if it were a truly perfect reign, I imagine it would be more about balance and harmony, not control in the traditional sense. After all, if such an entity exists, it would ideally know what’s best for everyone. But yeah, I understand how the idea of total authority, even in a utopian context, can raise concerns. It’s a pretty complex topic.

Sure if you count the holy book as institutional religious baggage. It’s cool, I never thought of it exactly that way but it definitely is.

Or… perhaps… talk to people and try to understand why they think the way they do. Who knows, maybe you’d hear something that makes sense. Just an idea! :D

Lambedor de bota detectado

Which is why it’s a big irony when people come to Lemmy to complain about communism/socialism.

Like, man, you are on a decentralized network run by volunteers who don’t want to be monetized. You want to enjoy the benefits of socialism but at the same time complain about how bad it is and promote capitalism.

It is religion …

My concept of Christianity is rather expansive, and Christian anarchists are often inspired by Tolstoy, who is someone I have read about and whose works I have given some attention. I can confirm they are rather different than most Christians - Tolstoy in particular rejected the Church after he saw they were committed to enabling war, which is clearly un-Christian. Dorothy Day is another relevant Christian anarchist, and I have worked with a Catholic Workers House locally, so I have some IRL exposure to these folks as well.

I tend to think “Christian” is an almost meaningless term without more context or clarification, people who call themselves Christians hold opposite views on many different positions. “Buddhism” is no different, if anything it is worse, so this isn’t particular to Christianity. Nor is it particular to religion, Marx spent some time in the Communism Manifesto clarifying what he meant by “socialism” and the different kinds of socialism he was aware of - there are many such overloaded terms and concepts. It seems particularly common in any political context, where there is power struggle it seems there are struggles between meanings for a particular word.

I don’t agree that it is doomed to fail, but I also don’t believe humans are inherently Fallen, and especially not in the particular soteriological sense that Christians believe (i.e. all later generations have inherited the guilt from the single act of disobedience by Adam & Eve dooming all of humanity to endless toil and suffering, as well as an evil nature).

That said, I do think humans behave in sometimes predictable ways, and it might be useful to look at what kinds of choices about society might alleviate suffering and promote well-being and fairness in society.

That said, I don’t think that’s going to happen without significant social upheaval, and that itself seems to bring about a lot of violence and the kinds of suffering I think we should all avoid … so, yeah - these are hard problems.

Also, the bible tells us literally nothing about how heaven actually works or what people even do there. Meanwhile Marx wrote extensively about how he thinks a communist system would work. Heaven is not a “system” we can conceivably implement, because there’s nothing to implement. It’s just an abstract concept, and a very ambiguous one at that.

You could literally describe early christianity as the spiritual arm of a revolutionary front.

Sure, but comparing what people thought 2000 years ago to what they think now is a fruitless endeavor.

The concept of democracy came about around that time too (at least the Greek one, which arguably wasn’t the first but I digress) but should we exclude women and foreigners from it? That’s what the early proponents of democracy wanted.

Not to the early Christians it wasn’t. The early Christians movements (before they were co-opted by Empire) were radically egalitarian.

That would be irrelevant even if it was true. We are not in the second century. It is a very controversial position either way.

Egalitarian values certainly did emerge out of Christianity, and there was a change in that direction even then, but they were not egalitarian in the modern sense.

Also, please be careful when generalising early Christianty, as it was a very diverse group of sects that hardly agreed on anything.

Early religious communities sometimes were very accepting, and women played a role as well, but they still existed in a very patriarchal culture, so you should not expect their women to be equal to men in society, and there were absolutely positions of authority.

They opposed the empire because initially, they were not perceived by anyone as a group distinct from Jews, which were very hostile to it. However, there were appeals made by powerful Christians later to be recognized as a non-threat to imperial power, and ultimately, they succeeded.

Even so, the Jews simply wanted independence, not equality. The idea of social equality did not even exist then. They were equal in Christ, not in society.

Christianity was not coopted by the empire, it conquered it.

The idea that early christianity was somehow “more pure” I do not accept as well. I would say the Christian tradition has only been enriched over the years, and without a unified basic set of dogmas it would really make much sense.

I actually take a critical eye to the word “work” itself and think that it’s too encompassing a term. In our society it’s a blanket word that covers all labor. From punitive, fruitless toil all the way up to invigorating, actualizing applications of trained skill. Lots of what we call “work” are actually things we could want for ourselves in a utopia and would miss without, while IRL we’re currently on the crest of an economic trend in which the majority of society are trapped in ultimately meaningless and forgettable toil under wage coercion. Literally just being kept occupied and oppressed.

Put very simply I think you can slice our current idea of what work is into two halves, work that removes happiness from ourselves and society and work that adds happiness to ourselves and society. As utopians I think a society that contains only the latter is a reasonable prize to keep our eyes on.

On calories housing and most everyday things we are post scarcity if we ignore distribution. In fact we over commission and under deliver all these things. We over produce food by a factor of around 1.5, housing is much less transferable but even there we’re unbelievably wastefull, energy is basically the only thing that isn’t outright overproduced but really only because when we have cheap energy we just tend to use it, often to produce more stuff.

So imo we are by bookkeeping standards post scarcity, delivery/distribution is just fucked and partially because of that we are creating tons of waste.

We could all live in comfort and those who want to could work less, and none of this would break. The real world economy(things, energy, housing , food, water, logistics capabilities…) is so large and secure it could support the world population. If not for the barriers and assumptions, the intrinsic I’ve got mine fuck you of the systems.

For me that is being there, and I hope that even if you can’t agree on that point, it at least illustrates that we are incredibly close to post scarcity.