I stand by that. Never get your science (solely) from the internet. As you've proven, it's not a good source.

When you conflate cheese eaters with opium junkies, you are trying to make cheese eaters feel bad for eating cheese. That is food shaming. It's sad that you are either unwilling or unable to admit that, it's unavoidable.

Trump doesn't get it because he didn't have a happy childhood. He's never been happy. Wealth and power are his opium and every hit he gets just makes him more miserable.

It's going to be a long four years.

You're kidding, right?
Do I have to make a list? On every continent white people visited (if you can call showing up and not really leaving a visit) we fucked up the lives of a good portion of the people living there.
Sure, mankind has always been cruel, in every corner of the earth. However, white people are to murder, theft and slavery what Coca Cola is to refreshing diabeeetus (yes, that's how it's spelled). A fucking international enterprise whose traces can be found everywhere. On every fucking continent.
I hope we can agree on that. Otherwise, here's a short list: Gippsland Massacres, Nagasaki, Opium Wars, My Lai Massacre, fucking Iraq, Crusades, Apartheid, Herero and Namaqua genocide, that whole Columbus mess, Trail Of Tears and transatlantic slave trade (because why the fuck not?). Oh, my bad, I forgot the freaking Holocaust and starting 2 World Wars.
Who does this? Who? White people, that's who. Europeans and their descendants.
Would you like to argue that level of evil is genetic? I won't.
It's cultural. We europeans (and later our emigrated offspring) always thought we're better than everybody else, we had god on our side (and the Pope agreed!). Probably a leftover from the Roman Empire. And that's why everywhere we go, we steal, murder or occupy the shit out of every place. No other collection of ethnic groups has so much blood on their hands and it's not because we're worse DNA constructs than the others. All humans are capable of evil, it just takes a certain way of thinking to go that far.
Thankfully, we wrecked our own continent so badly during WW2, that we finally started to improve our ways. But here's the problem: we just started. We're far from being done.
Orban, LePen, Farage, Putin, Petry and last but not least Trump.

Hahaha... seriously, what kind of passive aggressive bullshit is that? "Ignoring the theoretical underpinnings of socialism, because I've decided that that's waffling, I say Jesus was a socialist." Next time, maybe just write TL;DR and make a farting noise while rolling your eyes.

You can't dismiss the actual meaning of the word Socialist as 'semantics', if you're talking about whether or not something is socialist. That doesn't help the discussion.

In order to use socialism as you appear to be doing, you would have to first:
- ignore the history of socialism and its political development,
- ignore the entire body of academic work, current and past, on socialism, and
- ignore how the word socialism "IS used now, like it or not" in actual socialist or semi-socialist countries

By doing that you end up at your definition of the word, yes. But you had to take a pretty long detour to get to that point

Marx's quote on religion is pretty straightforward - it can be, as you say, open to interpretation, but it's generally agreed that he didn't say that your Jesus was a stand-up socialist. He is more commonly taken to mean that religion is a false response to the real suffering of the oppressed; religion provides a fiction of suffering and a fiction of redemption/happiness, that will never translate into real change. It makes the oppressed feel like they are bettering their lives, while actually keeping them passive and preventing them from changing anything.

The slightly larger context of the quote is this: "Das religiöse Elend ist in einem der Ausdruck des wirklichen Elendes und in einem die Protestation gegen das wirkliche Elend. Die Religion ist der Seufzer der bedrängten Kreatur, das Gemüth einer herzlosen Welt, wie sie der Geist geistloser Zustände ist. Sie ist das Opium des Volks."

I don't know how to make that more plain, but I can try. Religious suffering is on one hand a response to real suffering (wirkliche Elend, by which one would mean a materialistically determined actual lack of freedom, resources, physical wellbeing, etc), but it is also a false reaction against that real suffering. Real oppression creates suffering to which there could be a real respones, but religion instead substitutes in false suffering and false responses - it tries to tackle real suffering with metaphysical solutions. He goes on to say:

"Die Aufhebung der Religion als des illusorischen Glücks des Volkes ist die Forderung seines wirklichen Glücks."

This, too, seems pretty straightforward to me, but you might see 4 or 5 different things there. Religion teaches the people an illusory form of happiness, which doesn't actually change or even challenge the conditions of suffering, and must therefore be tossed out, for the people to ever achieve real happiness.

A fundamental difference here is that religious goodness is internally, individually, and fundamentally motivated. 'Good' is 'Good', and you as a Christian individual should choose to do Good. A goal of Marxism is to abolish that kind of fundamentalism and replace it with continuous criticism; creating a society that always questions, together, what good is, through the lens of dialectical materialism.

You might recognize this line of thinking* from what modern Europeans call the autonomous left wing, or what Marx and Trotsky called the Permanent Revolution, which Wikipedia helpfully comments on as "Marx outlines his proposal that the proletariat 'make the revolution permanent'. In essence, it consists of the working class maintaining a militant and independent approach to politics both before, during and after the 'struggle' which will bring the 'petty-bourgeois democrats' to power." Which sounds great, except it can also lead to purges, paranoia, and informant societies.

My entire point is that socialism and Christianity are entirely different beasts. One is a rich, layered mythology with an extremely deep academic and political history, but no modern critical or explanatory components.** The other is an academic theory of economics and politics, with all the tools of discourse of modern academia in its toolbelt, and a completely different critical and analytical goal.

