I don’t have time for a longer answer but I think you misunderstood me. My whole point is exactly that those religions do not focus on metaphysical beliefs.
They focus on ritual aspects, practice and social activities. It’s exactly because they focus on the material aspects of worship that I don’t think they matter much in terms of being a materialistic socialist. They don’t impose metaphysical explanations for why society has a given structure or how to achieve such and such goal as a society.
They focus on activities and practices, both social and individual. They don’t require that you adhere to specific metaphysical beliefs to engage in those practices.
For example: I don’t believe in the actuality of metaphysical spirits and yet I find the practices of Umbanda tremendously meaningful for me as an individual journey of enlightenment and the social activities very fulfilling culturally.
About your last comment (imposing social behavior norms with threats of spiritual punishment) that’s so incredibly Christianity centric. My religion has nothing of the sort, for example. Judaism doesn’t even have a concept of hell. And although Islam have something similar for some branches, it’s much less important than it is for Christianity.
What I mean by sociality is nothing of that sort. It’s simply social activities. Festivals, collective worship, social gatherings, communal rituals, etc. Those things are tremendously more important for most religions than merely specific sets of metaphysical beliefs about the nature of things.
Yes I see what you meant now. I too realized that some of the mix of local/national/ethnic traditions and religious tradition was not exactly the religion and the belief in it. I just rejected much of this early on in life.
Protestantism is politically interesting as it is the group of religions that basically evolved to overcome the incompatibilities earlier christianity and catholicism had with capitalism. Simply they modified christianity to fit the lifestyle and practices of capitalists. I didn’t grow up with either of those, not that the crap I grew up was any better.
The common scheme of this complex of judeo/X-ian/islamic is that it is very individual centered, it is all about a deity having a personal relation with the believer. I know many African and Asian religions had more collective relations with the metaphysical. Native American belief systems are even more collective in nature. The entire community does rituals for the benefit of the community. On Judeochristian scripts there is an entire city of sinners and this one guy who is not a sinner walks away while the city is destroyed.
Religion may have not had such negative overtone to Marxists if it wasn’t for clergy that tends to align with the powerful and the rich, so the three bodies can manipulate, exploit, and control people.
