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I was with this until this part: > His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to red

I was with this until this part: > His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favourable economic environment." That's going to segue (thanks for the spelling check davidw) obviously into some religions thing about the soul or something. And I take issue with having to be redeemed. I do not need to be redeemed.

michaelsbradley 13y ago
Read paragraph #1 in the linked page and you'll find stated quite plainly the ideas and questions which the author intends to explore in the rest of his text. The commentary on Marx is situated within that larger context and does touch on questions of soul, faith, redemption, and other religious themes.
tehwalrus 13y ago
umm, no it isn't (I mean, maybe he did say something like that afterwards, but that's not what he's saying here.) The idea that humans are not just the product of their environment but have something within them is undoubtedly true; some of our behaviours are learned (from the economy, and from other places), and some are innate/genetic. Similarly, humans placed in a "favourable economic environment" are not automatically perfect, or even good. On these points, I agree with him (in spite of being an atheist and ex-Catholic.)
- yukichan 13y ago
  Due to the bit about redemption and that it was the Pope's words I considerably doubt he was speaking about anything other than original sin. If you find your genetics equatable to sin from which you need redemption, you should consider aiding gene therapy research or something then, because you cannot change your genes by reading the writings of religious leaders.
  - tehwalrus 13y ago
    To talk about "redeeming" oneself is a standard English idiom. When the pope uses it, maybe he does mean something else, but I don't see why we need to interpret a long-ish, otherwise non-theological piece uncharitably over the use of a single word once.
    - yukichan 13y ago
      > but I don't see why we need to interpret a long-ish, otherwise non-theological piece uncharitably over the use of a single word once. Because the words are in the general sense and I'd like someone to show me why "man", as it was originally phrased, needs any kind of redemption. Maybe we don't need a tailbone or some troublesome cancer causing genes, but fixing bad genes isn't redemption. It's a judgement-free mechanical fix for a machine, a biological equivalent to the flipping of bits in programming code. I'm not redeeming my code by making it more optimal when I fix a bug. So why would changing our genes be redemption?
      - hacknat 13y ago
        Do you not think that there is clearly something wrong with humanity. A quick glance around the world shows that we are positively evil to each other. I think we are also good, but there is immense suffering in the world. You can be an atheist and think that there is something wrong with human beings. Non Christian folk for millennia have a rich tradition of seeing something wrong with human beings: Oh, the torment bred in the race, the grinding scream of death and the stroke that hits the vein, the hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief, the curse no man can bear. - Aeschylus, from The Libation Bearers
      - muraiki 13y ago
        There are differences between the understanding of redemption in the Catholic and Orthodox churches; I can speak only for the Orthodox part, and hopefully I won't mangle it somehow. :) I've tried to compress this as much as possible without being confusing. The goal of humanity is not simply to end up in Heaven, to reach some sort of place. It is not even necessarily the case that we are trying to restore ourselves to the state that Adam and Eve had -- for even they made a mistake at that time, a mistake serious enough to have cosmic ramifications. So what was the problem? Well we do know of Adam and Eve being cast from Paradise after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But it's not the eating of the apple that begins the story. Rather, it was Adam's reaction to God. When God confronted Adam, Adam did not respond by saying, "Yes, I ate of the tree against Your warning. I'm sorry; please forgive me." He said instead, "The woman which You gave me, she made me eat it." Instead of being accountable for his action, for his own free will, Adam blames not only Eve but his Creator, essentially renouncing his free will. It was this act, that of failing to accept responsibility and instead casting down his neighbor, that led to humanity being cast out from Paradise -- or rather, casting itself out. Adam's action had effects throughout the cosmos, sending everything into disorder and brokenness and death. So we see that the problem we have is that humans are cruel to one another and to God (and to creation, also). And this cannot be rectified in a way like having a bone fixed or some code swapped, for the problem is inextricably tied up in humanity's free will. So God chose to rectify this in a way that demonstrated not only His divinity, but _perfect humanity_. Christ becomes incarnate in the flesh and demonstrates, Himself, not only what it is to be truly human but that glory which all humanity is intended to receive. St. Athanasius describes this succinctly as: "God became man