• 5 Posts
  • 115 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 22nd, 2024

help-circle










  • For example, most religions tend to accept suffering and poverty as a given, as a test or as something that in general is by design. Assigning virtue to being oppressed …

    Islam acknowledges poverty and wealth to be given in the sense that it is not by the virtue or failing of the individual that he or she is rich/poor. This is contradicting the neoliberal mantra, that it is totally the individuals fault and thereby justified.

    Furthermore it is the duty of the rich to help the poor and it is the right of the poor upon the rich to be helped by them.This is why mandatory donations for the wealthy are an obligation equal to prayer and fasting.

    God tests people with poverty and with wealth. Also Islam with its prohibition of interest is incompatibile with capitalism. Christianity and Judaism also prohibit interest, but a millenia long effort to twist the prohibition away eventually suceeded.

    If in millennia every religion ever has been used to crystalize a power hierarchy in humanity (from the clergy to caste systems), maybe there is a reason. And the reason is that religious thinking and mindset inherently enables these hierarchies.

    Again you are describing institutionalization. On the contrary if someone is steadfast in their belief, they will obey God and not the worldly leaders, if those demand something in violation of the faith. This also creates a measure for the legitimacy of leaders that cannot be set by the leaders themselves. So what the historical and current leaders are doing is to try to corrupt existing religious institutions or build institutions so they can be corrupted. The hierarchy is inserted into the religiom by existing hierachies.

    To further argue that point. What became of Soviet Russia? Maos China? Eastern Germany? All the other Warsaw pact countries? All of them were hostile to religion on a range from surveillance and coercion to death squads murdering clergy by the tens of thousands and razing places of worship down to the foundations.

    Authoritarianism finds any tool to impose unjust hierarchies. And it creates its own idols to worship. Be it the market, the great chairman, the 5 year plan, the supreme race, the expanding imperium…

    All these idols share one crucial aspect. They are geared towards material aspects in this world. And this is a great weakness of communist revolutionary thought. It chains itself to compete with the capitalists in the struggle for capital accumulation and distribution. Thereby communist thought is enslaving the working class to remain producers and consumers.


  • As i have written:

    What we have seen over the last century is the result of deliberate meddling by outside imperial forces that promoted wahabism and other extremist strands twisting Islam into being a tool of oppression and riddling it with hypocrisy.

    To your statement:

    Religion is a form of institutionalized control and oppression, and as such is a fundamental enemy of the working class.

    A common argument is that Jesus would be a socialist by todays definitions, condemning the corruption of the rich and sitting with the poor. The prophet Mohamed, blessing and peace be upon him, was persecuted by the polytheists because Islam was challenging their business model surrounding the idol worship and they tried to coopt him into furthering their economic agenda. Moses was liberating his entire people from enslavement under the Pharaoh. The Abrahamic prophets all fought injustice and corruption in their society.

    I agree with you that the institutionalization is an issue, but that is an issue of the particular institutions, not the religion itself.


  • you have mosques kicking off every morning,

    Have you ever been to Southern and Central Europe? Churches ringing their bells every day. Villages being mostly dark at night, with the church being shined on with a dozen spotlights. Religious festivities including parades around holidays. Priests and Nuns casually walking in the streets.

    Islam is noticeable in everyday life everywhere (to the extent that I feel that you have a substantially higher religious freedom in Europe as a muslim),

    As you can see with the statement above, the fact that religion is “noticeable in everyday life everywhere” has nothing to do with religious freedom.

    and if you do something that is socially (and therefore religiously - as there’s a nonexistent division between church, states and culture here) risque, you can also gtfo. so what?

    Islam is quite accommodating and tolerant to other religions. Religious minorities enjoy protection and are allowed to practice their ways even when it contradicts Islamic law, such as Christian being permitted alcohol. What we have seen over the last century is the result of deliberate meddling by outside imperial forces that promoted wahabism and other extremist strands twisting Islam into being a tool of oppression and riddling it with hypocrisy.

    Also we see how religious minorities are instrumentalized to start divisions and civil wars in places like Syria and Lebanon. Areas where Christians and Jews have lived for Millennia and built vibrant communities, with religious tensions being the rare exception. Or looking at Iberian Peninsula, where the Jewish community fared well for centuries under Islamic governance, until the Christian conquerors slaughtered them and forced them into conversion and hiding like the Muslims.

    Finally the western nation state model is incompatible with Islamic governance, but again was imposed upon Muslim majority countries.






  • Which only has rather limited information derivable from it. The most “identifying” would be to vote regularly on a community dedicated to your local area.

    If you don’t trust your instance with knowing your IP-address, then the issue is not going to be solved by “anonymous voting”. Because your instance has to know if you voted on something or not, so votes cannot be done multiple times. This is unavoidable and equal to the situation when using reddit. Except that you can choose a different instance if you distrust the current instance.

    OP either did not think through what he is claiming or he is driven by an agenda.


  • It is a bit more complicated than that.

    First of all the social security system in Germany should not be tax funded. It is a mandatory insurance which should finance its activities through the insurance rate collected on income. However with demographic shifts and the like it is notoriously unstable, in particular the pension fund. So what happens is the social securities being cross financed from tax money.

    Like with climate change, we are talking about the issue since more than 30 years, the problematic effects are becoming ever more apparent, but no government is willing to address the fundamental issues, instead kicking the can down the road, until the system will collapse.

    Then another issue is that the government activities are far from sufficient and it is en vogue to attack social security further. Especially in the last years we saw an unprecedented rise in people relying on food banks as unemployment checks and the equivalent for refugees, who are prohibited from working, are insufficient. But rather than adjust the payments to reflect the rising costs of living, we see a distraction debate about people “refusing to work” which make up only a tiny minority of people receiving benefits, but the goal is to abolish unemployment insurance.

    Then another issue is that nonprofits are often used by rich families to circumvent inheritance tax. This year there will be an unexpected windfall of 4 billion Euros to the inheritance tax, as a rich family failed to set up their construct in time. Furthermore “nonprofits” by industrialists are often used for lobbying for more capitalism. In particularly infamous is the “Stiftung Familienunternehmen” (family run businesses trust). You would think this represents your local bakery run in the fourth generation. Instead it is run by “family businesses” such as Henkel (washing ingredients, chemicals) whose owners are billionaires.

    Finally, Germany has the whole range of non profits which follow purposes that genuinely follow causes that benefit humanity and the environment and they also receive billions in donations in Germany every year. Overall the donations to nonprofits in Germany amounted to 12.5 billion € last year, or about 150 € on average. This includes a wide range of purposes. For instance sports clubs are usually nonprofits and donations to them are usually tax deductible. So it might be the father of one of the kids in the football club donating a new set of jerseys.