has christianity dwindled in the uk

@SW-User

...as if Karl Marx has had an excellent track record. 🙄

@Thinkerbell Still a good quote.

@SW-User

...not if you consider the alternative Marx proposed and his followers carried out. 🙄

@Thinkerbell Ah, I guess I hadn't.

Alas, it seems I had separated the art from the artist.

@SW-User

...not generally a good idea.
The Devil can cite scripture for his purpose, after all.

@Thinkerbell Shun him, the devil, for he is well read.

@SW-User

...so was Marx, at least in certain areas.
You should have shunned him too.

@Thinkerbell I did.

"Where Turgenev saw men, Marx saw classes of men; where Turgenev saw people, Marx saw the People."

@SW-User

Good for you. 👍

“It goes without saying that the artists sympathized not with the actual working classes but with their own idea of the working classes,”

@Thinkerbell Karl Marx was far from the first person to suggest that religion was an addiction

@SW-User We should separate the art from the artist. There’s plenty of musician or painter whose lives were packets of Grief. And Marx was far from the first person to suggest that religion was an addiction

@SatyrService

And sociologists are still mulling it over nowadays.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2020/10/religion-less-opiate-more-suppressant-study-finds

@Thinkerbell I think biology has more to say about it. If you look at it look at a religion as an infection, which it has many things in common with it isn’t that religion best interest to become more benign, to those who carry it. Rather than force them to difficult choices hard life. Religions that were once quite strict, have become kinder and gentler.
Sociologists have a more limited view. Do I include that science within my own. It is far from an inclusive system. A challenge for some, is that a religion becomes less demanding of its people it also becomes less demanding of everyone else. Some call that going Soft.

@Thinkerbell

Engels nailed reality in Manchester...

@SomeMichGuy

Yes, but his solution was nonsense, as Lenin, Stalin, Mao et al amply proved.

@Thinkerbell Some would say, Lenin was overwhelmed by his circumstances.
Mao And STalin were just traditional dictators
Mao may have started With a philosophical agenda. Bree just became the emperor Stalin never had anything like that, he was always in Ever just somebody who wanted to be the Tzar

To the greatest extent no one has been able to set up a proper experiment
Using the ideas of communism. But communism, as initially was seen. Had the same floor that Adam Smith’s economy had. But neglected to understand that humans Will ever and always choose their personal welfare and prosperity over a collective. For Adam Smith? I offer the field of emotional economics. A worthy read. As far as Marx and Engles Lacked a lot of basic understanding of human nature which we have come to know. All of these things are 19 century ideas. Or earlier

@SatyrService

There's a saying in the physical sciences that if a theory doesn't work in practice, then it isn't a good theory.
Somehow that idea hasn't reached the soft sciences yet;
it's often claimed it's just that the theory has not been properly applied. 🙄

@Thinkerbell

Nice dodge.

I was replying to your offering the quote that


If you've read Engels' bleak report, it makes it clear how the early Industrial Revolution in England wasn't working out very well for the laborers there in Manchester.