New Pamphlet: Critique of Avakian’s Away With All Gods
Posted by Mike E on January 16, 2009
Avakian’s Away With All Gods!: Critiquing Religion Without Understanding It
By Pavel Andreyev
click to download the new pdf pamphlet
Pavel Alexeyev is an historian and specialist on religion with a long acquaintance with the
Revolutionary Communist Party and other Maoist organizations.
It would be wrong to suppose that Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World (Chicago, Insight Press, 2008 ) is just a book. It’s in fact a campaign by some highly motivated people to promote atheism, and a certain critique of religion (including “Christian Fascism”) in American life. Authored by the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, it has been advertised for months with great fanfare… Even the most significant and original contributions to religious studies are seldom publicized with this sort of (dare I say religious?) excitement. Party expectations are obviously high….
Committed to atheism and historical materialism, I myself am in principle totally sympathetic to the project. If I thought it was done well and effectively I would applaud it.
The web version of this pamphlet:
Kasama’s online Lit Table of Essays for Discussion
Coming soon in pamphlet form: Pavel Andreyev’s critique of Avakian on Thomas Jefferson
emil said
is it necessary to be an atheist to a communist? i dont know really whether god exists or not. i think some communist beliefs are as stupid as religious ones, such as the cult of personality around avakian.
Green Red Rev said
Many definitions of god has been given by many people at different time. On one side you have jews bombing Muslims and then, you have many, many Jews in the world leading demonstrations and activities against that. And many are communist too. In fact Kibutzes were greatest better sides of Israel’s history without my knowing how much of them were or were not atheists.
Stalin’s death, (true, Stalin had an extent of Cult of Personality) Krushchov’s changing line of the party wasted all those years positive activities. So ALTHOUGH they were Jews, but they did not side with TROTSKY who happened to be Jew. What they said about Zineviev, etc., I haven’t read. But there was a Cult of Personality. Is that Communist’s false?
It might be pragmatic, but it has always been in gorilas, in Chimpanzes all that there is the leader and so forth. Not to let you label me Social Darwinist, see this;
X thousand years of class society, has been fed by religion, monarchy, patriarchy and class.
That came after whence Hunting and Gathering humans started agriculture, ate the fruit of knowledge that men are also a part of children’s production and mom is not the sole CREATOR. You ever thought why god, the creator would need a Sacrifice?
Originally, maybe god was hungry. With agriculture which was also invention of women, the fruit, seed gatherer who when having too much put some under soil and discovered the’ll grow riht there (who also domisticated animals from wolf to dog and lion to cat by giving them free food)coming about, and having something like villages, many things changed that to an extent Engels’ book Origin of Family, State Property and State many things changed.
In the meantime, somethings like religions were twisted. Before, female looking idols were worshiped, now they became male.
One of the greatest sins that made ten commendment was males thence had started to swear to their sexual organ as god. They’d swear to it you know? And women’s place from being the holy thing that can reproduce for the team of supposedly communist gang and without them we one team would be outnumbered by the other rivals so they should stay alive and sleep with stronger male around who brought the best food, changed into polygomy and other variances.
At some point Kings, Pheros of Egypt, Magicians of this tribe acted as god or god’s rep. But these things in the main Euro Asian dominant culture made so much trouble that they had to deport god to the sky, and as said by Ludwig Feurbach according to geographic conditions, culture and everything else for variances of human specie religions were made with god somewhere else.
Look at Mohammad. I am not endorsing him but, being in between 3 main continents in the middle of the desert, to gain national unity and power for their Arabic culture he put a mixture of prophets with books that included not only Jesus and Moses, but also Zorastra that the other two never cared for, to unite his nationality.
Now all these religions and whatever their reason of coming about might have been turned into businesses for priest, Rabi, Mullahs and whateverelse king/feudal justifiers.
