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There is something akin to belief in the supernatural when Marx suggests people can be weaned from their own self-interest.

There is something akin to belief in the supernatural when Marx suggests people can be weaned from their own self-interest.

Being akin to the supernatural (like a better lie is more akin to truth) can also involve the conception of the self as god .

With a glance, we can all see that both the Christian and the Greek tradition (and now even Marx as you say) recognize something amiss in the idea "self-interest" along side of the idea of "supernatural."

Maybe this affinity to the supernatural is normal feature in all of the Western tradition, including Marx. And so it isn't a coincidence the title has the words "secular religion"

. But so far this kinship we are now talking about is left undefined, undifferentiation, indistinguishable. In short, unless we can see this difference, we are bound to confuse ideas and become sloppy in thinking--which I suppose is admirable to some--and think that Christianity is Marxist, or that only the Marxist is what a true Christian ever hoped to be.

As far as Marx is concerned, Tucker explains how . . . the economic interpretation of history and the conception of communism have as their setting a comprehensive scheme of thought this philosophical in character. Its subject is man and the world--self-estranged man in an 'alienated world' as Marx called it. The world revolution is conceived as the act by which estranged man changes himself by changing the world. Instead of being divided against himself as always in the past, man is to be restored to his human nature--and this is what Marx means by 'communism.'
--Robert Tucker in Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx

What is that kinship then, Eric, if the Marxist conception of mankind denies alienation from the supernatural? What supernatural kinship is there, where there is no supernature except in man?

There is something akin to belief in the supernatural when Marx suggests people can be weaned from their own self-interest.

I don't know if it's "supernatural" so much as simply "mistaken."