General Discussions

[PaulP]

Would you say socialism has roots in some very fundamental religious principles?

I often think about this when I see the likes of ScoMo preach liberal policies, while worshipping socially.

Of course some may claim perhaps what ScoMo and his like really worship, is the business of religion, the capitalist version!

I'm only familiar with Christianity, so I can't comment on others. Also, I don't really like the word "fundamental" when used in religious discussions, for obvious reasons.

I'm not a practising Christian, and haven't been for 30 years. But I do take an interest in contemporary Biblical scholarship. That one simple word "religion" covers an enormous amount of territory. The Bible consists of 66 books (73 in the Catholic version), written over a 1000 year period. Many of the authors are unknown, and whomever they were had no idea they were writing something that would end up in the Bible. Various groups, councils, individuals etc. came together in the early days of Christianity to formalise the faith and put together the books that ended up in the Bible. There are libraries solely dedicated to this history, and suffice to say this isn't the time or place to delve too deeply into this (even if I was familiar with this history, which I'm not, except for the sketchiest of outlines).

One of the problems with the Bible is that it is very uneven, very contradictory. If you want to be literal or bend the rules of interpretation, you can find a quote to justify anything. It's well documented that the Bible has been used to justify slavery, subordination of women, and a whole lot more. But Christianity has done a lot of good. As H. Richard Niebuhr said, religion is a good thing for good people, and a bad thing for bad people.

Getting back to your original question, one could posit a link between socialist ideals and an aspect of Christianity known as the Social Gospel, but I'm not sure that organised Socialist or Communist countries had much use for or interest in religion.

I'm no fan of the ScoMo take on religion, which unfortunately is very common. I think it's infantile. Progressive Christianity tries to emphasise orthopraxy (what you do) rather than orthodoxy (what you believe). I'm not much interested in whether someone believes in the Virgin Birth, or the physical resurrection of Jesus. I'm interested in what they're doing to make the world a better place.