All this said, and accepting that from god was then hungry (for majority of women during pregnancy)so she needed sacrifice up to when there was a famines so vast like the one “Brutal Aztecs” went through and to keep elite fews fed, they sacrificed large numbers of other kids, all this can be our momentarily rationalization for dealing with our needs since we think that we can think and therefore have free will and in a way we are lost. I don’t have the faintest idea about how animals instincts make them know what to do in mating, caring for eggs of Penguins and being depressed and all that. But as Max Plunk speech on philosophy of Free will or Determinism proofs, these philosophical sayings are two different systems of saying the same thing. Still genes and environments are what makes us think that we can think and our upbringing forms our behaviour. Now what some call something like as Jung teaching – the better parts of it – involved, we might be saying a lots of things different but the bottom line is being fair and unfair, selfish or altruist, good Karma, bad Karma or good Christian, etc.
But as this type of thinkers have said,we have lost our mind connection with the nature as other beings. And while animals run away before earthquake or Volcano, we still haven’t read things on our machines that have to predict that.
Same way, we have harmony in nature, in cosmos, in Fractual Geometry and everything else.
So we have to deal with metaphysical cosmology, Sufism and what have you.
Have you ever read this American writer’s book, I think John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath when in bad economical times this priest of a sort joins the Reds? Have you heard of why Archbishop Romero was shot in El Salvador? Have you heard of Father Roy Bourgiouse who gathered people of many different cultures and faiths and closed or – nowadays say relocted and defamed the School of America?
These are not exactly Communist but, pretty much as potential revolutionaries in struggles.
Action matters, not faith, but cult of personality is not a Communist sickness. It is an Animal value remaining in humans. Communism is not perfect society with golden houses for all working class/governers. It is a goal you always struggle after it.
Now you say you have a god but, you don’t take orders from Vatican or Tehran or anywhere else. I’d say let’s go and paste some flyers in the more poor hoods or our city, whereever it may be, about their direct needs and problems at the moment. Whatever happened on the way is our people’s university.
Keith said
One of the many dumb things about Avakian’s book is that he doesn’t understand the historical Jesus at all. There is a lot of interesting recent scholarship by people in the “Jesus Seminar” (Dominick Crossan, and Robert Funk etc)who try to determine the “historical Jesus.” Anyway, it is pretty clear that Jesus was a revolutionary from among the lowest class of an oppressed nation. Crossan’s new book is about Paul as an enemy of the Roman empire (he alos challenges the idea that Paul was opposed to women’s equality and he argues that the anti-woman stuff comes later.).
There is also a good book by Joel Carmichael “The Origins of Christianity” where he argues that Jesus was a part of a broader anti-Roman movement that he calls the “Kingdom of God Movement.” John the Baptist and Barabas (the man released by the Romans instead of Jesus) were also leaders. He also argues that the when Jesus turns over the money changers tables in the temple that he had to have a pretty large following of armed people to get into the temple which would have had armed guards. According to Carmichael Jesus went into the temple with the expectation that God was going to intervene in history and help bring the victory. (That is the problem with religious thinking!). The failure of god to intervene and the followed by the murder of their leader is how Carmichael explains the belief in reserection and the rest which is an unsceintifc way of dealing with the loss of your leader.
Anyway, Avakian seems to know nothing about the whole mystical tradition of all religions either(he doesn’t know anyone who has ever dropped acid and saw God? I saw god on acid, more than once in fact, and I treasure the experiences.
Mike E said
My understanding (from many sources, including the Jesus seminar) is that the Jesus of the gospels really is not a “historical Jesus” at all.
In other words, there was probably an early Jewish preacher who formed the start of what became the christian religion — but the historical events of the Gospels do not get any empirical confirmation, and the sayings attributed to Jesus (in the gospels) were almost all invented later (of the next hundred years) by the writers inventing doctrine for a new church.
there are reasons why progressives who are Christians choose to proclaim “Jesus the revolutionary” and “Jesus the worker” and so on (and there are reasons why this has been raised by various heresies throughout the last two millenia). But i believe it is not historically accurate (or materialist) to assert that this partisan iconic view (among other opposing partisan iconic view) is somehow the real “historical Jesus.”
Green Red rev said
3 Things:
1- On my posting up there solely to reply to Emil, Fractal Geometry is correct spelling.
