If someone wants to believe they can talk to the dead or receive the holy spirit through bread or there’s a heaven after death, but otherwise all their activities and interactions with real suffering people are grounded in this realm of existence, why should I give a shit?

but they do not have an effect on real life.

Sure. But the beliefs themselves have an effect in real life. If all these controversies with pedophilia and mega churches and cults haven’t convinced people to drop their religions, then it’s pretty clear that we have to work with these systems.

The socialist movements that try to eradicate religion because they don’t care or misinterpret Marx’s ideas have failed at doing so. Cubans and Vietnamese prohibit religious institutions from gaining too much influence, but that’s much more reasonable than demanding that no one participate in them. You can only do that by uplifting them from their miseries.

The west has exploited religions of the people they’ve oppressed to their advantage greatly. Look into the build up to the Soviet Afghan War if you want to see WASP politicians talking to Muslim extremists about “God” as if they share the same religion

If you can’t even acknowledge that these “fantasies” can create or destroy entire movements regardless of what their god and books say, then I don’t know what to tell you

Then ban all religious comms.

With all due respect this is pretty much a solved problem, and untill there is sufficient reason to revisit it it should be treated as such. I quote from here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm

“The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany—a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion.”

[And yet…]

“Accusing the would-be ultra-revolutionary Dühring of wanting to repeat Bismarck’s folly in another form, Engels insisted that the workers’ party should have the ability to work patiently at the task of organising and educating the proletariat, which would lead to the dying out of religion, and not throw itself into the gamble of a political war on religion” (ibid.)

Let me put it this way: As dialectical materialists we must never settle into mere empericism as what appears before us must be understood in the historical relations that produce such a phenomenon. Therefore, when we talk of religion it isn’t so much a discussion of particular religious ideas and how we can tactically intervene in them to better our goals, but rather a wuestion of where religious thinking comes from, what are its conditions, what is it an expression of. Another quote: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form[…]. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.”

Indeed today we do see very little reflection of our ideas in the world, and it is understandable that in a desparate effort to remedy this one would try and popularize as much as possible. But at the cost of the very foundation of Marxism. That we see the fantastical mish-mash of half digested ideas upheld as a virtue of the diversity of thought speaks to the overwhelming lack of principle among so-called “leftists.” The answer to the disorder of our camp is not to abandon it, but instead to rise to the occasion.