Where do religions come from, what place do they hold in the human imagination and what social role do they play

Where do religions come from, what place do they hold in the human imagination and what social role do they play ?

"The production of ideas, representations, and consciousness is first of all directly and intimately linked to the material activity and material commerce of men ; it is the language of real life. (...) It is men who are the producers of their representations, their ideas, etc., but real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and the relations corresponding to them (...) Religious distress is at the same time the expression of true distress and the protest against this true distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a situation without spirituality. It is the opium of the people." - Karl Marx in "The German Ideology" -

“Once it was recognized that all culture is based on the compulsion to work and the renunciation of instincts, and that, as a result, it inevitably arouses opposition among those affected by these demands, it became clear that the goods themselves, the means of obtaining them, and the arrangements for their distribution could not be the essential, or even the sole, characteristic of culture. For they were threatened by the revolt and the thirst for destruction of the participants in culture. Alongside the goods, now come the means that can serve to defend culture, means of compulsion and others, which must succeed in reconciling men with it and in compensating them for their sacrifices. These, for their part, can be described as the totemic basis of culture. For the sake of a homogeneous mode of expression, we will call “refusal” the fact that an impulse cannot be satisfied, “prohibition” the device that fixes this refusal, and “deprivation” the state brought about by the prohibition. The next step then is to differentiate between deprivations that affect everyone and those that do not affect everyone, but only groups, classes, or even individuals. The former are the oldest : with the prohibitions that establish them, culture inaugurated detachment from the original state of animality, who knows how many thousands of years ago. To our surprise, we have found that these deprivations continue to be at work, continue to form the core of hostility to culture. The instinctual wishes that suffer from them are reborn with every child (…) Such instinctual wishes are those of incest, cannibalism, and the pleasure-desire for murder. (…) The man of belief and piety is eminently protected against the danger of certain neurotic affections : the adoption of the universal neurosis exempts him from the task of forming a personal neurosis.” - Freud in “The Future of an Illusion” -

INTRODUCTION

In saying "religions," we encounter a difficulty : the type of content may have varied considerably from one religion to another and from one era to another. What limit should be given to the term religion ? Was there a bear cult ? Will we go as far as the cult of the bull, if it existed, or of the mother goddess, in the same case ? Can we judge this and the great institutionalized religions of our time in the same breath ? Can we analyze Christianity and Buddhism in the same way ?

Of course not. And yet, the following considerations concern religions and not each one specifically. Just as one can speak of slavery or man, of the Neolithic or hominization, even if each situation has its own particularities.

The approach specific to religion is to produce a belief in immaterial forces located outside the material world and above it. It thus determines behaviors consisting not only of human morality, but also of rules intended to obey the will of these forces which dominate the terrestrial world. The objective of this virtual universe, that of the spirits, which is added to the world known to our senses, is to resolve the multiple insoluble contradictions of reality. By opposing these two worlds, the real and the virtual, the material and the immaterial, the sensible and the unknowable, the human and the divine, the natural and the supernatural, religion claims to resolve the existence of these fundamental contradictions which constantly shock us in a painful way. These contradictions are those of life and death (like the need to kill other animals in order to survive, while the ancient hunter considered himself an animal and there were prohibitions against killing), of power and weakness, of temptation and punishment, of drive and inhibition, of well-being and misery, of love and hate, of the conscious and the unconscious, of knowledge and ignorance, of the oppressor and the oppressed, of submission and revolt,… By giving reality a new light, that of myth, man transcends his suffering, his torn between these opposing poles. This does not help him to overcome them but rather to bear them. The myth does not solve the real problem, but it gives it a meaning, an interpretation that makes it more acceptable, more general and less individual, which allows him not to have to assume all the weight alone since it is the community that tells him what to think about it and what to do in these situations. Through religious mythology, the poor gain wealth (in thought), the weak gain strength, the ignorant gain knowledge, the one who is afraid gains confidence (in God and not in himself), ...

Dualism (body/spirit ; material world/spiritual world ; natural/supernatural) is a characteristic of religions. It systematically chooses to consider that spirits dominate (so-called idealist conception). But it is not necessarily a strict dualism because the men of the time seemed to consider that spirits lived among them, or in them, and that the material world was only illusory. Such conceptions can be based on the awareness that the unconscious acts on us. Thus, the creator, artist, scientist or thinker, feels well that he is overwhelmed by his creation. He does not have the feeling of having consciously thought everything he has invented nor of having only found it by observing reality. Dreams, the delirium of madmen, the ecstasies of people in a state of trance, the effect of natural drugs, and many other psychological phenomena are at the origin of this idea according to which a spirit, foreign to our body, would inhabit us. In hunting tribes, it could be the animal spirit of the tribe, for example the protector animal of the tribe, which may be taboo for hunting.

