{"id":119,"date":"2009-11-25T22:26:13","date_gmt":"2009-11-26T06:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=3423"},"modified":"2009-11-25T22:26:13","modified_gmt":"2009-11-26T06:26:13","slug":"the-malleability-of-political-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2009\/11\/25\/the-malleability-of-political-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"The malleability of political religion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The Big Money<\/em> has an entry up, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thebigmoney.com\/articles\/moneybox\/2009\/11\/25\/karl-who\">Karl Who? China is a Communist country, but I have yet to meet an actual Communist<\/a>. After reading the first paragraph I began to think of the clear analogies between conventional supernatural organized religion and Marxist-Leninism, in particular, in its ideological flexibility (e.g., the transformation of the cult of a pacific Jewish prophet into a universal religion of a martial empire). The Chinese see the analogy too:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Xu boasted China&#8217;s engineering triumphs: the 88-story building in Shanghai, designed by an American architectural firm but built by Chinese engineers; the 67 bridges over the Yangtze River; the Olympic structures; high-speed rail; supercomputers. And when we asked how we would square the experience of modern China\u2014parts of Beijing are a luxury retailer&#8217;s paradise\u2014with Communist Party doctrine, he had a ready response. Karl who? &#8220;We&#8217;re not a bookish party,&#8221; he said. Besides, the Communist Party has always been flexible when it comes to dealing with national priorities. It cooperated with the Kuomintang to fight the Japanese. &#8220;Mr. Marx is still widely respected by the party and the party members. He&#8217;s a great mind in the people&#8217;s history.&#8221; Just because many of his ideas are outdated\u2014they were devised in a period without today&#8217;s developments in science and technology\u2014it doesn&#8217;t means he&#8217;s forgotten. <strong>&#8220;I want to compare it to God in your mind. Maybe you don&#8217;t go to church every week. But that doesn&#8217;t follow that God is not in your heart.&#8221; Marxism, like religion, is &#8220;still a power that controls the morality of the people.&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Though I do not think that the Chinese state is qualitatively different in the liberties it takes with Marxism on a historical scale, only quantitatively. The shift from Communism as an international movement with anti-nationalistic overtones toward being a tool of geopolitical influence utilized by the Soviet state was itself innovative in the early 20th century.<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"a2a_dd addtoany_share_save\" href=\"http:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fsecularright.org%2Fwordpress%2F%3Fp%3D3423&amp;linkname=The%20malleability%20of%20political%20religion\">Share\/Save<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Big Money has an entry up, Karl Who? China is a Communist country, but I have yet to meet an actual Communist. After reading the first paragraph I began to think of the clear analogies between conventional supernatural organized religion and Marxist-Leninism, in particular, in its ideological flexibility (e.g., the transformation of the cult [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":125,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/119\/revisions\/125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}