Millennium
2000 years of what?
It may seem outrageous enough that after countless ancient civilisations have left astonishing massive and mysterious stone monuments as a lasting memory of their existence, the best British capitalism can do to record the start of the third millennium is to lavish £750 million on a plastic tent on a piece of inaccessible waste land in Greenwich.
But insult follows injury, because among the more pointless of the displays which various commercial and other sponsors have been prevailed upon to produce to fill up this costly void is the so-called "Spirit Zone".
Beleagured visitors seeking consolation for a wasted journey by indulging in a double Stolly on the rocks will be disappointed. This zone offers as little solace to them as it does to anyone believing it to be a space for re-running the old late night black and white TV spooky films The Twilight Zone.
No, in a world whose scientists have now not only split the atom but visited the moon and sent exploratory satellites circling the solar system, this zone is a monument to the Bible-bashing, sanctimonious god-botherers who are so firmly rooted in the Blair cabinet, and to religious prejudice of the most mediaeval type.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition to be there of course – but then, as the Monty Python crew pointed out, " nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" .
But the various Christian Churches whose dubiously calculated "millennium" is being marked with such ridiculous hype have claimed a certain right to impose their antiquated views on at least a part of the proceedings.
With all this added to the routine doses of state-sponsored religion which this largely secular country has to put up with every Christmas, it seemed a good moment to look back at the ways great socialist and revolutionary thinkers, notably Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky have viewed religion in general and Christianity in particular.
Each of them was a convinced, passionate atheist, arguing strongly that religion arose historically from the ignorance and oppression of early societies, and had continued and developed with state sponsorship into later years because it suited the requirements of the ruling class.
In place of the idealism of religion and semi-religious philosophies, the marxists argued for a coherent alternative materialist world view, concept of dialectical materialism, in which the world and the universe as a whole are regarded as matter in motion.
Engels summed up:
"From the very early times when men, still completely ignorant of the structure of their own bodies, under the stimulus of dream apparitions came to believe that their thinking and sensations were not activities of their bodies but of a distinct soul which inhabits the body and leaves it at death, from this time men have been driven to reflect about the relation between this soul and outside world.
"If upon death the soul took leave of the body and lived on, there was no occasion to invent another death for it. Thus arose the idea of its immortality, which at that state of development appeared not at all as a consolation but as a fate against which it was no use fighting, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. Not religious desire for consolation but the quandary arising from the common universal ignorance of what to do with this soul, once its existence had been accepted, after the death of the body, led in a general way to the tedious notion of personal immortality.
"In an exactly similar manner the first gods arose through the personification of natural forces. And these gods in the further development of religions assumed more and more extra-mundane form, until finally by a process of abstraction, out of the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods there arose in the minds of men the idea of one exclusive God of the monotheistic religions.
"Thus the question of the relation of thinking to being, the relation of the spirit to nature – the paramount question in the whole of philosophy – has, no less than all religions, its roots in the narrow-minded and ignorant notions of savagery.
"…The question: which is primary, spirit or nature was sharpened into this: Did God create the world, or has the world been in existence eternally?
"The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of the spirit to nature and therefore in the last instance assumed world creation in some form or other … comprised the camp of idealism. The others who regarded nature as primary belong to the various schools of materialism."
Religion and revolution
Engels goes on to challenge the notion that upheavals in religion are always linked with social change.
"Even in regard to Christianity the religious stamp in revolutions of really universal significance is restricted to the first stages of the bourgeoisie’s struggle for emancipation – from the 13th to the 17th century – and is to be accounted for by the entire previous history of the Middle Ages, which knew no other form of ideology than precisely religion and theology.
"But when the bourgeoisie of the 18th century was strengthened enough likewise to possess an ideology of its own, suited to its own class standpoint, it made its great and conclusive revolution, the French, appealing exclusively to juristic and political ideas, and troubling itself with religion only in so far as it stood it its way."
In the same pamphlet, Engels goes on to trace the history of the Christian religion. "The Roman world empire brought about the downfall of the old nationalities. The old national gods decayed, even those of the Romans, which also were patterned to suit only the narrow confines of the city of Rome.
"… The fact that already after 250 years it became the state religion suffices to show that it was the religion in correspondence with the conditions of the time.
"In the Middle Ages, in the same measure as feudalism developed, Christianity grew into the religious counterpart to it, with a corresponding feudal hierarchy. And when the burghers began to thrive, there developed, in opposition to feudal Catholicism, the Protestant heresy, which first appeared in Southern France at the time the cities there reached the highest point.
"(…) The ineradicability of the Protestant heresy corresponded to the invincibility of the rising burghers. …
"The first great action occurred in Germany – the so-called Reformation. The burghers were neither powerful enough nor sufficiently developed to be able to unite under their banner the remaining rebellious estates – the plebeians in the towns, the lower nobility and the peasants on the land. …
"But beside the German Luther appeared the Frenchman Calvin. While the Lutheran Reformation in Germany degenerated and reduced the country to rack and ruin, the Calvinist Reformation served as a banner for the republicans in Geneva, in Holland and in Scotland … and provided the ideological costume for the second act of the bourgeois revolution, which was taking place in England.
"…In France the Calvinist minority was suppressed in 1685 and either Catholicised or driven out of the country. But what was the good? The forcible measures of Louis XIV only made it easier for the French bourgeoisie to carry through its revolution in the irreligious, exclusively political form which alone was suited to a developed bourgeoisie. Instead of Protestants, freethinkers took their seats in the national assemblies.
"Thereby Christianity entered into its final stage. It had become incapable for the future of serving any progressive class as the ideological garb of its aspirations. It became more and more the exclusive possession of the ruling classes and these apply it as a mere means of government, to keep the lower classes within bounds."
(extracted from Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy - Engels ).