|
Che
Guevara
Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War /
Che Guevara: Radical Writings on Guerrilla
Warfare, Politics and Revolution
The African Dream: The diaries of the Revolutionary War in the
Congo /
Self- Portrait Che Guevara
Paulo Freire
Pedagogy of the Oppressed /
Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage
Education for Critical Consciousness /
Teachers as Cultural Workers
*
* * * *
Belief and Interfaith Dialogue
By John Hick Whether Marxism is to be accounted a religion
is a matter of definition. Personally I prefer a definition of
“religion” which involves an essential reference to the
Transcendent and which consequently does not include Marxism.
Nevertheless, Marxism borders on the religions in that it is a
systematic interpretation of human existence which issues in a
distinctive way of life; and as such it constitutes one of the
most powerful options among the world’s living religions and
ideologies.
And when a Marxist engages in dialogue with
people of other faiths than his own he does so from within his
own conviction that Marxism teaches the truth about man and his
history, including the truth that man’s religions are
projections of human hope, whose historic function has been to
enable the exploited masses to bear their servitude patiently
rather than rise up against their oppressors. And it must be his
hope that through his proclamation of Marxist truth his hearers
will be converted and enlisted among the forces of progress. . .
.
The origins of the scientific revolution of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lie in the many-sided
awakening of the European mind from its dogmatic slumbers in the
period which is comprehensively called the Renaissance. This was
a renaissance of the ancient Greco-Roman civilization, whose
literature was spread throughout Europe by the new technique of
printing. Science was thus a product of an interaction of
cultures.
For the rationalistic and enquiring spirit of
Greek philosophy seems to have been the main new fertilizing
agent which stimulated the rise of modern science in Christian
Europe, bringing its medieval phase to an end. And since its own
increasing momentum, rapidly establishing its independence from
the Christian world view, and indeed continually challenging the
Christian faith and forcing it to undergo major transformation
in order to remain credible in the light of growing empirical
knowledge.
Thus we may say that Christianity provided,
unconsciously, an intellectual soil in which the Greek spirit of
unimpeded rational inquiry could blossom into the modern
scientific outlook, and that this has now in turn largely
transformed the intellectual content of Christianity into a
faith which does not contradict the findings of the sciences. .
. .
One of the major questions put to the
Marxists and Maoists in their dialogue with the religions will
concern individual human freedom. The religions will have
increasingly to recognize a considerable element of truth in the
Marxist analysis of the economic dynamics of human society., and
a common aim with Marxism in the ideal of a classless society in
which men no longer exploit one another.
Indeed the moral basis for the criticism both
of the Hindu caste system and of polygamy and the traditional
subordination of women is most clearly articulated in Marxism.
For Marxism embodies in its pure form the mentality produced by
the scientific revolution. Marxism is modernity without
religion, in contrast to much of contemporary Christianity,
which is modernity in a religious form.
But the Marxist societies have to face the
question whether, in their opposition to capitalist-Christian
civilization, they have not themselves become hierarchical and
authoritarian, thus negating the concept of human liberation on
which they are based. For there are clearly as many features of
Marxist as of Christian, Muslim, and Hindu societies which
contradict the modern ideal of human equality and freedom. . . .
Source: Excerpt from John
Hick. God Has Many Names. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982. * * * *
*
update 29 July 2008 |
