swiftessay
I’m not Muslim but I’m a religious person (I follow a Brazilian-African religious tradition called Umbanda) so I think I can try to respectfully chime in with my perspective.
For me personally it all boils down to recognizing that different spheres of your experience can be governed by different processes, with different rules.
When it comes to material interaction with the sensible world, I’m thoroughly and 100% materialistic. I don’t attribute metaphysical explanations to material processes.
And honestly I think presuming that religion necessarily means attributing metaphysical explanations to stuff is a very stubborn miscomprehension of how religions other than Christianity works. Most religions are really not very interested in building systems of reasoning about the world and doctrinal orthodoxy like European Christianity is.
They are much more focused on ritual, on human connection, on sociality, and experience of the divine. And those things aren’t at all incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how the sensible world works.
EDIT:
Sorry for editing, but I think my answer wasn’t complete enough.
I think looking at religion as a system of beliefs is a fundamental eurocentric misunderstanding of those things we call religion that aren’t western european Christianity. Specially protestant Christianity, which is a very specific practice, extremely focused on belief, and rationalistic systems of thought.
Most of the things we call religions: eastern varieties of Christianity, Buddhism, a lot of branches of Islam, Judaism, etc, etc are decidedly not about belief, but about practice, sociality and experience.
Think like this: what you have to do to be a good protestant christian? You have to have specific beliefs about who Jesus was, what he did, the significance of his actions, what is sin, what is salvation, what is grace, etc, etc, etc. It’s a whole system of thought.
What do you have to do to be a good Muslim? Practice the tenets of Islam. Practice the pillars. It’s not a person who adheres to a long list of beliefs. As a system of belief it can be summarized in a single phrase: there’s only one God and a specific person is a prophet of this god. That’s it. The rest is about practice, ritual, sociality and experience.
That is not incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how society organizes, of the processes that create exploitation in capitalism, etc, etc.
EDIT 2:
That’s the last edit I promise.
Just a quick comment that there are those who argue that the word “religion” is a bad category. That lumping together all those different human experiences as instances of the same phenomenon is kind of unhelpful. Precisely because it necessarily draws an eurocentric comparison with Christianity which is prone to cause misunderstanding of those phenomena.
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.
I used the API to overwrite and delete all my messages and deleted my account today.
I’m slowly deleting all my social media accounts and stay only on fediverse stuff. I think the slower, less FOMO driven nature of Lemmy will make it a more healthy to find people to talk with.
It’s nice that neoclassical economics is now verifying with their methods what we know since… the 1830s maybe?
I mean, yeah I’m being ironic. But it’s nice to have quantitative verification.
I took a look at the article and the authors. The senior author is a computer science guy focused on researching online harmful behavior.
It’s quite telling that he has no humanities training whatsoever in his academic background. A CS guy doing humanities research without any training in humanities.
I myself fit the description of guy from a hard quantitative science background who delved into humanities and social sciences research. I’ll honestly say to you: the only thing worse than a humanities researcher who eschew any type of quantitative research as “positivist reductionism” is a “hard science guy” who thinks he[1] doesn’t have to give a shit to the work that was done by humanities researchers because “numbers will tell me everything I need to know”.
[1] Masculine referents 100% intended because it’s usually a guy.
I’m a relatively old (let’s say more than 40, less than 55) guy living in a dependent country in the periphery capitalism (Brazil). It always felt to me that building strong socialist movement in core capitalist places like the US or in Western Europe would be damn near impossible.
Back 20 years ago it felt like those countries had a very solid way of providing life’s necessities and a more or less comfortable existence for a fraction big and politically strong enough of their populations that it would be really hard for organic movements to raise and make people see the exploitation. Hell, it’s hard to talk about radical politics with workers here, who see the exploitation first hand and are mostly aware that the game is rigged against them. I imagine how hard it would be in a place where everyone you know have a car, a house and so on.
Of course that was built on the backs of the Global South. But it felt like exploitation had been exported to places where it was invisible and wouldn’t make any waves back in the places to which this wealth was flowing.
I’m not a well versed in marxist theory to be honest. Just enough to understand we’re all being fucked and need to take over. But I always thought that any next big revolutionary movement with international impact would start in super-exploited places like Latin America, South East Asia, Africa, … I made an analogy with the Russian Revolution. The first revolution happening in a rich but relatively relatively peripheral country. It was Russia, not Germany or France. It wasn’t the most advanced capitalist country. It was a place where there was enough capitalist development for a proletariat to emerge and material conditions that made proletarians more readily radicalizable for whatever reasons.
So, I thought, maybe it will be India or the Philippines, places that already have active revolutions going on. Maybe it will be Brazil, Malaysia, etc…
But this right-wing turn in politics in the last 10 years, the successive crisis and the need for more and more exploitation to keep ever increasing accumulation seems to be bringing over-exploitation right to the core of the system. More and more the working classes of Europe and the USA are being impoverished and denied what used to be available to them.
I wonder if that doesn’t make those places a lot more prone to political radicalization than they were 20 or 30 years ago.