if you have made an error somewhere in the "line" of thought and end up with incorrect conclusions.

With metaphysical thought of any religion, eastern western, northern, southern, there is no such sequence, things are all over the place and not necesseraly need a connection.

The Christian religion you attribute to European origin, may have spread through Europe initially, but it is just a fork of a middle eastern religion, Judaism in specific. So is islam, an non-European religion, also a fork of Judaism, Historically and archaeologically it is hard to separate Judaism from the Greek times and language, in which rationalism and materialism is born, and on top of this philosophical base science and methodology. The religious claims may be going back thousands of years but the scripts in their earliest found and mentioned references data back to Hellenistic times. Jesus comes 7 centuries after Heraclitus wrote, whose writings were available and are referenced by others in the library of Alexandria which christian clergy says were destroyed.

To be a scientist or attempt to be scientific and serve metaphysical beliefs at the same time, if nothing else, to me it indicates mental contradiction and discomfort. If the metaphysical can not have any relation to anything physical/natural/material process or condition, why bother with it? It doesn't belong in this universe and in this physical life and presence. Why would illusion be necessary to a someone in search for material reality, in order to know what to do to change it, or improve it? It can only be an obstacle.

Is it because some religion serve as providing a social contract under which people are expected to behave against each other? We can do this by other agreements, social, political, legal. To maintain a social contract in fear of the metaphysical consequence is just a way to terrorize and manage humans to control them, with ultimate political and economic benefits of doing so.

Nice of you to say this, I am very attached to my toothbrush, and my guitar and bicycle. But where is this distincion made, do you know? To what extant do we see limits where personal ends and public property begins?

For example, one can claim his land of 5 generations back is 24 hectares, but he is not using it for production, he takes care of it, uses a patch for growing personal/family food, the rest is for walks, riding a horse or a bike around, Is this personal? A 4 person family globally relates to about 3 hectares of land that can be culrivated, and maybe 6-7 more that is useless for agriculture. If one person has 10 times as much as personal, that would create a deficiency for available land to grow food for everyone else.

With basic hand-tools one person can barely work a land that is half a hectare, no matter what grows in it. Most of us can barely deal with the work needed for 1/10 of a hectare 1000sq,.m

The other extreme would be to have a 400sq.m house that you pretend is personal but at times you could exploit a traveler or a visitor to charge rent.

It is incomprehensible for me how can one be both a communist and have a religious affiliation, or any form of metaphysical thought. I am very respectful usually of people with faith but not as communists at the same time.

Please help me understand, I am too dumb when it comes to this.

I was browsing the boards up and down before reading this, and my first reaction was "haven't you read who Engels was and what he did for a living?", but others had the same response as well.

The reason I was searching and browsing threads was to locate reading material about "private property" and the distinction of it being owenrship of means of production or property you couldn't exploit anyone's labor with.

I am firm and clear about production means not being private, but what if someone creates/builds something for their own use. It can be a cabin,house, or it can be a raw boat, a violin, a bicycle... without any intention of renting them, using them to exploit others. What can be wrong with it? I am thinking more about the amount of resources needed, that they would have to become private to be used, so building a 6 story 1000 sq.m building "for yourself" is an overkill and abuse of resources, but even painting on a piece of canvas also needs privatization of "materials". So there has to be a cut-off.

But banning all private property makes no sense at all, it is nearly inhumane to enforce such policy.

You mean you set idealism to side and used rational thought and advise?

How dare you?

OK, teasing you a bit. One of the reasons I tended to take this seriously is because when I was little my parents gave sheltered to beaten/tortured nearly to a comma older cousins who were constantly "interrogated" due to having a file in national.security.office as members of a communist party. A good thing to have, such parents, relatives, friends.

Unlike other choices in life, some can result in a lot of pain, dignity, pride, and more pain.

If I am not mistaken this party is aligned with the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) which in last week's election received 7.8% of the vote and 20 out of 300 seats in parliament. This may mean that the KKE has larger membership than CPUSA, not that this really matters.

The word revolution hasn't been in the vocabulary of this party for decades, not even by mistake. The material conditions must have not reached optimal ripe status.

1st time the US military was stationed away from borders was in Nicaragua to protect fruit plantation monopoly. 1st time it was involved in overthrowing a government and install a vicious coup was in Guatemala, to protect the banana monopoly UF had formed. The banana we know and eat worldwide (almost) is a British patent, but it may be vanishing in this next decade. We may be the last to ever eat a banana.

Plantains are not bananas, and there are literally hundreds of relatives to this fruit/vegetable but very few are sweet and taste like a banana.

Nothing wrong with the fruit itself but the economic/political structures that formed to have it mass produced are some of the most evil days capitalism ever created. Millions of peasants were sentenced to artificial poverty so they can become slave workers to this monopoly.

Sugar was bad as well till this Cuban and Chilean duo disrupted the party the Eur-American trash were having.

Isn't the true pyramid the one with a square base? I think this is called a tetrahedron.

Sunshine? It needs plenty of UV to grow, it is not heat. If you are too far away from the tropics, try one of the med varieties, smaller and more accustomed to less light.

There are many different herbal teas that contain 0% teaine/caffeine and have many substances that boost the immune system, anti-bacterial/fungal substances, and contain perfect amounts of hydrolites if you are in hot/dry environments. Sugar, molasses, or honey addition is optional. For hot weather make it at night in a big jar or bottle, put it in the fridge. and have a cool drink all day. It is used for sports (like cycling) to prevent dehydration instead of the industrial salty drinks they sell for an arm and leg with smudge of some artificial fruit flavor.

In the med we have what is called mountain-tea, it grows from 300m up in wild forest type of land or low vegetation non-agri. land and people gather it and sell a bundle that can last you 6months for 1$/e

But there are many different herbal wild teas you can taste and select the ones that fit you, make a blend of your own, drip a little lemon in there too.