In response to this Thu29May03 post by Tahir Wood:

> Tahir: Absolute nonsense - many Marxists, beginning with
> Marx, were extremely interested in religion and knew much
> about theology...
> TW

Tahir, you say you want some academic rigor in this debate,
so let's see it from both sides.

The claim that Marx, "knew much about theology," can
hardly be justified academically. His famous joke about
Religion in the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO (1848) shows
fairly clearly that he did not wish to delve deeply into the
topic.

But let's get even more rigorous. An academic critique on
Marx as regards the theologian Bruno Bauer was published
in 1977 by Zvi Rosen. Up through 2002 this was the most
thorough scholarly treatment of this topic available in
English. Zvi Rosen demonstrates cogently that Marx did
not care to delve into theology -- he considered it backward.

For Karl Marx, God does not create man but rather man
creates God. Hegel has already stated that such a view
is "foolish and perverted," (LECTURES ON THE
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, 1827) and I quoted that
for Pratyush, since it is a scholarly reference, even
though Hegel was quite harsh about it.

But there is more. Zvi Rosen demonstrates that Marx
was somewhat impatient and impetuous on the topic of
Christianity. For example, he began to lavish praise on
Feuerbach only when he was breaking with Bruno
Bauer in 1844. Rosen notes:

"There are almost no Feuerbachian motifs
in Marx's conception of religion...Marx
protested when Bauer wanted to recruit
Feuerbach as a contributor to the atheistic
journal the two planned. Those who studied
Marx disregarded this fact for many years,
since it did not fit in with the picture of
Marx's development drawn by Engels."
(Zvi Rosen, BRUNO BAUER AND KARL
MARX, 1977, Martinus-Nijhoff, p. 148)

In retrospect, that seems obvious when we remember that
Ludwig Feuerbach never wrote on the topic of politics,
which was Marx's main interest. (As an interesting side-
note, Zvi Rosen showed that the famous line attributed
to Marx, namely, "there is no other road for you to truth
and freedom except the fiery brook; Feuerbach is the
purgatory of modern times," was not written by Marx at
all, but by Feuerbach himself, as a sales blurb for his
books. The statement was assigned to Marx by
Ryazanov much later.)

Also, who can forget the blatant anti-Semitism in Marx's
writings? Is that serious theological scholarship? Marx
portrayed Jews as commercially oriented at root (A
WORLD WITHOUT JEWS, 1845). This is nothing
but common street-level prejudice!

Finally, for this e-mail, I want to focus on a topic that
Zvi Rosen pioneered for the English reader. Marx was so
prejudiced (and so unscholarly) about Judeo-Christianity
that he advocated a famous screed by G.F. Daumer, THE
SECRETS OF ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY (1846) that
preaches hatred for all religions, especially Christianity.
Zvi Rosen writes:

"In an address delivered in a Communist
circle devoted to popular education, in
London in 1847, Marx said, inter alia:
['Of everything which German philosophy
has done the most important thing is
*criticism of religion*...but what has not
so far been investigated is Christianity's
practical ritual. Daumer has *proved*
in his recently published book that early
Christians really did slaughter people,
eat their flesh and drink their blood...the
offering of human sacrifies was sacred
to them and was really carried out...
Daumer's book, which depicts this affair,
deals Christianity a death-blow.']" (Zvi
Rosen, ibid. p. 144)

This revelation clearly shows that Marx accepted this
anti-Christian slander. Also, Marx believed that this
alleged 'theological research' could hurry the collapse
of a bourgeois society founded on Christian principles.

Who today can call this scholarship?

Regards,
--Paul Trejo, M.A.