your lack of enthusiasm for Marx.

You...

So you have an axe to grind and simply won't accept anything other than your brand of groupthink.

Then, my apologies for not realizing you were from a .ml instance earlier.

yet

Um, so I'm threatened with a terrible no good downvote you've already given me, and mean words, unless I conform to your groupthink? lol. Tell me more about who's free and who isn't while expressing how trapped you are mentally, monetarily, and emotionally. You're welcome to call me stupid for choices my parents made as a child, as it only shows how you've tried to apply the label sticky-side out.

Perhaps your reading of Marx was too shallow, as to skip that socialism fetishizes material goods and materialism to the point where it seeks to control all of it. It's every bit as materialist as capitalism, otherwise it wouldn't care at all about who controls the means of production at all.

Indeed, and failed socialist governments proved the point time and again for a century that they were every bit as materialist, in some ways, much more so. Religion is inherently non-material; it's spiritual, yes? That's a pretty easy definition to agree on, that Invisible Sky Daddy is non-corporeal, right? I can attend any temple or church I want and never give them money. Some say I should, and that's between me and Invisible Sky Daddy. Or, even better, I can be a pagan out in the forest praising nature, or a Buddhist. Socialism makes those things illegal exactly because they're non-material and therefore not subject to control of the materialistic state. Music, movies, all media is regulated by the state because it might give you non-material feels about life and hope and joy. That media can only fetishize the materialism of the state and those who lived lives doing so.

Definitely don't change your mind. it's OK, I promise, that hate will burn you up from the inside and give you nothing to show for it.

;D