ALEXANDER

Last year when they mentioned it for the first time they were talking about May 8th which is Victory Day in Europe it’s supposed to symbolize the defeat of the Nazis and the victory of freedom and equality*. Wanting to remove it in the context of rising fascism in the Global North is very telling. Last week they talked about removing May 1st. Which is international day for the fight for labor rights and represent the people who fought to limit the work day at 8h. Again in a context where workers rights are going backwards and with a government that wants to make people work more with less rights and without a higher pay, choosing this specific day is very telling.

"What are you screaming about ? It's just one day, you can't work for one more day ? What do you mean the symbolics ? You just want a day off."

And then see other countries news headline "France to remove christmas as holiday in the name of economic growth" and suddenly everybody understands perfectly that it's about more than just not working.

"The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."

This is not the idea that religion is some symptom of stupidity, but that it is a necessary and understandable reaction to the horrors of the world that, nonetheless, must be abolished to create a real world worth living in. It is a call to forsake the comfort of illusion and wade out into the cold water of the real.