Missing the mark with religion: Marx and the worship of man

By Steve Farrell
web posted February 12, 2001

Do religion and morality have a place in the law, in government, in policy, and in the public classroom? Finding the answer to that question, in lieu of the arrival of President George W. Bush's Compassionate Conservatism, is a quest worthy of our full attention.

As I have written before, "the unspoken consensus, though few will admit it, is: It is appropriate to inject religion and/or morality into political debate and into public policy just so long as the moral slant parallels my moral view of the universe, and it is highly inappropriate if it does not!"

It's time to fess up, we all think this way!

So let's get frank with those on the left who keep telling the religious folks on the right to shush up - even the most devout leftist atheists cannot seem to escape the innate compulsion to moralize! Communist Founder Karl Marx was just such a man. Being one who arrogantly proclaimed that "there is no morality," he, yet, was incapable of restraining himself from condemning capitalists as "exploitive" men, as "greedy" men, as men who wickedly looked upon their wives as "brothels" and little more!

Karl MarxMarx moralized everything! It's just that he had a different set of rules. How could his central dogma - "the ends justify the means" - be interpreted as anything less than a moral perspective?

It was this high and holy frame of reference, of the ends justifying the means, that was the moral driving force behind everything communist; a moral driving force which dragged behind it a host of additional moral teachings, such as, the rich may be robbed, babies may be aborted, and millions may be strategically starved by-order-of-the-state, if it so be that the privileged few can devour a few more meager morsels of rice, and "possess" a few more acres of unproductive common property. Such a moral end! But is was moral from their perspective, nonetheless.

The same Marx who arrogantly proclaimed against morality, only to invent his own morality - next, arrogantly proclaimed that he had "dethroned God," only to invent his own God - Man. "Man is God," he taught. But not willing to leave bad enough alone, he had to invent his own theory of how life began and evolved - and when he had finished with it, and arrived at the final product in the equation - religion entered the formula again in an incredible, or shall we say, self-serving way.

You see Marx taught, as did Darwin, that man evolved from the lower species - but rather then progressing gradually, Marx concluded that the progress from lower species to the higher came in quantum leaps. That is, yesterday's monkey, is today's man. No stuff in the middle. Where the real trouble starts is when Marx decided that some men had leaped farther than others, and that he - Marx - had leaped farther than they all!

With such a theology as this, it isn't hard to understand why Marx soon expected to be worshipped, that he made it a practice to crush all competitors in the communist movement, and that communism and socialism re-introduced to the world the worship of the state.

But that was not all. Communism introduced the diabolic belief that genocide was not only at times an economic necessity, but also a highly moral act. Marx taught that emerging communist states would conduct swift and brutal purges of capitalist and/or religious people in society in order to speed up the transition from capitalism to full blown communism. This murderous intervention tactic by communist masters, Marx described, as "compassionate," because it would be less costly in blood then if capitalism died a slower and natural death!

Fascism fits right into this discussion as well - for it seems the question leftist historians and political scientists have habitually refused to address, is whether or not the root gospel which produced Hitler's belief in the superiority of the Aryan Race and his hatred for Jews, was not Christianity, but a race-oriented twist on Marx's Man as God theology?

Rarely mentioned, when one hears the word NAZI, for instance, is the fact that the NAZI Party's official name was the National Socialist German Workers Party [1], that Hitler was one of its founders, that German Socialism had infected Germany with a hatred for the Jews long before Hitler was born, and that the beginning of all this modern Jew hating dates at least as far back as Marx's own call for "the species . . . [to be] abolished." [2] Fascism is but one form of socialism, and Hitler's holocaust was not motivated by reasons fundamentally different from the hundreds of millions slain by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

Liberals today fight against the right for conservative Christians to influence law and public policy, in so doing they often attempt to tie Christianity to the holocaust, as if to warn that Christian fundamentalism was made in Hitler's image. But it just doesn't wash. In fact, Marx's attack on Judaism, which inspired Hitler, was actually in Marx's own words, an attack on Christianity's roots. [3]

All laws good or bad represent someone's moral view of the universe.

Footnotes

[1] Shire, William L. "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" New York, MJF Books, 1959, 1960, p. 50.
[2] Marx, Karl, "On the Jewish Question." http://history.hanover.edu/modern/marx/marxjew4.htm
[3] Ibid. For example Marx wrote: "Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has merged again in Judaism. From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is, therefore, the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again." All of this being important to both Marx and Hitler because it was the spirit of Judaism which was according to both of them, at the root of the love of property, and this love of property was the enemy of both the fascist and the communist state. Again from Marx: "What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible . . . Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist."

Freelance columnist Steve Farrell resides in Las Vegas's beautiful neighbor - Henderson, Nevada. Read his latest at NewsMax.com: http://www.newsmax.com/columnists/Farrell.shtml




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