Radio reminder

Oh snap, so the revolution has begun?? I knew I should have kept that tin foil hat.

*runs off to buy tin foil at my local Wal-Mart™*

Obligatory zip code instructions: 55xxx will be fine.

...never mind the RCP is something of a cult in their own right...

An anarchist friend of mine who did his undergrad work at Berkeley said he was actually incensed that the RCP bookstore closes for Christmas and accepts most major credit cards...he thought that was hypocritical of them.

To be honest, I don't know what the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA actually is, although I tend to be suspicious of things that claim to be revolutionary - it carries connotations for me of an anti-democratic tendency, a deeply suspicious conviction which often, at least in the past, has been associated with the sort of "keys-to-history" transhistorical approach to politics and society which treats all the diversity of stakeholder politics as mere manifestations of some form of transhistorical tendency. Not that this is the only thing 'revolutionary' can mean in a political context (many of its other applications are benign and I fully accept them), but one can't be too sceptical of these things. I'll certainly be listening.

All Gods? Including Marx and Lenin and/or Mao?

I've always thought communism (as implemented in real life, not the hypothetical you find on paper) bore a striking resemblance to a fundamentalist religion. It involves total faith in and obedience to a higher power (the party) and demands that its subjugates have no other similar belief (such as a competing religious affiliation).

But regardless of all that, is pro-atheism rhetoric from a member of an organization called "The Revolutionary Communist Party" really the kind of press freethinkers need?

Check this out... terrific stand up comedy about Religion VS. Science

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHesg_zdkFw

One very drunken night, using a marker, I scrawled above the entrance of The Revolutionary Bookstore (A RCP business) Mao For Fucking God! For some odd reason, my message was not there the next time I went past the place. My assumption was that they think Mao is higher up the hierarchy than god.

SC, we need to get a real anarchist on the show.

Hmm. I see that the US left is about as unified as the shower of egotists that we have here in the UK. Mention a rival outfit and watch the cat-fight begin. Depressing.

@Dave: Yeah - the People's Front of Judaea vs the People's Judaean Front - and both hate the Popular Front of Judaea. Something like Edinborough vs England until someone from Glasgow shows up.

@vinraith

Surely you're thinking of "Marxist-Leninism" in particular and not "communism" in general? Many communists opposed the authoritarian methods of Lenin and his ilk, such as Rosa Luxembourg and Anton Pannekoek to name a few.

I've always thought communism (as implemented in real life, not the hypothetical you find on paper) bore a striking resemblance to a fundamentalist religion. It involves total faith in and obedience to a higher power (the party) and demands that its subjugates have no other similar belief (such as a competing religious affiliation).

The comparison goes even further, since Communism has sacred literature, hierarchy, rituals, prophets, martyrs and other saints, schisms resulting from disputes over minutiae comprehensible only to fanatics, and various other paraphernalia that come with religion.

Theists sometimes make the claim that "commies killed millions because of atheism." This is wrong. Many of those people were killed because they were heretics or unbelievers. The KGB (NKVD, OGPU, Cheka, etc.) performed the same function as the Inquisition. Torquemada and Felix Dzerzhinsky had the same duties for their respective religions.

@#12.

Cor! But hang on... er, Lamarck [John the Baptist], Darwin [god], The Origin [bible], Huxley [St Paul], Herbert Spencer/JBS Haldane/Stephen Jay Gould [various saints], social Darwinism and racism [heresy], puctuated equilibrium [disputes about minutiae], biology departments in universities [inquisition].

It would appear that the whole of modern biology is a bit like Catholicism too. Crikey.

Does the link work for anyone? I'm getting a "temporarily unavailable" message.

Here is the direct click to the radio station:

http://www.am950ktnf.com/listen

use 55112.....

Use this link to listen:
http://www.airamericamn.com:8000/listen.pls

The site has crapped out. One of the "benefits" of shared hosting.

Dave (13),

None of that is sacred to atheists or biologists or other scientists. You should know that!

The site is back up. Hooray!

Down again.

Rand sucks huh?

she stood up for your right to speak.