Religion indicates a code of behavior that divides attitudes into two categories : good and evil. Here again, it resolves the contradiction by dividing everything into two separate and disjointed parts. Evil is absolute, indisputable, taboo, forbidden under penalty of displeasing the spirits. It is diametrically opposed to good. Man does not have to question for himself what would be good or evil : the community decided this a very long time ago through the voice of the ancestors. He does not need to understand. The continuity of generations is supposed to show him that the question was settled once and for all, a long time ago.

Religion is not discussed, negotiated, criticized, or self-criticized. Religion is indisputable because it does not obey the principle of confrontation with sensible reality. It operates in another world, that of spirits, which we do not see, do not know, and which is only accessible to us through the intercession of certain very special characters who act as a bridge between the two worlds : sorcerers, magicians, oracles, astrologers, and other priests.

Religion does not confront itself. Neither with the science of nature. Nor with that of history. It is not required to do so by its own nature. It does not need to confront the material world since it is supposed to obey immaterial laws. It does not have to truly confront history since it aims at eternity. It can admit historical change in the history of men and societies (the Bible, for example, tells plenty of stories), but it does not have to submit the religious principle to a history. This principle, aiming at eternity and superpower, does not have to submit to the vagaries of history, which is of the inferior domain : that of men and earthly goods.

The first observation we wish to make concerns the durability of religions, which some authors emphasize to indicate that they consider them indispensable to humanity. The great religions seem relatively old and have seemingly withstood the many social changes, lifestyle changes, and social systems. From Buddhism to Judaism or Christianity, they have passed from ancient societies to the modern world, and this would seem to tell us that they correspond to an eternal human need... We don’t think so. At least not in these terms.

First of all, what is striking is not exactly the longevity of religions but the very large number of ancient religions that have disappeared. This shows that ideology does not hover over society. When a civilization disappears, its religion does not survive. Many people go for walks near the Egyptian temples that the whole world presents to us, but no one believes in the religion of the Pharaohs anymore ! Only Egyptologists know about it. It no longer attracts anyone. Yet it was the foundation of one of the most religious states we have known... This religion has disappeared, like the entire political, social, and civilizational mode linked to it.

Now 99% of civilizations have disappeared, leaving only a few traces underground...

The beliefs of these men disappeared with their society. There is a clear link between these beliefs and the institutions that organized them. It took temples, religious orders, and civil orders to impose them and teach them to men and children.

Religion is not independent of the way civil society functions.

In today’s cities, we cannot imagine what a religion of the bear god, or a cult of the bull, would do... So the form that belief in an ideal world has taken has changed with the real world. However, it can correspond to lasting needs...

There is the need to break with fear, the need not to fear the future, not to suffer from the death of loved ones, not to have to assume psychological burdens that are beyond us, the need to live with the enormous weight of our unconscious needs. All these may well have been needs that have passed through centuries, types of society, various modes of production while remaining human, moral, mental, psychological, and even social needs that must not be neglected.

Man does not live by bread alone. Men need myths, legends, dreams, ideals. The human brain is not content with what we know. It interprets. It needs theses on what we do not see. It invents the virtual. It embroiders on the real. It needs sciences but also philosophies. These are not necessarily religions. But religions respond to this need for a general philosophical conception.

This does not mean that religions are sufficient to meet these needs, nor that they will always be the means of meeting them...

Death plays a significant role in human society. It also plays a very important role in religions. And it is probably no coincidence that religions have sought to control all the ceremonial arts of death. They have also provided a general ideological interpretation of death, allowing each person who has lost their loved ones to feel cared for by the community in their misfortune and in the difficulties of living without that loved one.

Some scientists have believed they have found physiological bases for religious beliefs in elements of brain function. It’s possible. What is certain is that dreams, hallucinations, unconscious thoughts that come to the conscious level, intuitions, surprising thoughts upon waking, and other manifestations of a spirit within us that transcends us are elements that have led men to believe in spirits...