so that man might become God." This concept is termed theosis. Theosis is realized in love of God and one's neighbor, actualized through humility. Unlike Adam blaming Eve, Christ, the new Adam, blames Himself. Christ takes up and covers the sin of the world, even on the Cross praying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Christ accounts _only Himself_ as deserving of death, and all as worthy of eternal life. And in this perfect love, even death has no power over Him. Hades (a place of gloom where the dead were consigned; a jail in a sense -- not Hell) cannot contain Him and is destroyed, and those who were bound there by Adam's sin are released. "Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life." It through these actions that all of creation was redeemed. Yes, that was "redemption" in the past tense. From the Orthodox perspective, redemption has already occurred because Christ has not only rectified the division between God and man, He has given us the tools to experience divine life even now, through humble love of God and neighbor. Christ has given us the perfect example of how to live, He has destroyed death, and through Christ's union with humanity in the Incarnation, descent into Hades, Resurrection, and Ascention, paved the way to become by grace that which God is by nature. "The powerlessness of Christ has always threatened the powerfulness of the world. And the silence of the cross is the most eloquent sermon about the power of love. Despite what we know in ourselves and whatever we see in our world, the cross proclaims what love can and will achieve. The scandal of the cross is that, in spite of our wrongs and the wrongdoings of our world, God loves us to the point of death." --Fr John Chryssavgis, Light Through Darkness: the Orthodox Tradition
AnimalMuppet 13y ago
> And I take issue with having to be redeemed. I do not need to be redeemed. Marx thought you did. He thought you needed redeemed from an evil, oppressive economic system. He thought that, by doing so, everything would become wonderful. The point of the quoted words was not that you need to be spiritually redeeded, but that Marx's idea of redemption didn't work because his view of humans was wrong.
- yukichan 13y ago
  > He thought you needed redeemed from an evil, oppressive economic system. And now I take issue with your use of pronouns. Marx never knew me, and neither do you.
  - obstacle1 13y ago
    Can we not be intentionally dense for a second? Obviously Marx wasn't talking about you personally as in whatever identity you (delusionally) think constitutes you. He thought there was some fundamental characteristic common to all human beings, so speaking of you as a generality makes sense within the framework, since as a human you'd have that characteristic. But I'm pretty sure you knew that, and were just being difficult.
  - gambiting 13y ago
    What is this? Reddit comment section? Is it so hard to understand what that sentence means?
- rmc 13y ago
  Slight difference. Catholics & the Pope believe that once your born you need to be redeemed. But Marxists, in theory, claim once the oppressive economic system is gone you don't need redeption.
smsm42 13y ago
Leaving aside the question of redemption, which you have to expect from a Christian, the insight about the error of discounting the human nature is very profound. It is the bane and doom of many government policies, not just Marxist, but regulators which have nothing to do with Marxism and probably just want to make some things better. Unfortunately, they frequently forget about the human nature and incentives they create, and all their designs invariably unravel and lead to unintended consequences, sometimes just burdensome and sometimes disastrous. Christians treat it as freedom for evil, from which humans need to be redeemed, but however you take it you can not fail to recognize humans are free to behave in ways that you don't want them to and can not predict. Failure to recognize if goes way beyond Marxism, unfortunately.
ubernostrum 13y ago
Wait. You mean the Pope -- the leader of the Roman Catholic church -- believes in the Catholic interpretation of the doctrines of grace and of original sin, and bases his world view on them? I am shocked, literally SHOCKED, to learn this, anonymous internet person who is playing at not understanding the source of the quote in order to launch nit-picky off-topic jabs about religion.
- yukichan 13y ago
  Did you really contribute to the discussion with this reply? It seems more like valueless and arrogant sarcasm which happened to be more upvoted than any of the sane replies I got. Wonderful stuff. I tried to have a decent discussion but it turned into an angry hatefest. Notice I never attacked anyone, and all my replies were intended only to further the discussion or to address specific points in replies or raise issues I had with what others were saying. But you go, you go on the attack, your community is right there behind you.
davidw 13y ago
I don't have time for philosophical debates, but did want to correct your spelling: Segway is the thing with two wheels that is going to revolutionize human transportation. "Segue" is the word you are looking for.
- yukichan 13y ago
  Thank you, I wasn't able to reply earlier.
Zuider 13y ago
For someone who insists that you don't need redemption, you sure like preaching.