2- God wasn’t there, Jesus seminar, all that are not far from renegade Kautsky’s earlier writing with some merit “Foundations of Christianity” but looking for a savior is an on going desire and parties, religions pop out everywhere. From considering Che Guevara as the Christ for his photo after killed (better side relatively) to clan side taking.
And Emil on this party, looking at late great revolutionary fighter Chairman Mao during the great proletarian cultural revolution with a sunshine on back of his head, later imitated by Chair Gonzalo’s photo…. it has been used pragmaticaly. Is Kasama great sincere people going to either Condone or Condemn that particular action in the least is to be seen but it is wrong. I will waith as many years to see if this much criticism about Leader with the Sunshine comes from honorable Mike E for that matter.
3 – Keith, thanks mentioning the that author but, are you talking about The Birth of Christianity – Reality and Myth? of Joel Charmichael published 1989 with similar sayings or has he other titles?
Green Red rev said
http://www.thegodmovie.com/
The God who wasn’t there by the way goes along the same lines but, please don’t take this as BUY DVD endorsement!
Pavel said
Mike says:
I would say that there probably was an historical Jesus (although there are some reasons for doubt) whose basic core of ideas is discernable in the sayings common to the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), which have a lot of overlap with the non-canonical gospel of Thomas.
John is a different sort of gospel altogether, with long poetical passages placed into the mouth of Jesus and developing the notion that he is indeed divine and sent to save the world. The synopics on the other hand seem to contain a core of plausible quotations that people had remembered and written down. Many scholars embrace the concept of the lost “Q” gospel, which would have contained numerous sayings of Jesus we find in both Matthew and Luke but not in Mark.
I used to accept the view that all the canonical gospels were written between 70 and 100 but I’ve been influenced by the work of Richard Pervo on Luke and the companion work, the Book of Acts (which purports to describe how the early church takes shape and how Paul conducts his missionary work among the gentiles while Peter heads the movement overall) to think the current version of Luke was completed around 120 and that it and Acts are a reaction to the challenge that Marcion posed to the faction in the Christian movement that eventually won out. I won’t go into that here; the point is just that the gospels as we know them were probably composed from ca. 70 to 120, but the main work of recording Jesus’ words probably took place just between 70-80 or so.
I think it’s possible to reconstruct more or less what the man was saying and why it had a lot of appeal at the time, first of all, among Judeans under Roman occupation (although we have to realize that Roman Judea was a pretty cosmopolitan place too, with many nationalities living there), then among Jews widely scattered through the Roman empire and beyond (even before the uprising of 66-70 that resulted in the destruction of the temple and the diaspora; Paul was from Tarsus in Asia Minor), and almost simultaneously among non-Jews (many of them already interested in the Jewish scriptures available in the Greek [Septaguint] translation).
I don’t have time right now to try to summarize in a few sentences what the content of that basic message was, but I think it included a concept of a “heavenly kingdom” that somehow challenged the legitimacy of the Roman Empire indirectly; a scornful attitude towards the Jewish religious leadership of his time for its emphasis on the “letter of the (Mosaic) law” over the “spirit of the law;” a conception of the Jewish deity as a loving father-god approachable by the humble individual at variance with the Old Testament conception of the angry and judgmental deity; an emphasis on forgiveness as a virtue; an emphasis on the poor and oppressed as the beloved of God who will one day see justice which the rich and oppressors will get their reward.
I don’t want to present a “partisan iconic view” of Jesus but these are I think components of his message we can realistically draw from what we have to work from. They do help to explain why the movement spread as it did.
Mike, you mention “writers inventing new doctrine for the church.”
But I wouldn’t use the word “church” at all until at least, say, 150 or so when Justin Martyr was writing. We just don’t know much about what was going on among self-professed “Christians” between the time Paul was writing (50s) and then.
We don’t know what was happening in the “Roman Catholic Church.” Nothing at all is known about the first few popes.
Concerning really significant people in the Christian movement—Basilides flourished in Alexandria in the 120s, preaching a brilliant mix of ideas; he was surely the greatest systematic theologian the Christian movement had produced. But all his writings were burnt and he was soon declared a heretic. We only know a little bit about his ideas from quotations from his works from hostile critics. A little later Marcion flourished but he too was declared a heretic and his writings burnt, similarly Valentinus, in the 160s. There were many factions of Christians in the second century we only know about through the anti-heresy literature produced by Irenaeus and Tertullian in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries.