This does not mean that the statements, the ideologies that underlie religions, correspond to any "human nature". Indeed, these assertions have varied completely, opposing each other from one era to another, from one religion to another.

They are of the same domain as any ideology. This means that they have a history, that this history is linked to the history of the societies that carried them, that their ideologies do not depend only on a few seers, prophets or other believers, but on the material and real needs of the society that carried them.

It’s no wonder that religions were initially feminine and then macho. Society followed exactly the same evolutions... The reason for this lies not in mentalities, but primarily in lifestyles that had changed.

The institutionalized religions that have survived are all extremely hostile to women. This is immediately obvious. They all date back to the beginnings of private property ownership, where the family became the basis of this property, with recognized descent becoming a fundamental pillar of the social order. Hence the need to verify that the woman had not slept with another man. Religions have espoused this objective...

They then corresponded to a need of all societies based on private property, and this continues to this day...

After having monopolized death, these religions took control of male-female relations.

Then they took possession of the children’s under-construction ideology.

It is not surprising, under these conditions, that they have ensured a certain longevity.

However, it is an exaggeration to say that Jews practice the ancient religion, or likewise Christians and Buddhists. This is neither feasible nor conceivable.

For example, the ancient Jews were slave owners, had multiple wives, slept with their children...

Of course, neither Islam, nor Judaism, nor Buddhism, nor Christianity can be practiced as they were at the birth of these religions. We do not know what was done at that time.

Those who claim continuity do not even know that it is impossible.
THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ROLE OF RELIGIONS

1°) RELIGIONS AND METHODS OF PRODUCTION

The religious or believing person is not an individual facing nature and the world, but an element of a social whole. It is no coincidence that his belief is collective, calling upon rites, practices, and possibly texts, which are recognized and respected by an entire community. He did not create his religion alone, and it was not born separately from his way of life. All religious beliefs are aimed at the broad masses and only last if they have managed to spread. There is no such thing as an individual religion. The best way to realize this is to observe a man who comes from a remote region living in a modern city, for example, a Bushman who lived in a village and then comes to live in the capitalist city of South Africa. His belief fades very quickly, even if he regains it upon returning to the village. Outside of the social context, the gods no longer have the same power over man.

Outside of a mode of production as well. There have been various modes of production in human history and they are decisive for their way of life but also for their ideologies.

For example, we are accustomed to the religion of "creation" (the world and man created by a god), but such conceptions themselves only began to be conceived from the moment when, in the era of his relationship with nature, man became a creator and no longer a predator... Creator not only of his production of wheat, barley, but also creator of his relationship with domesticated animals. As a result, creator of his artisanal but also artistic representations. Creator of statuettes representing man. And as a result, we have man thinking of god as a creator of clay statuettes that he would then have animated, the potter god who made man from clay...

The belief that values ​​the supernatural is mainly based on what happens in real life (natural or social).

The supernatural part (spirits) is based on yet another natural mechanism : unconscious thought, hallucinations (natural or induced). The unconscious is only a real functioning of the brain that partially or totally escapes our consciousness. Thoughts that have not been consciously produced by man seem to him to come from spirits...

Man, who feels within himself a spirit different from his conscience, attributes the same spirit to animals, to springs, to trees, to deserts, to the wind, to the storm.

Man sees God in his own image. Social man sees God in his social image.

When man is part of nature, his beliefs do not remove him from it. Man who perceives himself as an animal has animal gods. Man who perceives himself as a simple family has family gods based on ancestor worship.

The more man dominates nature, the more he gives human traits to his divinities.

The man who hunts has beliefs about the hunted animals. Considering them a family of the same type as the human family, he addresses their gods to apologize for having hunted them.

For example, Mircea Eliade speaks in his "History of Beliefs and Religious Ideas" of "the behavior and spirituality specific to the hunter." "For some two million years, the Paleanthropes lived from hunting ; the fruits, roots, mollusks, etc., gathered by women and children were insufficient to ensure the survival of the species. (…) The incessant pursuit and killing of game ended up creating a system of sui generis relationships between the hunter and the slaughtered animals. (…) The "mystical solidarity" with game reveals the kinship between human societies and the animal world. Killing the hunted beast or, later, the domesticated animal, is equivalent to a "sacrifice" in which the victims are interchangeable."

