From: bhattach@quip.eecs.umich.edu (sayan bhattacharyya)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.bangladesh
Subject: Religion & Socialism / was Failure of Socialism in Bangladesh
Date: 22 Dec 92 21:40:48 GMT
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor, MI

In article <1992Dec22.202235.11816@news.clarkson.edu> haque@sunray.ece.clarkson.edu writes:
>In article IG9@news.udel.edu, khaleq@brahms.udel.edu (Mohame Khalequzzaman) writes:


>> You can't have both together.It's like saying that some-one is a Muslim-Hindu
>> and Christian at the same time.  Whether or we like it is a different thing,
>> but religion and real communism can't go hand in hand.
>
>
>Religion and communism has gone together in the South America. What about the 
>Churches in Nicaragua and other places who believed in Liberation Theology? 
>One of the reasons that communists were popular in the south America was that 
>they had been endorsed by the church. Sandanista govt. had more than one 
>priests in their cabinet.
>


While it is true that sections of the Church in Latin America led by 
Liberation Theologists have allied itself with the struggle of the Latin
American people, I think this was in part because the Church was 
often the only officially tolerated dissenting voice allowed to exist
by the various right-wing Latin American dictatorships .Thus those
who wanted to fight the Right naturally drifted towards the Church
as it provided the only legitimate way of expressing the aspirations
of the Latin American people. Thus, the religious affiliation of the 
Liberation Theologists was, I think, more a matter of necessity than 
anything else.

Note also that the "established church", i.e the Vatican and various
papal functionaries, representative as they were of conservative
interests, never quite approved of Liberation Theology as doctrine.
The relationship between the Vatican  and the Liberation Theologists
was at best uneasy. The leading Liberation Theologists of Latin 
America, such as the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal (who was a
member of the Sandinista cabinet), Dom Pedro Casaldaliga of Brazil
(the archbishop of Mato Grosso province) and the assasinated priest
Camillo Torres of Colombia, had all been close to expulsion by the
Vatican at various times. Only a few months ago the Brazilian 
liberation theologist Bom was expelled by the Vatican. ( Bom is 
best known  for his famous assertion : "When I gave food to the
poor, they called me a saint ; when I asked why the poor were hungry,
they called me a communist.").

Thus, religion and communism have apparently gone hand in hand in
Latin America because there was no other choice for the leftists
to survive, given the harshness of the repressive right-wing regimes
there. It is not a natural alliance. 



>Why do you think that communists HAVE to be aethists? Is it 
> because Marx said so?
>

Not because Marx said so, but because communism attempts to 
explain both the social and natural worlds in terms of 
deterministic forces and laws, just as Newtonian mechanics
seeks to explain the physical world and Darwinian biology
seeks to explain the animal world. As a result there is no
place for a omnipotent prime mover or creator in the marxian
system as everything is sought to be explained in terms of
deterministic forces. Of course, you may or may not agree
with this explanation. But the fact remains that the concept
of God is inherently in conflict with the marxian system.

>Anisul Haque
>Clarkson University




-- 
Sayan Bhattacharyya          |   Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
Graduate student             |
Artificial Intelligence Lab  |
The University of Michigan   |
Newsgroups: soc.culture.bangladesh