There certainly WERE writers “inventing doctrine for the church.” But the gospel writers weren’t necessarily doing so, or working
at that stage of conscious conspiracy. To a certain extent they were recording honest recollection of thought-provoking words heard, maybe double-checking from multiple sources.
It’s in all of the synoptics. Why not assume he said it?
Zack said
It seems obvious that the biblical Jesus figure is a collection of various gods/myths that were popular around the time of the gospel writings.
Pavel, read any Robert Price?
Pavel said
Yes, Zack, although I wouldn’t paraphrase Price exactly the way you do. The birth, life and death of Jesus is surrounded in myth without question. And his historicity itself is questioned by Price and some others.
But again, in my opinion there was a real Judean intinerant rabbi who, through teachings more or less recorded in the gospels, made an impact on Judean society that gave rise to the Christian movement. Without positing such, it’s very hard to explain Paul, the rapid emergence of the Christian movement in Italy and the west, and the spread of Christianity in Egypt, Syria and eastwards by the early second century.
Keith said
Green Red and others the correct title is “The Birth of Christianity – Reality and Myth?” by Joel Charmichael.
All history is contentious and partisan. Just check out histories of the Civil War or biographies of Lincoln. Lincoln is regularly categorized as a tyrant by historians sympathetic to slavery.
So it is perfectly possible to argue that Jesus never existed or the historical Jesus has no relation to the Jesus of the gospels but Dominick Crossan book “Jesus a revolutionary biography” strikes me as a pretty careful piece of scholarship and he is very quick to point out gospel stories that must be considered false, vs. stories that are probable and ones that have numerous independent collaborators. The Jesus seminar also puts out a set of color coded gospels different colors for words attributed to Jesus but which he definitely didn’t say, words that he might have said, and things that he said that are pretty well established.
But arguing against a historical Jesus doesn’t solve the issue of religion.
I, for one, am certain that if you regularly meditate for reasonably long periods of time you will experience non-ordinary states of consciousness. Just like if you take a couple of pulls off a bong, or drink some shroom tea.
In any event, religious explanations for the world (which is what I think we are really trying to critique and overcome) are the effect (not the cause, they are determined, not determinate) of the current level of development of the productive forces and our inability to consciously organize our lives. The market does for us what we are not yet doing for ourselves, and this is the source of religion.
Avakian has a very narrow/impoverished approach to human experience (laughter).
The way to deal with religion is to tax the church. Right now churches are tax exempt which means they are actually subsidized. Publishing half-baked books attacking religion (laughter)and is not the way fwd.
Zack said
Thanks for your reply, Pavel.
One question, Paul was a gnostic… right? that being the case, he never wrote of a “in the flesh” Jesus, but a spirtal being. No?
Zack said
I’d also just add, I dont think it crucial to have an actual person (this case, Jesus) to start movements. Look at the cargo cults like Taro.
Ha, look at mormonism and all the dogma one crazed scammer produce to what it is now.
Green Red rev said
Hi Pavel,
“It’s harder for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”
It’s in all of the synoptics. Why not assume he said it?
Very good point. In more than a handful of various dinominations I have asked about it. The most common answer – where they have read it I don’t know or – sorry care to believe – answered that at the time of such writing, cities – or certain city the words is in relation with, walls were surrounding them for protection from … aliens? …. and for camels certina enterances were larger than the ones men used to come into that supposedly were blockable or removable? And the word Needle is in regard to those certain Camel entrance slots.
Read books of Solomon and actions of others and everything else can be justified. True, I am pleased with good words sayings and few better progressives but, with all due respect to Liberation Theology, for example, ELN of Colombia founded by Jesuit perist guerrillas may not touch Narcotrafficing called actions, i.e. supposedly taxing/safety providing for poor peasants – to become dirty handed on that part like FARC but, still hostage taking, etc. is theirs alright. So atheist anti imperialist (brigade?) seems more bearable with brighter future.
Pavel said
Zack (# 11):
No, I definitely wouldn’t call Paul a Gnostic.