Let us note that these animal-related societies developed concepts in which human sacrifices are conceivable, charged with paying the price of human society to animal spirits.
Mircea Eliade continues : "For a few million years, the Paleanthropians lived mainly from hunting, fishing and gathering. But the first archaeological indications concerning the religious universe of the Paleolithic hunter date back to Franco-Cantabrian cave art (30,000). (…) Primitive hunters considered animals as similar to men, but endowed with supernatural powers ; they believed that man could transform himself into an animal, and vice versa ; that the souls of the dead could enter animals ; finally, that there were mysterious relationships between a person and an individual animal. (…) Bones, and especially the skull, have considerable ritual value, probably because they are believed to contain the “soul,” or “life,” of the animal, and it is from the skeleton that the Lord of the Beasts will grow new flesh ; this is why the skull and long bones are exposed on branches or on high ground ; among certain peoples, the soul of the killed animal is sent to its “spiritual homeland” (cf. the “bear festival” of the Ainu and the Gilyaks) ; there is also the custom of offering to the Supreme Beings a piece of each animal killed (the Pygmies, the Negritos of the Philippines, etc.) or the skull and bones (Samoyeds, etc.) ; among certain populations of the Sudan, the young man, after having killed his first game, smears the walls of a cave with blood. (…) We can thus examine the beliefs and religious behavior of contemporary hunting peoples (…) in Tierra del Fuego, in Africa, among the Hottentos and the Bushmen, in the Arctic zone, in Australia, or in the great tropical forests (the Bambuti Pygmies, etc.). (…) These “stopped” civilizations constitute in some way “living fossils”.

And Mircea Eliade points out that many wars waged by nomadic hunting tribes against sedentary agrarian civilizations (the class struggle between hunter-herders and farmers) resemble, in their techniques and in their organization and nom de guerre, hunts against animals. This is the case of the invasions of the Indo-Europeans and the Turco-Mongols.

The man who gathers or cultivates has a belief in the annual reformation of nature, which he links to the reformation of human generations, a cult of fertility. The woman’s body, for example, is deified in relation to the fertility of the earth.

Mircéa Eliade reports :

“There is no need to emphasize the importance of the discovery of agriculture for the history of civilization. By becoming a “producer” of his food, man had to modify his ancestral behavior. Above all, he had to perfect his technique of calculating time, discovered already in the Paleolithic period. It was no longer enough for him to ensure the accuracy of certain future dates with the help of the rudimentary lunar calendar. From now on, the cultivator was obliged to develop his plans several months before their implementation, obliged to carry out, in a precise order, a series of complex activities with a view to a distant and, especially at the beginning, never certain result : the harvest. In addition, the cultivation of plants imposed a division of labor differently oriented than before, because the main responsibility without the assurance of the means of living now fell to women.
No less considerable were the consequences of the discovery of agriculture for the religious history of humanity. The domestication of plants brought about an existential situation previously inaccessible ; It therefore prompted creations and reversals of values ​​that radically altered the spiritual universe of pre-Neolithic man. (…)

A fairly widespread theme explains that food tubers and fruit trees were born from a sacrificed divinity. (…) This primordial murder radically changed the human condition, for it introduced sexuality and death, and established religious and social institutions. (…) A similar mythical theme explains the origin of food plants – tubers as well as cereals – as coming from the excretions or filth of a mythical divinity. (…) The meaning of these myths is obvious : food plants are sacred, since they derive from the body of a divinity. In feeding, man is, ultimately, eating a divine being. The food plant is no longer “given” in the world, as the animal is. It is the result of a primitive dramatic event : the product of a murder. (…) The gratification of cereals to humans is sometimes linked to a hierogamy between the god of the sky (or the atmosphere) and Mother Earth, or to a mystical drama involving sexual union, death and resurrection.

The first, and perhaps most important, consequence of the discovery of agriculture is a crisis in the values ​​of Paleolithic hunters : religious relationships with the animal world are supplanted by what can be called "the mystical solidarity between man and vegetation." If bone and blood had previously represented the essence and sacredness of life, now sperm and blood embody them. Moreover, women and feminine sacredness are promoted to the forefront. Since women have played a decisive role in the domestication of plants, they become the owners of cultivated fields, which enhances their social position and creates characteristic institutions, such as, for example, matrilocation, whereby the husband is obliged to live in his wife’s house.

