Can’t remember who it was so forgive the lack of reference but I saw a tweet thread the other day criticizing the notion of religious left and offering instead an advocacy for an explicit materialist, rational, atheistic, non-superstitious, etc orientation. It’s been eating 1/11

2/11 me up a bit. Not because its an unfamiliar suggestion but because its a supposition that is conditioned by its own blind ideological *superstitions* and *irrationalities*. What is more, it fails to investigate the reasons why leftish types are drawn to religious practice; &

3/11 this seduction into, by, and of religious practice cant be reduced to some amorphous wielding of “mystification.” Its much deeper than this. Its, at least, partly connected to the fact that there is something on offer outwith a bland materialist or “secular” socio-political

4/11 orientation in & to the world(s) in which we are thrown. And ironically part of this seduction is also what motivates fidelity to a hopeful, sequential (or even teleological), eschatology of a leftist political outlook. But this latter is unrecognized by many (most?) left

5/11 types. This is because they are metaphysically ignorant & thus they end up becoming epistemologically arrogant in their dogmatism, all the while seeing themselves as absolved, pure, set apart (read: holy), etc. On @owls_at_dawn we did a series going through Daniel Barber’s

6/11 book On Dispora. Part of Barbers project is to throw a wrench into such epistemological purity by problematizing the metaphysics of “secularity,” demonstrating how it operates according to a very similar type of “religious” logic. Very interesting read. Def recommend it. But

7/11 beyond just the theoretical apparatus, there is a real practical disservice this type of materialist dogma reproduces. The fact that many Marxists, anarchists, etc have attachments to transcendence/excess/the beyond/etc of various sorts means that real, material conditions

8/11 include the real material expressions of religious (for lack of a better term) practice. To use epithets to discard these expressions as irrational or superstitious is also to *suppress* real material expressions. Which in turn means that this position becomes idealistic (in

9/11 the bad sense – especially bad from the position of the positivist lefty types who self-legitimize through their own brand of purported non-idealistic rationality). Obvs there are issues to address within religious belief-systems (Weltanschauung in the Freudian sense) but so

10/11 too are there similar issues to address in “worldview Marxism” & other similarly conditioned metaphysical/transcendental orientations. This is quite theoretical but it just really chaps my hide when leftists puff their chests under the bs assumptions that they have escaped

11/11 the cave and grasped the really real... reeks of the odor of the born again who have tasted the truth of the Word and who patronize the blind for still being ensnared by the grips of darkness. Just by slapping the word “critique” on your dogmatism doesn’t set you free.