New CPUSA Religion Commission Begins Work

Author: People's Weekly World
First published 06/16/2009
Reprinted from the People's Weekly World
http://cpusa.org/article/view/1050/





CHICAGO — The Communist Party USA has established a new Religion Commission to strengthen its work among religious people and organizations. In its leadership are activists representing various religious traditions from around the country. Tim Yeager, a Chicago trade unionist and a member of the Episcopal Church, serves as its chair.

“We want to reach out to religious people and communities, to find ways of improving our coalition work with them, and to welcome people of faith into the party,” Yeager said. “We invite questions and responses from people who would like to dialogue with us on matters pertaining to religion, Marxism and the struggle for more peaceful, just and secure world.”

There is a common misconception concerning the position of the Communist Party USA about religion, Yeager noted. Many who are unfamiliar with the party wrongly assume that all Communists are atheists, or that the party requires its members to be atheists. Nothing could be farther from the truth, he said. Religious people are welcome to join. The party’s Constitution specifically states that membership is open to “[a]ny person living in the United States, 18 years of age or over, regardless of race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, or religious belief…”

Yeager acknowledged that relations between some Marxist parties and religious institutions in other parts of the world have been marked by conflict. In tsarist Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church had been an arm of the state, and its leadership was opposed to the Revolution. The Bolsheviks adopted an official atheist position, and for many years waged a struggle against organized religion. Elsewhere, such as in Latin America, Marxist parties and religious progressives have worked together against repressive regimes and imperialist intervention.

“There has been no state church in the United States since shortly after we gained our independence, and we have a tradition of religious diversity,” Yeager said. “The so-called Christian Right in recent years has certainly made progress, but some of the greatest leaders in our history have been men and women of faith, and our party has been proud to work with them. The best known example, of course, would be the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

The Religion Commission will be producing articles on matters pertaining to religion and social progress, he said. Its goal is to share with the broader people’s movement the party’s thinking on the religious aspects of current struggles, taking up theoretical questions, and discussing the relationships, contradictions and commonalities among science, Marxism and religion. The commission also announced plans to hold a series of gatherings around the country, open to the public, to discuss how people from religious traditions and the party can better work together, building toward a national conference in 2010.

“As Marx said, the goal is not merely to explain the world, but to change it. We hope that the new Religion Commission will help build greater unity toward that end,” Yeager said. “We welcome people from faith communities to join us.”

For more information, contact Tim Yeager at rtyeager @ gmail.com

Gregory Rodriguez: Asking the right god question

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-rodriguez_12edi.ART.State.Edition1.4ad094f.html
Sunday, October 12, 2008

Gregory Rodriguez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is director of the California Fellows Program at the New America Foundation. His e-mail address is grodriguez@ latimescolumnists.com.

Forget Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. These atheists du jour have nothing on the most famous anti-theist of all time. Good old Karl Marx is still the most eloquent and thoughtful nonbeliever, and his "religion is the opium of the masses" is still the best one-liner in the business.
But as famous as that zinger is, it's too bad that most people have never read the sentences that come before and after it. Marx was a whole lot more sympathetic to religious faith than most people give him credit for. He saw religion as a source of solace that should be abolished only until the sources of people's pain – an unfair economic system – had been eradicated.

"Religious suffering, " he wrote in 1844, "is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."

Marx wasn't just another hater of religion as a childish fantasy or a retreat from rationality. He saw faith as a symptom and not the disease, and he was interested in faith not in terms of right and wrong but because of what it told him about the human condition.

That's a far cry from the tenor of today's brand of assertive atheism. According to surveys, atheists make up only about 4 percent of the U.S. population, or about 5 million adults. But thanks to a slew of best-selling books and Mr. Maher's new film, Religulous, atheism has never had a higher profile in this country.
And, of course, you could ascribe at least some of the resurgence of assertive atheism to a backlash against evangelical Christians and the way they have assertively injected religion into civic life.

Like so many other public debates, the one over religion is dominated by extremes. But a new study out of Northwestern University gets at something much more interesting. It starts to provide data and insight that add to our ability to understand what Marx was getting at – not if there is a God and not whether it makes sense that humans should believe, but simply why humans believe.

The study, by psychology professor Dan McAdams and researcher Michelle Albaugh, was aimed at finding out about the religious sources of political leanings. They interviewed 128 devout Christians in and around Chicago, and they avoided the usual questions of "How do you know God exists" or even "Why do you believe?" Instead, they asked their subjects to describe what their lives and the world would be like if they did not have faith. In other words, what would the world be like if
Christopher Hitchens were right and there were no God?

The study analyzes the results mostly in terms of political divisions. It found that politically conservative Christians described a godless world "as one of incessant conflict and chaos, expressing strong apprehension regarding people's inability to control their impulses and the attendant breakdown of social relationships and societal institutions."

Liberal Christians, on the other hand, had a different set of concerns. For them, a world without God would be "barren or lifeless, lacking in color and texture, an empty wasteland that would not sustain them" and in which they would feel lost.
All of the respondents generally imagined life without God as "entailing fear, sadness, interpersonal isolation and loss of meaning and hope."

The political findings are intriguing, but not nearly as interesting as the way the question and the answers it elicited get at deeper, core issues. It appears that we do believe out of need, but it's not, as Marx suggested, primarily because of material deprivation. Instead, it looks as if faith answers fear, and many different kinds of fear, which we can begin to delineate in some detail.

In the end, even these specifics don't intrigue me as much as this fact: Zero-sum arguments about faith and faithlessness just go round and round, generating heat and no light. It's better to return to real knowledge and fundamental questions.
Rather than arguing over the existence of God, rather than playing believer-nonbeliever gotcha, we learn a whole lot more if we just keep asking ourselves – in as many new ways as possible – why it is that so many of us feel compelled to pray.

Gregory Rodriguez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is director of the California Fellows Program at the New America Foundation. His e-mail address is grodriguez@ latimescolumnists.com.