Testing… 1… 2… 3…
Sorry for the noise, my internet connection was done all week (mix of ISP server upgrade and(?) France Telcom line upgrade).
Yea! Seems to be working…
Amazingly, I even remembered my Type{Key,Pad} password.
Service-with-a-snark will be restored soon.
Now, back to the normal deprograming…

I'm glad many people here recognize the religious nature of Communism. If the idea of new religions is brought up, I think things like Scientology come to peoples minds, but things like that are not really new religions, they're directly designed to look religious whereas real religions don't generally acknoledge themselves as one of many religions till they have to for diplomacy. Thus these pseudo-religions are crudely formed to look like other religions, and thus have an old nature about them, such as an origins story. I think Communism, Objectivism and Nazism are real examples of new religions, that while they are started and structured on the writings of one person (as with the old religions) evolve and morph to circumstances. I would also point out that no religion tries to go against known fact initially, they fill in blanks and uncertainties. This is why Judaism says the world is flat but Islam acknowledges its roundness. It's also why the new religions are silent on origins, because it was known or at least starting to be known. Well what was uncertain at the time of the new religions? Its something Communism and Objectivism go on about a lot, economics, sociology and psychology were largely unknown, and new religions fill in a lot of the blanks of these with dogma. This is really just a hypothesis but I think it seems to fit.

Dave, I find it's not a matter of political leaning, but a matter of degree . . . are you merely passionate or a "True Believer". These RCP folk are True Believers and don't think for a minute that if they (like the Xian Dominionists) had a real chance at carrying out a violent revolution that they would hesitate for a second. Most people on either side of the political spectrum will argue with you, maybe even threaten you, but only a True Believer will pull the trigger.

Where did I just see a story about fundamentalists having fits when told that the Moon wasn't self luminous? (Lesser light to rule the night, therefore contradicting the Bible). I am sure any biologist or well informed layman could go thru the Origin saying, 'Well, Darwin was wrong about that,' or 'Well. genetics were not understood then,' or whatever. Hardly the attitude toward the 'infallible' Bible.

gaypaganunitarianagnostic: I'm pretty sure the description of biology as being like religion was only satirising #12, not actually meant to be considered true.

The podcast is now available, if you'd like to hear how Sunsara answered comments very similar to some of these.

The comparison goes even further, since Communism has sacred literature, hierarchy, rituals, prophets, martyrs and other saints, schisms resulting from disputes over minutiae comprehensible only to fanatics, and various other paraphernalia that come with religion.

All that is missing is an afterlife: only Kim Jong-il has got one so far (...and Mao, by being incorporated into Chinese folk religion).

Lamarck [John the Baptist], Darwin [god], The Origin [bible], Huxley [St Paul], Herbert Spencer/JBS Haldane/Stephen Jay Gould [various saints], social Darwinism and racism [heresy], puctuated equilibrium [disputes about minutiae], biology departments in universities [inquisition].

Yawn. Lamarck got a lot right, but the most basic things he got completely wrong; Darwin got a lot wrong (ever heard of his theory of heredity? No? It's not taught, because it's dead wrong); like its author, The Origin is fallible and does indeed contain errors, and almost nobody ever cites it; all those "saints" were just geniuses that made one big error per lifetime; and the comparison to the inquisition is just ridiculous – why not to the color green?

I'll happily grant the point about punk eek. You just need to know that scientists are by definition nitpickers. The overblown controversy has increased our knowledge: we now know that punk eek occurs most but not all of the time.

(I wanted to insert a link to the pdf of Benton & Pearson 2001, the TREE paper which reviews that issue. But only parts of the Internet work for me this evening. Very strange, very frustrating.)

[...] Judaism says the world is flat but Islam acknowledges its roundness.

So? There are imams in Pakistan who preach that the world is flat and call everything else heresy. Was in a newspaper a few years ago.

David Marjanović, OM: Again, I'm pretty sure that #13 is ironic, see what it is addressed to. Arguably the irony doesn't work, because the ways in which Leninism resembles religion might not be so shallow as those suggested for biology but that's a different question.

On the communism/religion thing, I've seen it argued that Marx's theory of history was very specifically "Christianity shaped" (the Original Sin of private property, salvation through the sacrifices of the workers, a utopian future way out in the future that makes all our suffering worthwhile) and couldn't have been conceived outside of a Christian context. It may be bollocks, but it's worth bringing up if Christians are telling you that tenuous paths of intellectual descent from Darwinian evolution to Nazism or Communism mean that science is teh Evil.

Sigh... every time I try to convince my fundy relations that being an atheist doesn't make you a "Commie" or even a leftist something like this comes up and I have to start all over again.