Hi John, nice to see you again. I don’t think your post is inflammatory. I agree that environmentalism could be seen as a religion only before it went by other names such as Transcendentalism or Romanticism. Even Buddhism and passages from the Bible preach respect for the environment. Whatever John Muir believed and felt I think was a religion to him. Not saying I agree, but I can see how they could maneuver it if they only changed the name.
Hmmm could socialism be a religion. I don’t know. I often think socialism and communism are confused. We know that communism becomes the religion in the absence of God.
Socialism could be close to a religion maybe Christianity in its purist sense. Give to the poor, “love one another as I have loved you”, “a man cannot serve two masters” etc.
I’m sure plenty will disagree, but it seems closer to the spirit of Jesus than capitalism…
I think it is hard to say if socialism as a concept has completely failed. It’s only been since WWI that much of the world went from being monarchies to finding their way with out it; our history books are filled with their rocky road to the present state of being.
WWI until now is such a small little pocket in history. Its even smaller because its really from the 1940’s that it became more and more of an ideology Europe shared.
It’s hard for me to base the concept of socialism solely on Hitler’s Germany, because it was Hitler. I don’t have to go in to detail, but it’s unfortunate he had to rid Europe of 6 million Jews, homosexuals, gypsies etc. and be in a continuous war with Russia and all of Europe, because maybe he could have done something. Maybe he could have dug Germany out of the hole by the Beetle alone- just kidding.
Much of Europe seems to be doing fine right now; no worse than us. The Euro dipped this month, but once again no worse than us. Many of the people who live in France, England, Denmark etc love their system. Really I think we are afraid of socialism because we have a third world country below us and few European socialist countries have that.
Many of us, myself included have this idea of an illegal immigrant coming over, having three babies, going to the psychologist, some how getting on disability due to depression…
Any way I would like some examples of where socialism has failed aside from Hitler’s Germany and not examples of Communism.