michaelsbradley 13y ago

Read paragraph #1 in the linked page and you'll find stated quite plainly the ideas and questions which the author intends to explore in the rest of his text. The commentary on Marx is situated within that larger context and does touch on questions of soul, faith, redemption, and other religious themes.

tehwalrus 13y ago

umm, no it isn't (I mean, maybe he did say something like that afterwards, but that's not what he's saying here.) The idea that humans are not just the product of their environment but have something within them is undoubtedly true; some of our behaviours are learned (from the economy, and from other places), and some are innate/genetic. Similarly, humans placed in a "favourable economic environment" are not automatically perfect, or even good. On these points, I agree with him (in spite of being an atheist and ex-Catholic.)

yukichan 13y ago
Due to the bit about redemption and that it was the Pope's words I considerably doubt he was speaking about anything other than original sin. If you find your genetics equatable to sin from which you need redemption, you should consider aiding gene therapy research or something then, because you cannot change your genes by reading the writings of religious leaders.
- tehwalrus 13y ago
  To talk about "redeeming" oneself is a standard English idiom. When the pope uses it, maybe he does mean something else, but I don't see why we need to interpret a long-ish, otherwise non-theological piece uncharitably over the use of a single word once.
  - yukichan 13y ago
    > but I don't see why we need to interpret a long-ish, otherwise non-theological piece uncharitably over the use of a single word once. Because the words are in the general sense and I'd like someone to show me why "man", as it was originally phrased, needs any kind of redemption. Maybe we don't need a tailbone or some troublesome cancer causing genes, but fixing bad genes isn't redemption. It's a judgement-free mechanical fix for a machine, a biological equivalent to the flipping of bits in programming code. I'm not redeeming my code by making it more optimal when I fix a bug. So why would changing our genes be redemption?
    - hacknat 13y ago
      Do you not think that there is clearly something wrong with humanity. A quick glance around the world shows that we are positively evil to each other. I think we are also good, but there is immense suffering in the world. You can be an atheist and think that there is something wrong with human beings. Non Christian folk for millennia have a rich tradition of seeing something wrong with human beings: Oh, the torment bred in the race, the grinding scream of death and the stroke that hits the vein, the hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief, the curse no man can bear. - Aeschylus, from The Libation Bearers
    - muraiki 13y ago
      There are differences between the understanding of redemption in the Catholic and Orthodox churches; I can speak only for the Orthodox part, and hopefully I won't mangle it somehow. :) I've tried to compress this as much as possible without being confusing. The goal of humanity is not simply to end up in Heaven, to reach some sort of place. It is not even necessarily the case that we are trying to restore ourselves to the state that Adam and Eve had -- for even they made a mistake at that time, a mistake serious enough to have cosmic ramifications. So what was the problem? Well we do know of Adam and Eve being cast from Paradise after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But it's not the eating of the apple that begins the story. Rather, it was Adam's reaction to God. When God confronted Adam, Adam did not respond by saying, "Yes, I ate of the tree against Your warning. I'm sorry; please forgive me." He said instead, "The woman which You gave me, she made me eat it." Instead of being accountable for his action, for his own free will, Adam blames not only Eve but his Creator, essentially renouncing his free will. It was this act, that of failing to accept responsibility and instead casting down his neighbor, that led to humanity being cast out from Paradise -- or rather, casting itself out. Adam's action had effects throughout the cosmos, sending everything into disorder and brokenness and death. So we see that the problem we have is that humans are cruel to one another and to God (and to creation, also). And this cannot be rectified in a way like having a bone fixed or some code swapped, for the problem is inextricably tied up in humanity's free will. So God chose to rectify this in a way that demonstrated not only His divinity, but _perfect humanity_. Christ becomes incarnate in the flesh and demonstrates, Himself, not only what it is to be truly human but that glory which all humanity is intended to receive. St. Athanasius describes this succinctly as: "God became man so that man might become God." This concept is termed theosis. Theosis is realized in love of God and one's neighbor, actualized through humility. Unlike Adam blaming Eve, Christ, the new Adam, blames Himself. Christ takes up and covers the sin of the world, even on the Cross praying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Christ accounts _only Himself_ as deserving of death, and all as worthy of eternal life. And in this perfect love, even death has no power over Him. Hades (a place of gloom where the dead were consigned; a jail in a sense -- not Hell) cannot contain Him and is destroyed, and those who were bound there by Adam's sin are released. "Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life." It through these actions that all of creation was redeemed. Yes, that was "redemption" in the past tense. From the Orthodox perspective, redemption has already occurred because Christ has not only rectified the division between God and man, He has given us the tools to experience divine life even now, through humble love of God and neighbor. Christ has given us the perfect example of how to live, He has destroyed death, and through Christ's union with humanity in the Incarnation, descent into Hades, Resurrection, and Ascention, paved the way to become by grace that which God is by nature. "The powerlessness of Christ has always threatened the powerfulness of the world. And the silence of the cross is the most eloquent sermon about the power of love. Despite what we know in ourselves and whatever we see in our world, the cross proclaims what love can and will achieve. The scandal of the cross is that, in spite of our wrongs and the wrongdoings of our world, God loves us to the point of death." --Fr John Chryssavgis, Light Through Darkness: the Orthodox Tradition

