you have spoken like a true “communist” … ??

I want bullet trains

The first word, I, is wrong, when the preceeding sentence is we. Why is a fast train preferred over a slow train, why the rush? Ask your average sporty cyclist, above 16kph(10mph) the effort needed to maintain speed or accelerate increases exponentially due to wind resistance. Same for any vehicle, land, sea, air. On whose clock are you running? The capitalist clock where time is money and money is time?

What you want and what society needs may be in contradiction. Who decides what society needs? Popular vote, majority rule, experts, politicans, scientists, … everyone?

We most definitely do not need fast trains, planes, or automobiles. The reason they are available is because they are profitable to someone(s).

The world better slow down or it is burning itself up

swiftessay: undefined> They are much more focused on ritual, on human connection, on sociality, and experience of the divine. And those things aren’t at all incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how the sensible world works.

Human connection, sociality (I’d say you mean socialization) are very much material, and so is behavior, communication, etc. The “experience of the divine” is beyond those, and you seem to want to mix things in order to connect them. How does one who is not a metaphysical believer exeperience the divine? If there is such divine how does it relate and affect our material existence?

I know it is very mechanistic as is our understanding of the material world though science. Science, begins with certain axioms, assumptions if you will, and builds up on those in a rational way for which you can backtrack back to the assumptions at any point you are in doubt. Just to see if you have made an error somewhere in the “line” of thought and end up with incorrect conclusions.

With metaphysical thought of any religion, eastern western, northern, southern, there is no such sequence, things are all over the place and not necesseraly need a connection.

The Christian religion you attribute to European origin, may have spread through Europe initially, but it is just a fork of a middle eastern religion, Judaism in specific. So is islam, an non-European religion, also a fork of Judaism, Historically and archaeologically it is hard to separate Judaism from the Greek times and language, in which rationalism and materialism is born, and on top of this philosophical base science and methodology. The religious claims may be going back thousands of years but the scripts in their earliest found and mentioned references data back to Hellenistic times. Jesus comes 7 centuries after Heraclitus wrote, whose writings were available and are referenced by others in the library of Alexandria which christian clergy says were destroyed.

To be a scientist or attempt to be scientific and serve metaphysical beliefs at the same time, if nothing else, to me it indicates mental contradiction and discomfort. If the metaphysical can not have any relation to anything physical/natural/material process or condition, why bother with it? It doesn’t belong in this universe and in this physical life and presence. Why would illusion be necessary to a someone in search for material reality, in order to know what to do to change it, or improve it? It can only be an obstacle.

Is it because some religion serve as providing a social contract under which people are expected to behave against each other? We can do this by other agreements, social, political, legal. To maintain a social contract in fear of the metaphysical consequence is just a way to terrorize and manage humans to control them, with ultimate political and economic benefits of doing so.

It is incomprehensible for me how can one be both a communist and have a religious affiliation, or any form of metaphysical thought. I am very respectful usually of people with faith but not as communists at the same time.

Please help me understand, I am too dumb when it comes to this.