Red Star Ministry: Marxism, Theology, & The Human Condition
Added 2025-08-11 20:37:01 +0000 UTCAlyson and Breht are guests on the Red Star Ministry Podcast, a Christian Communist outlet. Together with the host Christian, they discuss Alyson and Breht's evolving personal relationship with religion and atheism, the Dialectics of Nature and Human Consciousness, Spinozist Philosophy, Marxist Philosophy, Post-Atheism and much more.
Comments
I agree with your point, I actuallly would argue the mystical and the organized aspects of religion are THEMSELVES in a dialectical process of inter-penetration and unfolding. I hope I do not come across as saying there is no place for organized or even belief-centered religion, just that it must in open engagement with transformative and experiential spirituality as well as with the world at large!
Revolutionary Left Radio
2025-08-20 19:30:19 +0000 UTCThoughts and prayers to Alyson as a fellow fugitive from a Baptist upbringing lol. Nothing good coming out of that hive rn! Grim!
Matt Pierce
2025-08-14 11:44:03 +0000 UTCThere is this neat dialectical irony, that only by going through idealism, materialism can fully become materialistic. We, as Marxists, are already familiar with this through taking up dialectics from Hegel. Over time, I have become increasingly more convinced that a similar movement is going on with religion/spirituality. The conventional understanding of materialism, even when it implements some dialectical insights, is very much confined to a sort of empirical, scientific rationalism. While the scientific method is the necessary basis to open the world for reason and defeating superstitions, we can never fully articulate the totality of being within a complete rationality that leaves no remainder. The generation of knowledge, the definition of new concepts always requires us to cut something out of its organic existence and to turn it into a thing of the mind, therefore enabling a sort of positivist idealism. Every gain in that regard also always includes a loss. Dialectics is one of the major tools to become aware of this contradiction and to help us keep our thinking fluid enough to take on other perspectives if needed. However, to each specific rationality there will always be inextricably tied a remainder of irrationality: every logos casts its shadow. The analogy I like to employ here is a mathematical one. The set of real numbers is differentiated from rational numbers by the so called irrational numbers (like Pi), which escape the clear rational articulation as a fraction of two integers. Irrationality here does not mean non-sense but instead indicates a sort of “between the lines”. Something we cannot put into words, something we only feel intuitively. Of course this is also the sphere, where bias and actual non-sense come from or grow in, but it is never just that. Religion relates to our intuition of the absolute, to our being-in-the world and to the fundamental relation we have with others as well as with nature. If we are nature understanding itself, the mirrors in which the world looks at itself, God is the Urbild (inverse image) in that relation. To gain full understanding of our material world, acquiring an intuition for the between the lines, is necessary. And often religious or spiritual traditions have a much finer sense (as wells a much greater pool of techniques and conceptualisations) for this irrationality, while of course also still harbouring all kinds of crude idealisms and irrationalities of the bad kind. Nevertheless, Marxism on its own, at the moment, feels a little too shallow in that regard. And I see Breht’s journey as a proof of this, where this gap moves more and more to the center of contemplation. I really like the articulation of post-atheism in this episode. That being said, I think leftists who try to appropriate religious insights tend to start from a too narrow perspective. I do agree that you find a spectrum from (liberating, unconventional) Mysticism to (traditional, conservative) Organized Religion in every major faith. However, I don’t like to label Mysticism as left (good) and Organized Religion as right (bad). A faith is not necessarily better the more it breaks with traditions or the more individualistic, esoteric and detached from everyday life it becomes. Conversely, an authority of tradition and collective institutions does not necessarily have to be tied to regressive dogmas, but can also convey respect for accumulated wisdom and practical experience against the pretensions of particularity. While the mystic traditions can offer some deep and important insights into the foundations of faith (which also generally have the longest shelf life), the institutionalized or organized religion is where religion is alive, present and practical, even though that means it gets sullied by the sins of its time. That is, for example, why I think the Catholic faith has a much richer and livelier pool of experiences, aesthetics and techniques than the Protestant traditions have, even though, I deeply acknowledge the necessary insights and revolutions that Protestantism has caused within the Christian faith. The crusades, witch hunts and inquisitions – which is what most would put up against Catholicism – is at the same time a testament that it has actually been part of history, as really existing Christianity with all the horrible mistakes and corruptions that accompany that. In religion (and I would even say in Marxism) the liberating, subversive strains have their place and time just like their traditional and conservative aspects do (in Marxism the historicity and the negation of negation). It is clear why in the past the political left-wing has been more closely tied to the more mystical, “religiously anarchistic” sides of religions. However, here in the West, in our very liberal, individualistic and increasingly isolating societies, I think the conservative aspects of collective identity and communal tradition are actually becoming more and more important. I am not sure the left has fully realized that potential shift yet, as it pertains not only to religion but to culture in general.
Max
2025-08-13 12:53:10 +0000 UTC
