REJECTION OF MATERIALISM SUSAIRAJ J. 09039

REJECTION OF MATERIALISM

The primary reason Karl Marx hated religion specifically Judaism and Christianity was that he regarded it as the "opiate of the masses."The Marxist worldview is based on a materialist understanding of life. In popular jargon, "materialism" means an excessive love of material things. However, philosophically, "materialism" means that the only reality is matter, that there is no reality beyond the material world.

That is why, for example, to most leftists it is a great wrong that amid Latin American poverty, the church would build expensive cathedrals. In their view, all that gold and treasure should be spent on the poor. To a person with Judeo-Christian values, on the other hand, while feeding the hungry is a primary value, there are many other values, including the need to feed the soul. Moreover, the fact that many of the world's poor people would prefer having a cathedral to distributing whatever money selling such edifices would provide has disturbed the Left since Marx. To a materialist, the notion that poor people would place non-material concerns over material ones is absurd, if not perverse.

 Religious people have values that transcend the material; Marx called religion the opiate of the masses: It keeps the masses from making social revolution by keeping them happy with non-material concerns and non-material rewards. For the heirs of Marx, which is what the Left is, the "good" is not so much a moral, let alone a spiritual, category, as it is an economic one. Hence, the left's preoccupation with economic inequality, taxing the rich, etc. The Left regards itself as morally elevated because of its preoccupation with materialism. Yet religious Americans who reject materialism are far more likely than left-leaning parents in the same socio-economic condition to sacrifice materially in order to have one parent be a full-time parent. Moreover, Judeo-Christian values explain why a religious woman is far more likely to sacrifice materially by giving birth to, rather than aborting, an unplanned child. Even freedom is a higher value to one who holds Judeo-Christian values. That is why the materialist leftist world so often celebrated and continues to celebrate communist regimes.

Those regimes may have rendered their societies prisons, but they reduced material inequality. That is why the founders of America, the place where Judeo-Christian values have flourished, inscribed a verse from the Torah, the primary source of Judeo-Christian values, on the Liberty Bell: Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof. Meanwhile, the world is becoming polarized between those who choose to live in the past, embracing myth and superstition, and those who strive to achieve a balanced, tolerant, technical civilization that promotes individual freedom and personal growth. This could erupt into another major world war in the next few years.

 The major cause of all of our problems is overpopulation. This issue has yet to be addressed by any country other than China, and religious elements are actively impeding any general solution. In the meantime, precious resources continue to diminish, and the very food chain of life itself is now in peril. We cannot even agree on something as simple as saving the Blue Fin Tuna population by changing our diet for a while. The outcome of these struggles, I believe, will result in a permanent rejection of materialism, and the transformation of the consumer-based economy into something else.