The fertility of the earth is linked to female fertility ; consequently, women become responsible for the abundance of harvests, because they know the "mystery" of creation. It is a religious mystery, because it governs the origin of life, food, and death. The soil is assimilated to the woman. (…) Agricultural work is assimilated to the sexual act. (…) Certainly, maternal and feminine sacredness was not ignored in the Paleolithic, but the discovery of agriculture significantly increases its power. The sacredness of sexual life, first and foremost female sexuality, is confused with the miraculous enigma of creation. (…) The crises that endanger the harvest (floods, droughts, etc.) will be translated, in order to be understood, accepted, and mastered, into mythological dramas. These mythologies and the ritual scenarios that depend on them will dominate the civilizations of the Near East for millennia. (…) Agricultural cultures develop what can be called a “cosmic religion,” since religious activity is concentrated around the central mystery : the periodic renewal of the world. Just like human existence, cosmic rhythms are expressed in terms borrowed from plant life. The mystery of cosmic sacredness is symbolized by the World Tree. The Universe is conceived as an organism that must be renewed periodically ; in other words, every year.

Religion can have a very specific character, linked to the productive activity of men, showing that it is a matter of facing problems concerning social activity. For example, praying or making sacrifices for rain. The ancient Egyptians believed that whoever was eaten by the crocodile was taken to the bottom by the animal to go directly to the paradise of eternal life. This allowed them to accept the idea of ​​spending all day clearing the Nile marshes of reeds or hunting hippos or even washing children in the river, bearing the constant risk of hidden crocodiles.

Beliefs are not content with the world as it is. They provide interpretations of incomprehensible phenomena and tell people what to do in situations where they are attracted by what they should not do. These are taboos. They are a primitive form of social constitution. Prohibitions are the beginning of human socialization.

2°) RELIGIONS AND SOCIAL CLASSES

It should first be noted that, although religions claim to transcend classes and thus unite men, the various social classes have never truly had the same religion. All of Antiquity is full of religions, but they differ between the people and the ruling classes. The religion of the Pharaohs initially concerned only the god-king and his entourage. He alone was promised eternal life. The peasants, fishermen, hunters, and the common people of artisans of Egypt had their own beliefs. In the Gallo-Roman era, when the Romans were Christianizing the world, the Romanized Gauls, the ruling classes, were Christianized, but no one was concerned with the more ancient beliefs of the lower Gallic people, who worshipped rocks, springs, the wheel, trees...

This does not mean that the ruling classes were not concerned that the people be believers and follow moral precepts that would make society stable. Napoleon was far from being the first head of state to be concerned that the people be given opium to soften their resentment in the face of the inequalities and injustices they suffered. The state’s control over religious figures has always ensured that they do not hinder power and the ruling classes. So much so that many revolutions have found it necessary to carry out a religious revolution at the same time, dethroning religion in order to better dethrone the ruling classes and the state. Revolutions in China, as in Europe, for example, required the dethroning of religion, sometimes even if it meant creating another one, as was the case with Protestantism for the beginnings of the bourgeois revolution in Europe.

In ancient Greece, the lower classes did not have the same religion as the ruling classes. The less evolved social classes, and especially the rural dwellers, conscientiously, regularly, and perpetually applied rites whose meaning escaped them, to which they were attached by routine and the tragic fear of doing wrong. These lower classes had small, familiar deities with whom they lived in good relations on a daily basis. All of this was very close to real situations, very down-to-earth, intended to provide immediate relief in daily difficulties, to protect the family and the harvest. Dark forces were materialized and worshipped in the crudest objects. Rough stones, a remnant of the Betyl cult, and limestone pillars were worshipped. For the ruling classes, religion was not established in an institutionalized church but was based on principles. Greek religion was made up of myths whose purpose was to interpret the world, man, and his destiny. It was a very philosophical point of view, like that of Plato. While religious festivals unite the common people and the upper classes, there is a great distance between popular beliefs and the moral ideal of the ruling classes in Greece.

In India, religion and society form an inseparable whole. Hindu texts first stipulate a division of society into four major social classes, the castes, and then specify specific socio-religious roles for each of them. Thus :
• to the "Brahmins", the Creator assigned to teach and study, to sacrifice for themselves and for others (as officiants), to give and receive gifts ;

• to the "Ksatriyas", to protect creatures, to give, to sacrifice for themselves and to study, as well as not to attach themselves to sense objects ;

• to the "Vaisyas", he taught to protect cattle, to give, to sacrifice and to study, to trade, to lend at interest and to cultivate the land ;

• to the "Sudras", the Almighty enjoined a single activity, uncomplaining obedience to the first three classes.

