It was primarily an Islamophobic movement in the post-Gulf War and 9/11 era.

It feels like you are willfully misinterpreting what I am saying tbh. Compass here is operating as a metaphor, and I don’t like the implication that I am somehow perverting dialectical materialism because you don’t like my turn of phrase. Human beings aren’t computers, we have subjective experience that amounts to more than just logical operation. Regardless of whether we are applying science or not, there is still an experiential aspect of everything we do. And when did I say I was talking about modern popular religions when I was merely talking about religion in the abstract? I was clearly not suggesting that Christianity should be incorporated into Marxism or encouraged in socialist society or something

I don’t consider myself religious or spiritual but acknowledge that communism and Marxism occupies a similiar place in my brain as a compass that helps me process and understand the world around me. I don’t think its offensive to suggest that this is a near universal part of the human experience. And the last 2000 years religion has been used as a tool by the ruling classes, who is to say religion can’t exist in a fundamentally different way in a classless society?

Yeah religion doesn’t have to be like our modern Abrahamic religions in the west. Everyone has some sort of ‘religion’ anyway that helps us understand the world, why not share it with our community? It’s only a problem when it crosses into orthodoxy