Marc Lamont Hill SLAMS Black Preachers for Letting 'Genocide Joe' Exploit The Church, starts about 1:12

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[–]Promyka5When in the course of human events... 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yeah, that might work better. I recognize the gatekeeping function of the Church that had to be overcome at such great cost at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Rennaisance (Galileo's recantation, for instance), but the overpowering influence of the Church had waned considerably by the time Marx wrote his Opiate line, explaining why he might have chosen that word over another word, like 'straitjacket' or 'cudgel.'

I think that the contemporary function of the Church (or rather, the splintered collection of denominations and sects that we might instead refer collectively to as 'churches') might be more accurately viewed as supporting dissidence rather than as oppressive to it. Remember that churches were systemically shut down at the opening moment of the lockdown in 2020, probably to reduce dissidence to the naked authoritarianism, dissidence that they might have suborned. Although I'm not religious myself, nor a member of any congregation, I recognize that a considerable source of such dissidence in discussions of this and many other issues in our contemporary social milieu is that collection of various congregations that we call churches.

I think the cell phone and social media serve such a function to a much lesser degree, and serve the function of suppressing independent thought to a much greater degree.

[–]Maniak🥃😾 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Remember that churches were systemically shut down at the opening moment of the lockdown in 2020

Might depend on the area, because I also remember that at least over here, churches were one of the first places, if not the only ones, where people were still allowed to gather even though everything else was locked down, because reasons :)

But overall yeah, the social gathering aspect of churches can absolutely be a good thing, like any place where people gather and build communities can be. The community is the important part. The religious part is an implementation detail, but one that bring with it a hell of a lot of baggage.

My issue with it isn't about that social gathering aspect, but maybe more in line with the opiate thing, the "crowd control" aspect of organized religions, or any other organization that's focused on getting as many people as possible to blindly believe what they're being told and to be willing to drop all personal critical thought and simply follow, as if in a daze. Religions, and all cults, are the most obvious example, but we've seen the same principles and behaviors with C19, Russiagate, Ukraine, basically everything about 'american exceptionalism', ...

Any pattern that consists of a few narrative managers controlling the behavior of masses of people is a problem in my (not-holy) book. There isn't much of a difference between believing that some magic book is full of truth and morality, and believing that MSNBC tells the truth and should be trusted implicitly. It's just that one has been around and done damage for much longer and it affects more people, but the principle is the same.

Maybe religion was still the main vehicle for this when Marx did his thing, but nowadays the same principles have been taken and applied to many other things. It doesn't make religion less bad but it does mean that it's more important than ever to recognize those patterns because they've multiplied so much and are so much more easy to apply to even more people thanks to modern tech.