i mean that's how i got here in a roundabout way. There's a failure of a large segment of the "skeptical community" to apply their skeptical tools to contemporary social issues, but you also had the less internationally famous people like PZ Myers, Rebecca Watson, Sikivu Hutchinson and other people in their blog networks who were not comrades but usually did better than typical white liberal democrats.

The atheist community of austin had (or has? idk fuck them) a long-running public access tv show but they imploded over trans rights with all the comrades quitting in protest. Prior to that they were a good example of post-New atheism that wasn't overtly racist and so on.

a lot of shit libs stanning clinton and biden came out of that group though. minnesota liberal radio hosts gonna minensota liberal i guess.

There is a reason why Marx developed his thought in part but in an essential way by transcending the Young Hegelian critique of religion, and moving beyond a purely formal, abstract, intellectual critique on the internal consistency of the ideas, to the conditions which produce these conditions.

Marx emphasizes the concept of fetishism in part because he wants to highlight how the fetishist function of money in a capitalist society has important similarities to the fetishist aspects of religion.

Obviously it was a far bigger deal being an atheist in, say, 19th century Prussia or Russia, than the West today, but it still aggravates me that critique of organized religion has declined among Communists. Especially as a major obstacle to communist politics in non-western societies is the influence, authority and power of organized religion. I understand why, however, in that this critique has superficially been taken up by reactionary liberals, neoliberals and neoconservatives, and as many of us do not want to risk appearing, let alone being, say, Islamophobic. However I do think this a something of a passive relationship, rather than an actively or constructively critical and evaluative one to organized religion. This has less to do with if someone, say, is interested in the metaphysics of Taoism or Buddhism, or whatever (though not all religions are metaphysically equal frankly), but more with critiques of organized religion and religious ideology in its variety of forms.

Then we must say that it was completely seized and perverted by opportunists, at least in the anglophone context (and in France, from what I can tell), since it is just another cudgel of chauvinism to be wielded against the imperialized when it is discussed in Popular Discourse (tm).