For Islam, inequality of wealth is inscribed in human nature. Men differentiate one from another by their physical strength, their strength of character, their capacity to produce material goods... A hierarchy in the social sphere inevitably forms. However, before God, material power does not confer any political rights. Islam accepts only one criterion : piety. It is moral values ​​that distinguish men from each other. The poor and pious individual has more merit than the rich individual but with less firm religious convictions. He is therefore glorified in the text and does not have to regret his inferior status since it brings him closer to God. This is an additional guarantee of social stability.
The Quran mentions the existence of social classes and considers that they are willed by the Creator : "God has favored some of you more than others, in the distribution of his gifts" (S. XVI, 71).
Differences in wealth are therefore explicitly recognized and justified. Material inequality has been decreed by God ; it is He who determines the wealth of some and the poverty of others : "God distributes his gifts generously or measures them to whomever he wishes" (S. XIII, 26).

3°) RELIGIONS AND STATE

Current institutionalized religions were born in connection with a State. The example of the Egyptians is the most famous. The priests were one of the main powers of the Pharaonic regime. There was osmosis between this State and the foundation of religion. There was even simultaneous construction of religion and the State. See the State of Jerusalem at the collapse of the State of Israel, the gods of Olympus and the Greek State, Islam and the Muslim State. This is the case for Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Even if this link does not mean that religion was always born in dependence on the State : Buddhism was born from the crisis of the State… Some religions are openly concerned with the functioning and stability of the State, such as Confucianism. Others, like Christianity, initially had other aims (liberation of the Jewish people) but their success stemmed from their ability to serve power (the Roman State) in its ideological aims and in its mode of organization of the civil life of the dominated peoples of the empire.

Of course, historically, the relationship between state and religion has been extremely varied. But it is certain that religions before the state have nothing to do with those that appeared after. The state has so modified religious conceptions that it imposed the notion of the god-king, which was unthinkable before the existence of kings...

The first known attempt to impose a religion of a single god was that of Pharaoh Akhenaten, who aimed to remove power from the priests and impose a single power of the king. The second was that of the Jewish priests of Judah. ​​We recall that the Jews were divided into two countries : Israel and Judah. ​​Israel, agricultural and more prosperous, accepted the gods of the neighboring peoples with whom it traded. Judah, centered on livestock, displayed a claim to greater piety to accuse its neighbor of having broken with God. And this single god was imposed by a single power, that of the king of Jerusalem. Deuteronomy—the first monotheistic Jewish text, even if it did not yet deny other gods—appears to have been written around 622 BC. BC when King Josiah intends to make Yahweh the only God of Judah and prevent him from being worshipped in different forms, as seems to be the case in Samaria or Teman, with the idea of ​​making Jerusalem the only legitimate holy place of the national divinity and of royal power the sole power of the Jewish people. After the destruction of the Jewish kingdom, it was necessary to justify the fact that the chosen people had lost their kingdom. This is the goal from then on of the Jewish leaders who explain that God has punished his people for their lack of piety. The people will find their country and will have a State when the Messiah returns to earth and, at the end of time, restores "the kingdom of God in Israel."

H. Lloyd Jones explains how, in ancient Greece, the god Zeus is the model king, the basileus. He is responsible for the well-being of his subjects. He has power over the earth but must respect a universal order consisting of making his subjects happy. He is the protector of rights and customs. Gradually, Zeus takes all power over the other gods.

4°) RELIGIONS AND REVOLUTION

Many social revolutions in history have taken a religious banner. This stems from the significant role of the religious order in the old social order. To shake it, it was also necessary to break the old religion. And one way was to produce another. This is the case, for example, of a large part of the bourgeois revolution : for example, Protestantism in Switzerland, Germany, or England.

