Discounting the claim that Marxism is a religion (it's not, but that's not relevant to my point here), but ~30% of the world's population is Christian. There is no way more than 30% of the world's population are Marxists (let alone enough of the population for Christianity's numbers to be "not even close"). If you asked any random person on the street I doubt very many would be able to accurately describe what Marxism is and far fewer would ever claim they were a Marxist
It's not a religion in the sense of explaining where you go when you die or giving a metaphysical explanation for concepts like destiny or the origin of the universe. It's also avoided the pitfall previous religions fell into of encouraging adherents to declare their belief and affiliation--many people who are downstream of either Marx or Hegel have no idea that is where their ideas originate.
But it absolutely is a religion in terms of being a set of related belief systems which people rigidly adopt as factual beyond reproach and therefore use the justify all kinds of authoritarianism and violence against non-believers.
Getting a bad answer from a random on the street isn't a good test for the same reason that clues on Jeopardy about stories in the bible are a common failure points for contestants on that show. Not that many people (proportionally) care enough about the origin or technical details of their belief system to have studied and retained them. They just have their belief system and haven't considered changing it because that's more difficult and feels less immediately useful than working on their proximate problems.
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u/jamin007 Sep 09 '24
Discounting the claim that Marxism is a religion (it's not, but that's not relevant to my point here), but ~30% of the world's population is Christian. There is no way more than 30% of the world's population are Marxists (let alone enough of the population for Christianity's numbers to be "not even close"). If you asked any random person on the street I doubt very many would be able to accurately describe what Marxism is and far fewer would ever claim they were a Marxist
What are we doing here?