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.

>> ^Yogi:

I hate that kids tried as adults thing. That line has to be stricter or something, it absolute bullshit how 18 is the line and we just ignore it.

It needs to be not at all strict. That's the whole problem. Kids are tried as adults based on the severity of the crime committed, instead of the mental capacity of the individual (usually). The legal notion of "adultness" defined at some arbitrary chronological age is insanity given what we (as a scientifically informed society) know about human development.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

I have a feeling that by the very act of asking these questions and giving these kids the opportunity to think critically makes them less likely to bully others in the future. Very inspiring.


Plus they just saw a bully getting FUCKED UP!

Some of those kids are pretty awesome though and a lot more aware than I was at similar ages (a legacy of our modern information society I imagine).

ps. I still entirely support that kid cleaning that other little bastard's clock. You pick on someone, you gamble, and he lost big time. The school should have given the bigger lad a fucking medal and made the other asswipe clean toilets for 21 days rather than sending him on a vacation.

I actually PAID to see Vanilla Ice in concert way back. To be fair, I took an amazingly hot chick who used me for tickets. Ahh good times. Information society did open for him so I got to see that "pure energy" song performed live.

But is it surprising?

Look at the level of sheer noise of everything occurring in the world. Information is provided but there is often very little analysis behind the events, just fear and paranoia about phantom organizations, the war is fought in the same way, 70% of US casualties are IEDs. Yet we are lead to believe some Iranian country threatens the might of the entire US Army? Navy? Air Force? Stationed out in the Persian Gulf recently having conducted training exercises?. The current quagmire is of our own making the only solution provided is holding on and seeing how far down the abyss we can go before realizing that our infantry is overstretched over two combat zones? And then the withdrawl from there is even worse. But it's all some say this and that. Because it's okay to have a population in fear and confusion against themselves, it allows actions to be taken that in an informed society would lead to impeachments of everyone in the administration.