“The indestructibility of the Protestant heresy corresponded to the invincibility of the rising bourgeoisie ; when the latter had become sufficiently strong, its struggle against the feudal nobility, which until then had been almost exclusively local in character, began to assume national proportions. The first great action took place in Germany : this is what is called the Reformation. The bourgeoisie was neither strong nor developed enough to be able to unite under its banner the other rebellious orders : the plebeians of the towns, the lesser nobility of the countryside, and the peasants. The nobility was beaten first ; the peasants rose up in an insurrection which constitutes the culmination of this whole revolutionary movement ; the towns abandoned them, and thus the revolution succumbed to the armies of the princes, who drew all the profit from it. From that day on, Germany was to disappear for three centuries from the ranks of countries which play an autonomous role in history. But alongside the German Luther, there was the Frenchman Calvin. With a very French rigor, Calvin brought the bourgeois character of the Reformation to the forefront, republicanized and democratized the Church. While in Germany the Lutheran Reformation was bogged down and leading the country to ruin, the Calvinist Reformation served as a banner for the republicans in Geneva, Holland, and Scotland, freed Holland from the yoke of Spain and the German Empire, and provided the second act of the bourgeois revolution, which was taking place in England, with its ideological clothing. Here Calvinism proved to be the true religious disguise for the interests of the bourgeoisie of the time, so it was not fully recognized when the revolution of 1689 ended in a compromise between a section of the nobility and the bourgeoisie. The English national church was reestablished, not in its former form, as a Catholic Church, with the king as pope, but strongly Calvinized. The old national church had celebrated the joyful Catholic Sunday and fought the dreary Calvinist Sunday, the new bourgeois church introduced the latter, which still beautifies England today,” writes Friedrich Engels in “Ludwig Feuerbach.”

5°) RELIGIONS AND SOCIALISM

Lenin wrote in 1905 in "Socialism and Religion" :

"Modern society is based entirely on the exploitation of the great masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population belonging to the landowning and capitalist classes. It is a slave-owning society, because the "free" workers who work all their lives for capital have "rights" only to those means of existence strictly necessary for the maintenance of the slaves producing the profits, which make it possible to ensure and perpetuate capitalist slavery.

The economic oppression that weighs on the workers inevitably provokes and engenders, in various forms, political oppression, social degradation, the brutalization and degradation of the intellectual and moral life of the masses. The workers can obtain a greater or lesser political freedom in order to fight for their economic emancipation, but no freedom will rid them of poverty, unemployment and oppression as long as the power of capital is not abolished. Religion is one of the aspects of the spiritual oppression that always and everywhere overwhelms the popular masses, crushed by perpetual work for the benefit of others, by misery and isolation. Faith in a better life in the hereafter is born just as inevitably from the impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters as belief in gods, devils, and miracles is born from the impotence of the savage in his struggle against nature. To those who toil their whole lives in misery, religion teaches patience and resignation here below, lulling them with the hope of a heavenly reward. As for those who live off the labor of others, religion teaches them benevolence here below, thus offering them an easy justification for their existence as exploiters and selling them cheap tickets to divine bliss. Religion is the opium of the people. Religion is a kind of spiritual alcohol in which the slaves of capital drown their human image and their claim to an existence at least somewhat worthy of man.

But the slave who has become aware of his condition and risen up for the struggle that must free him, already half ceases to be a slave. The conscious worker of today, formed by large-scale industry, educated by the city, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois hypocrites and devotes himself to the conquest of a better existence on this earth. The modern proletariat sides with socialism, which appeals to science to combat the fumes of religion and, by organizing the worker in a genuine struggle for a better earthly condition, frees him from belief in the afterlife.

Religion must be declared a private matter ; this is how the attitude of socialists toward religion is usually defined. But it is important to determine exactly what these words mean, in order to avoid any misunderstanding. We demand that religion be a private matter vis-à-vis the State, but we can in no way regard religion as a private matter as far as our own Party is concerned. The State must not meddle in religion, religious societies must not be linked to the State power. Everyone must be perfectly free to profess any religion or to recognize none, that is, to be an atheist, as socialists generally are. No difference in civil rights motivated by religious beliefs must be tolerated. Any mention of the confession of citizens in official papers must be unquestionably suppressed. The state must not grant any subsidies to the Church or to confessional or religious associations, which must become associations of co-religionist citizens, entirely free and independent of the authorities. Only the complete realization of these demands can put an end to this shameful and accursed past, in which the Church was subservient to the State, Russian citizens being in turn subservient to the State Church, in which medieval inquisitorial laws existed and were applied (maintained to this day in our (egalitarian) provisions), which persecuted belief or unbelief, violated conscience, and made promotions and official remuneration dependent on the distribution of this or that clerical elixir. The complete separation of Church and State is the demand of the socialist proletariat with regard to the modern State and Church.