AnimalMuppet 13y ago

> And I take issue with having to be redeemed. I do not need to be redeemed. Marx thought you did. He thought you needed redeemed from an evil, oppressive economic system. He thought that, by doing so, everything would become wonderful. The point of the quoted words was not that you need to be spiritually redeeded, but that Marx's idea of redemption didn't work because his view of humans was wrong.

yukichan 13y ago
> He thought you needed redeemed from an evil, oppressive economic system. And now I take issue with your use of pronouns. Marx never knew me, and neither do you.
- obstacle1 13y ago
  Can we not be intentionally dense for a second? Obviously Marx wasn't talking about you personally as in whatever identity you (delusionally) think constitutes you. He thought there was some fundamental characteristic common to all human beings, so speaking of you as a generality makes sense within the framework, since as a human you'd have that characteristic. But I'm pretty sure you knew that, and were just being difficult.
- gambiting 13y ago
  What is this? Reddit comment section? Is it so hard to understand what that sentence means?
rmc 13y ago
Slight difference. Catholics & the Pope believe that once your born you need to be redeemed. But Marxists, in theory, claim once the oppressive economic system is gone you don't need redeption.

smsm42 13y ago

Leaving aside the question of redemption, which you have to expect from a Christian, the insight about the error of discounting the human nature is very profound. It is the bane and doom of many government policies, not just Marxist, but regulators which have nothing to do with Marxism and probably just want to make some things better. Unfortunately, they frequently forget about the human nature and incentives they create, and all their designs invariably unravel and lead to unintended consequences, sometimes just burdensome and sometimes disastrous. Christians treat it as freedom for evil, from which humans need to be redeemed, but however you take it you can not fail to recognize humans are free to behave in ways that you don't want them to and can not predict. Failure to recognize if goes way beyond Marxism, unfortunately.

ubernostrum 13y ago

Wait. You mean the Pope -- the leader of the Roman Catholic church -- believes in the Catholic interpretation of the doctrines of grace and of original sin, and bases his world view on them? I am shocked, literally SHOCKED, to learn this, anonymous internet person who is playing at not understanding the source of the quote in order to launch nit-picky off-topic jabs about religion.

yukichan 13y ago
Did you really contribute to the discussion with this reply? It seems more like valueless and arrogant sarcasm which happened to be more upvoted than any of the sane replies I got. Wonderful stuff. I tried to have a decent discussion but it turned into an angry hatefest. Notice I never attacked anyone, and all my replies were intended only to further the discussion or to address specific points in replies or raise issues I had with what others were saying. But you go, you go on the attack, your community is right there behind you.

davidw 13y ago

I don't have time for philosophical debates, but did want to correct your spelling: Segway is the thing with two wheels that is going to revolutionize human transportation. "Segue" is the word you are looking for.

yukichan 13y ago
Thank you, I wasn't able to reply earlier.

Zuider 13y ago

For someone who insists that you don't need redemption, you sure like preaching.