The term Gnosticism itself is difficult to define; should the emphasis be placed on its esoteric nature (the idea that the gnosos or “knowledge” is only shared within the select group), or on the idea that the material world is inherently evil? Is Gnosticism a religion of intellectuals who, deprived of political influence and inclined to see themselves as objects in the hands of unreasonable powers, retreated into spiritual activity, as Max Weber thought?
Or did it arose within the early Christian movement, to provide it with a philosophical basis, principally inspired by Greek thought, as Protestant theologian Adolf von Harnack thought? Some scholars have minimized the classical links and instead suggested that Egyptian, Persian and Babylonian thought stimulated Christian and non-Christian Gnosticisms (see Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism, 1990).
Others maintain that it emerged within Judaism, possibly stimulated by exposure to eastern religions, during the period between the Jewish Wars of 66-73 and 132-35 and appearing in its most developed form within Christianity in the second century (Carl B. Smith, No Longer Jews, 2004).
Michael Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton UP, 1996) suggests the term has been been applied too broadly and ought to be replaced in many instances with “biblical demiurgical traditions.”
Paul’s radical emphasis on salvation by faith (Romans chapter 3) doesn’t square with the Christian Gnostics’ emphasis on attaining purity through the emulation of Jesus, such as you find, for example in Basilides. As for him not writing about a Jesus “in the flesh,” he does in fact write of the bodily resurrection (anastasis) of Jesus (Romans 1:4, 6:5, 1 Cor. 15:3). There were schools of early Christians who thought Jesus had been an apparition (and hence had felt no pain on the cross) but Paul was not one of them.
Zack said
Pavel, thank you for the thought provoking reply… I’ve much to investigate and learn. :)
Carl Davidson said
The best approach to understanding religion is one Avakian dismisses in a backhanded way, the instrumentalism of the pragmatist school. Start with William James’ ‘Varieties of Religious Experience.’
People have created religion from day one, as long as we have had languages. It’s part of what makes us human. Read Barbara Ehrenreich’s ‘Blood Rites’ for an interesting account of how altruism developed not so much to help us eat, but to help us not to be eaten by other mammals.
Using a correspondence theory of truth to dismiss religion misses the point. ‘You can’t get there from here,’ as the saying goes. You have to understand and deal with religion from a very different perspective.
One of the better recent Marxist works is ‘Religion and the Human Prospect’ by Alexander Saxton. You can find a discussion of it at http://thirdwavestudygroup.blogspot.com/
nando said
Carl writes:
The first sentence (which is more or less true) does not lead to the second (which is not, I believe, provably true.)
Just adjust it somewhat:
“People have hunted each other with deadly weapons from day one, as long as we had the skill to make technology. It’s part of what makes us human.”
In fact, many things that have been true (from day one) can potentially be transcended in our epoch (scarcity, mutual slaughter and, yes, the illusory attempts to connect with magical beings.)
We can understand why humans created gods. We can even say that the attempt to affect outcomes, to “connect” with larger forces (both social and natural) are part of what “makes us human.” But it is not inherent to our humanity — and I believe it is profoundly limiting to assert that it is.
and we should be careful to appeals to “what makes us human” — even when it is true. For example, there is often a a sexual dimorphism among mammals. Many forms of complex behavior (including mating behavior and relations between the sexes) are clearly “hardwired” in many mammals (go watch lions).
But looking at the long (and remarkably unrelieved) arc of male dominance in human history, should we simply comment “it is part of makes us human”? Even if tendencies toward male dominance were hardwired among humans, would that mean that we could not socially constrain and transform tendencies toward reasserting that?
I don’t think that religious impulse is inherent in human beings — though I suspect a conscious desire to influence larger events is. The expression of our desperation and hopes in religious form is not inherent.
The emergence of secular and systematized atheist thinking is not a perversion of human nature (or a doomed attempt to deny who we are)…. those intertwined emergences (which despite various spurts of religiousity have progressed around the world over the last centuries, and now content at the heart of modern human thinking) are an historic leap, an historic advance, for humanity’s ability to consciously control its own development and eliminate age-old oppressions.