The idea that the Palestinian people have only been able to persist because of their religion is ridiculous to me. They are resisting because colonialism, apartheid and genocide are very bad things to which nobody would want to be subjected, not because of Islam. If Palestinians were atheists, is he suggesting that they wouldn't have the strength or the will to resist? Would their lack of a belief in the supernatural turn them into doormats for Isn'treal?
I like Hakim's content, but his position on religion is quite frustrating. He is a Muslim first and a Marxist second. Also, Joram van Klaveren is still a right-winger.
But isn't religion a source of false consolation? The real consolation would of course be the improvement of material conditions.
It certainly helps people cope with day to day life under capitalism, but eventually it needs to go.
I think in cases where religious institutions are actively organizing and encouraging people to engage in struggle, political or armed, to change their circumstances, it doesn't make much sense to call it false consolation.
Even when religions assert a kind of cosmic justice outside the scope of individual earthly lives, it's not always true that religion serves mainly to console, even in matters of personal psychology and belief. Christianity certainly falls into that pattern, but John Brown was not as consoled by the prospect that justice would be achieved in the afterlife as he was convicted by his religious morality that the earthly evil he saw in slavery had to be combatted by all means available, immediately.
I do think that desperate situations drive people to religious belief as a way of upholding the just world hypothesis in the face of powerful cognitive dissonance. But that's just one factor among many in promoting religious belief, and as a general tendency, it doesn't necessarily address what religion inspires or motivates people to do in particular circumstances.
Isn’t hakim’s argument that religion helps people keep fighting for better material conditions because they can bare the struggle better?
That is still poor analysis. People can have religion, but to chalk up a people's survival to it is absurd and horrifically bad material analysis.
It's better analysis than dogmatically repeating "isn't religion opium of the people? It dumbs them down, makes them complacent," even when that's clearly not what's happening in this situation.