Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World (paperback)
By Bob Avakian
Insight Press, Chicago (4/08) 260 pp $14.95
When Margaret Sanger launched her pioneering journal “The Woman Rebel” in 1914, the masthead proclaimed: “No Gods. No Masters” as a direct affront to the overwhelming and concerted religious opposition to her crusade for birth control.
How intriguing, indeed, to encounter a book title that also effectively eviscerates the entire panoply of invented “supreme beings” in the plural. As groundbreaking, controversial and provocative as some recent anti-religious bestsellers have been, they have, without exception, focused only on the solitary Big Daddy of the world's three great monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity and Islam rather than rejecting all imaginary deities.
However, Bob Avakian confines his commentary on other gods to the pantheon of Greek and Roman “rulers on high” who were created long before Christianity became the official religion of the Holy Roman Empire in the fourth century.
What About Jews?
And although he analyzes and dissects Christianity and Islam at considerable length, he makes scant mention of the tenets and superstitions of Judaism.
Rather than being a completely original work, this opus fuses material from two separate talks that Avakian gave: (1) “God Does Not Exist —We Need Liberation Without Gods” (2004), and (2) “Communism and Religion: Getting Up and Getting Free —Making Revolution to Change the Real World, Not Relying on ‘Things Unseen’” (2006).
I approached this work with some trepidation when I saw that the library catalogued it under both atheism and communism — Avakian led in founding the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, in 1975, and he has been its Chairman ever since.
These facts will no doubt alienate many readers despite the common knowledge that this ideology was typically branded as “godless communism” during the Red scare of the McCarthy era 1950s in an attempt to demonize it as an atheistic philosophy totally devoid of any moral values, which believers argue can only exist within the framework of the “superior” ethos so germane to the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions.
Faults of Capitalism
As a committed leader, he extols the virtues and advantages of dialectical materialism, but belaboringly dwells on the defects and disadvantages of capitalism.
And he repeatedly reminds us that revolution is every bit as important as evolution. Consequently, his body of work becomes as much a political polemic as an examination of how belief in gods enormously and detrimentally impacts our quotidian existence.
The author labels the Bible Belt as the “Lynching Belt” because of the racist views and atrocities that have occurred there.
He argues compellingly that the Civil War was fought with the South devoutly convinced that it was a just war because slavery was sanctioned and widely practiced in the Bible.
He calls the Religious Right “Christian fascists” and denounces them for practicing “salad bar Christianity” when they pick and choose which Biblical precepts they will follow or ignore.
In my opinion, his best example of this approach is that they want the Federal Marriage Amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman since they are determinedly hell-bent on excluding any possible legal alternative such as same-sex marriage.
Yet, paradoxically, they conveniently overlook the many Biblical patriarchs who followed the alternative practice of one man with many wives (King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines).
In summary, I feel that the very few novel nuggets of wisdom proffered in this volume do not nearly justify the expenditure of time or money required to peruse it. Avakian has authored many other books all listed on bobavakian.com.
Mr. Akerley, a Culver City resident, may be contacted at benakerley@aol.com
