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Permalink Reply by Malcolm on October 11, 2010 at 3:20am

Mark 10:29-30: "I tell you the truth," Jesus replied, "no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields....

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Permalink Reply by Dave Mann on October 11, 2010 at 4:15am

Religionists love to confuse different meanings of the same word.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism

One may be a materialist in the philosophical sense but be against the accumulation of things as a goal in life. They are separate ideas that share the same word.

Getting back to the "argument"

"...It has always been directly related to materialism. Summed up, the more
materialistic a society is, the less spiritual it becomes. The less
spiritual it becomes, the stronger atheism affects that society.

I don't see this the point of this argument. Is it a refutation of Atheism?
Materialist = less spiritual = Atheism
Because I don't see how that refutes or proves anything.

You said "How can I lose my spirtuallity because of being meterialistic if I never believed in a spirit to begin with? "

I agree. For me, "spirituality" is a useless concept; though some Atheists may disagree.

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Permalink Reply by rationalrevolution on October 11, 2010 at 11:34pm

The whole discussion of "materialism" is just a huge confusion.

As David Mann points out, philosophical materialism is completely different from being "materialistic".

This may help shed some light on the issues:

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/articles/understanding_evolution.htm

In ancient Greece philosophical materialism was indeed heavily associated with atheism, and the early Christians basically wages war against the materialists.

However, the materialists, most notably the Epicureans, were very much against being "materialistic", as in possessive of things. They advocated a lifestyle of simplicity and equality, and indeed Epicurus himself was noted as the only major philosopher in Athens that made his school open to the poor for free, while others like Plato and hundreds of others charged heavy fees and lives wealthy lives.

Likewise, Karl Marx is of course one of the most well known materialist philosophers of the past 300 years, and of course he railed against "materialism" in the lifestyle sense, and even developed a whole theory around it called commodity fetishism, which he built much of his criticism of capitalist culture on.

Indeed it was Marx the materialist philosopher and economist who launched the most anti-materialistic political movement ever known, a.k.a. Communism, which was in large part a movement against the "materialistic" lifestyle of capitalism, and also of course structural problems with a system whereby ownership of capital by a relative few disfranchises the working majority, who have the profits of their labor taxed away from them by capital owners, but that's another matter entirely.

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