<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;background-color:transparent">On Fri, Oct 16, 2026 at 3:24 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:</span></div></div><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div style=""><font size="4" face="georgia, serif"><i><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span>Marxism should be classed as a religion.</i></font></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b>I don't think <span style="background-color:transparent">Marxism<span class="gmail_default" style=""> was a religion but Communism definitely was. The books that Karl Marx wrote were stupid but they were not so stupid as to claim that his political ideas could be expanded to explain the workings of the hard sciences, like the idiot  </span></span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko" style="background-color:transparent">Trofim Lysenko</a><span class="gmail_default" style=""> did in biology. And s</span><span style="background-color:transparent">ome Communist<span class="gmail_default" style=""> </span></span><span style="background-color:transparent"><span class="gmail_default" style="">"</span></span><span style="background-color:transparent">philosophers<span class="gmail_default" style="">" insisted that Einstein's Relativity </span>must be wrong because it<span class="gmail_default" style=""> </span></span><span style="background-color:transparent"> </span><span style="background-color:transparent">contradicted </span><span style="background-color:transparent">dialectical </span><span style="background-color:transparent">materialism<span class="gmail_default" style=""> and </span></span><span style="background-color:transparent">undermined </span><span style="background-color:transparent">the </span><span style="background-color:transparent">material </span><span style="background-color:transparent">objectivity </span><span style="background-color:transparent">of </span><span style="background-color:transparent">the </span><span style="background-color:transparent">universe<span class="gmail_default" style=""> that their political ideology demanded</span>.<span class="gmail_default" style=""> Crap like that is religion. </span></span></b></font></div></div><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><font face="tahoma, sans-serif" size="4"><b><br></b></font><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div style=""><font size="4" face="georgia, serif"><i><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span> a lot of wars in the last couple of thousand years can be classed as religious wars up to and including the conflict in Vietnam.</i></font></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b>You could add 911 to that list,<span class="gmail_default" style=""> and without religion you wouldn't have Arabs and Jews in the Middle East, you'd just have people. With the exception of death itself, religion has caused more misery than anything else.</span></b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b><span class="gmail_default" style=""><br></span></b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="tahoma, sans-serif"><b><span class="gmail_default" style="">John K Clark </span> </b></font></div><div><br></div><div> </div></div></div>