TL;DR? Well, Jesus (in a lenient interpretation) taught that we should help the weak. Marx explained that the people should organize to eradicate the conditions that force weakness onto the people. Jesus
taught that greed would keep a man from heaven, Marx explained that religion, nationalism, tribalism and commodity fetishism blinded the people to its common materialist interests. Jesus taught that the meek will be rewarded for their meekness, and while on earth we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; Marx explained that meekness as a virtue is a way of preventing actual revolutionary change, and that dividing the world into the spiritual and the materialistic helped keep the people sedate and passive, which plays right into the hands of the Caesars.

*I'm just kidding, I know you don't recognize any of this


**There probably are modern scholars of Christianity who adapt and adopt some of the tools of modern academic discourse; I know too little about academic Christianity.

'Jesus' wasn't a socialist, though. The ideas in the Bible aren't socialist; it's just that people have sloppily started to associate socialism with vague ideas like sharing and being good to your fellow man. Socialism is a specific economic and ideological model for explaining and directing societal phenomena, and it's sort of annoying that it has been turned into either a spooky bugbear or an adorable care bear. There's a reason why Marx called religion the opium of the people.

Your video, BBC Reporter Standing Next to Burning Opium, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 8 Badge!

"Burning behind me is eight and a half tonnes of heroin, opium, hashish and other narcotics which have been stolen from their rightful owners and destroyed in an act of vandalism so tremendous it amounts to a crime against humanity.

In this much larger pyre lie the smouldering corpses of those responsible. After witnessing the execution of their spouses and children, their skin was carefully flayed from their bodies, their eyes and genitals were removed and their bones were slowly ground into powder."

(Cut to footage of thousands of terrified people being herded toward a gigantic concrete pit. Bulldozers force them over the edge as the narration continues:)

"Those who enter first die quickly. Eventually their bodies cushion the fall of those behind, who are suffocated and crushed in their turn by the weight of ever more flesh."

(Cut to the pit being capped and sealed, the cries of those still alive inside are abruptly silenced. Zoom out to reveal dozens more exactly alike beside it; further to show the vast complex of huts and barbed wire fences, train lines and guard towers built to accommodate the multitude who pour in every day.)

"Each pit has a capacity of one million. There are sixty here and this is the correction centre of just one minor country. Thousands more are under construction worldwide."

Maybe he got so high he saw a better world. Of course he couldn't stop giggling.

Hey, you forgot Dumbo.
That shit rocks psychedelic forever-

I'm in the camp of overall suck when I hear or see Disney now though-They done lost it.

Old guy. Crews of jacked-up artists tokin' opium and drawing still after still in frenzied all-weekers; THIS, was Disney.

I have always subscribed personally to a moderate combination of study as well as the "destrucktion of my mind" with drugs.

Sex = drug
Food = drug
Sleep = drug

Yeah Billy, all of these legal and universally-practiced exercises cause one's own body to produce drugs and can manifest as periods of altered states of consciousness, illness, etc. Everythings' a fucking drug man, your body is nature's chemistry lab and we continually introduce variables to the soup.

Some of the highest people I ever knew in my live were Korean, you can't tell me Asians don't like their drugs...If it were not for the opium pouring into the U.S. during the civil war music would be square as shit and everyone would be a lot meaner from pain!

Back to the video, fucking stupid hippies wasting good weed....D U M B A S S E S

Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes

I loved Chiang Mai when i was there during the water festival. It was great fun. Plus we smoked opium while on a trek in the golden triangle area.

Those are all anatomically correct descriptions of you laughing yourself to shitz, but did you climactic instead of climatic? Seriously, I don't need to be rated for this comment. I am just curious...


>> ^kceaton1:

>> ^Boise_Lib:
Ah, shit--you mean they drown in the end?

IN 3D!!!!

edit-
I have to add...that these trailers are killing me. I'm fairly certain I've disconnected my esophagus from it's muscle connections to the interior and exterior walls of the chest cavity, as I'm in great pain due to my laughing. I'm certain that my vocal chords are also on the verge of spilling outward--inside out, as it were, and falling into my stomach where they will be digested as I writhe in pain; hopefully as I'm still watching more of these trailers at the moment of this horrendous, but part and parcel event that must be paid when it comes to true comedy--yet still as the just previous moment had occurred the climatic conclusion is yet to be finished--so as the video and sound trickle into my helpless mind the brute humiliating force of my laughing will be unattaching my retinas and blood vessels will begin to pop as I finally reach what comedians and entertainers aspire to instill in their audience the near opium maxim, that says that I may have a stroke at any second and die: the oxygen deprivation moment of laughing Zen. I love them, I love their trailers. So does my doctor and the hospital's chief surgeon.
P.S.- I just had to add something over the top... Sorry for the two upvotes if you hate my cavalcade of craziness edit .

>> ^Boise_Lib:

Ah, shit--you mean they drown in the end?

IN 3D!!!!


edit-

I have to add...that these trailers are killing me. I'm fairly certain I've disconnected my esophagus from it's muscle connections to the interior and exterior walls of the chest cavity, as I'm in great pain due to my laughing. I'm certain that my vocal chords are also on the verge of spilling outward--inside out, as it were, and falling into my stomach where they will be digested as I writhe in pain; hopefully as I'm still watching more of these trailers at the moment of this horrendous, but part and parcel event that must be paid when it comes to true comedy--yet still as the just previous moment had occurred the climatic conclusion is yet to be finished--so as the video and sound trickle into my helpless mind the brute humiliating force of my laughing will be unattaching my retinas and blood vessels will begin to pop as I finally reach what comedians and entertainers aspire to instill in their audience the near opium maxim, that says that I may have a stroke at any second and die: the oxygen deprivation moment of laughing Zen. I love them, I love their trailers. So does my doctor and the hospital's chief surgeon.

P.S.- I just had to add something over the top... Sorry for the two upvotes if you hate my cavalcade of craziness edit .