The Russian Revolution must bring this demand to fruition as an integral and indispensable part of political freedom. In this respect, the Russian Revolution is placed in particularly favorable conditions, the detestable bureaucratic regime of the feudal and police autocracy having provoked discontent, excitement, and indignation even among the clergy. However miserable and ignorant the Russian Orthodox clergy may have been, it nevertheless awoke to the crash of the fall of the old regime, of the medieval regime in Russia. The clergy itself today supports the demand for freedom, rises up against official bureaucracy and administrative arbitrariness, the police surveillance imposed on the "ministers of God." We socialists must support this movement by pushing to the end the demands of the honest and sincere representatives of the clergy, by taking them at their word when they speak of freedom, by demanding that they resolutely break all links between religion and the police. Either you are sincere, and you must therefore demand the complete separation of Church and State, of school and Church, and demand that religion be declared a private matter, absolutely and categorically. Or you do not subscribe to these consistent demands for freedom, and this means that you are still prisoners of inquisitorial traditions, that you still want access to promotions and official remuneration, that you do not believe in the power of your spiritual weapons, that you continue to accept bribes from the State ; and then the class-conscious workers of Russia declare merciless war on you.

In relation to the party of the socialist proletariat, religion is not a private matter. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, vanguard militants fighting for the emancipation of the working class. This association cannot and must not remain indifferent to unconsciousness, ignorance, or obscurantism in the form of religious beliefs. We demand the complete separation of Church and State in order to combat the fog of religion with purely and exclusively ideological weapons : our press, our propaganda. But our association, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, at its founding, set itself the goal, among other things, of combating any religious stupefaction of the workers. For us, the struggle of ideas is not a private matter ; it concerns the entire Party, the entire proletariat.

But since this is so, why don’t we declare ourselves atheists in our program ? Why don’t we ban Christians and believers from entering our Party ?

The answer to this question will bring out the very important difference in the views of bourgeois democracy and social democracy on religion.

Our program is based entirely on a scientific, rigorously materialist philosophy. To explain our program, it is therefore necessary to explain the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes that of atheism ; and the publication for this purpose of a scientific literature which the autocratic and feudal regime has proscribed and severely prosecuted until today must now become one of the branches of our Party’s activity. We will probably have to follow the advice that Engels once gave to the German socialists : to translate and disseminate among the masses the atheistic and demystifying French literature of the 18th century.

But in no case must we be led astray by the idealistic abstractions of those who pose the religious problem in terms of "pure reason," outside the class struggle, as radical democrats from the bourgeoisie often do. It would be absurd to believe that, in a society based on the boundless oppression and brutalization of the working masses, religious prejudices can be dispelled by propaganda alone. To forget that the religious oppression of humanity is only the product and reflection of economic oppression within society would be to show bourgeois mediocrity. Neither books nor propaganda will enlighten the proletariat if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. The unity of this truly revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class fighting to create for itself a paradise on earth is more important to us than the unity of opinion of the proletarians about the paradise in heaven.

This is why, in our program, we do not and should not proclaim our atheism ; this is why we do not and should not prohibit proletarians, who have retained some remnant of their old prejudices, from approaching our Party. We will always advocate the scientific outlook ; it is essential that we fight against the inconsistency of certain "Christians," but this does not mean at all that we must put the religious question in the foreground, a place that does not belong to it ; that we must allow the forces engaged in the truly revolutionary political and economic struggle to be divided in the name of third-rate opinions or chimeras, which rapidly lose all political value and are very quickly relegated to the dump by the very course of economic development.

The reactionary bourgeoisie has everywhere taken care to stir up religious hatreds - and it is beginning to do so in our country - in order to attract the attention of the masses in this direction and to divert them from the truly fundamental economic and political problems, problems which are now being solved by the Russian proletariat, which is practically uniting in its revolutionary struggle. This reactionary policy of fragmenting proletarian forces, which is manifested today above all by the pogroms of the Black Hundreds, will perhaps find more subtle measures tomorrow. We will oppose it in any case with calm, firm, patient propaganda, which refuses to excite secondary disagreements, the propaganda of proletarian solidarity and of the scientific outlook on the world.

The revolutionary proletariat will eventually impose that religion become a truly private matter for the State. And, in this political regime freed from the medieval mold, the proletariat will engage in a broad and open struggle for the abolition of economic slavery, the true cause of the religious stupefaction of humanity.