It frightens me that y'all are still butting heads on this. Is there nothing better to do these days?
Religion offers the communal identity and individual self-actualization that can not be found in a purely capitalist society.
I'm a firm believer in the ability of faith to offer these principles and help to usher in a liberated socialist society, but I think that there are plenty of ways to achieve it that aren't explicitly religious, as well as plenty of ways that organized religion in its current form upholds capitalist values and power structures. Dule has outlined some of those, but naturally for him in a way that blames religion far more than capitalism.
More importantly, one can draw an equivalency between Zeus and Jupiter in a way that one cannot draw between Zeus and the Abrahamic God, the Brahma, the Dao, or (perhaps) the Great Spirit in Native American religion or the Isis at the end of Apuleius’ Golden Ass.
You say this like Isis was Apuleius' invention; it's of course very possible that the rites associated with her that he depicts were entirely fictitious and not an accurate representation of her mystery cult, but she already had plenty of real-life history by that point throughout the classical world, and it didn't end there (you can count yours truly among her latter-day devotees).
I have no interest in engaging with what Dule has to say here because it's all his typical tripe. Just to spite him, I'll make a note of my insistence on reclaiming the original anthropological meaning of "cult" for my own religious practice.
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