memes

There isn't much magical thinking anymore

Imo it has not decreased. It only seems that way because the explanations offered by the old religions have lost relevance in the modern world.

The function of religion is to explain our social existence. In the era of divine right, divinity itself must be explained, inevitably resorting to metaphysics. Now, under the right of private property, each person needs an explanation for their existence under capitalism: why some are wealthy and others are poor, why a medical emergency causes homelessness and starvation, why we send our children to war in distant countries that we never heard of, why we seem helpless to stop polluting and extracting and killing the planet.

This is why bourgeois forms of Christianity, like Protestantism and Mormonism, emerged. They claim to answer these new questions which Catholicism increasingly failed to, in a manner compatible with capitalism. They explain personal misfortune on the basis of individual failings and individual choices, mirroring the capitalist morality, which demands miserly behaviors, to keep converting money into capital, feeding the machine instead of feeding oneself.

Science and materialism resulted from the development of bourgeois productive forces and the seeking of relative surplus value. It is the great Enlightenment philosophers themselves who helped usher in these new forms of Christianity following the new social significance of the laws of physics. Scientists like Isaac Newton adopted deistic Christian attitudes, believing that God worked mechanically through the laws of nature, rather than violating those laws, but affirming a materialist conception of nature.

Bourgeois religion will exist as long as there is bourgeois society because bourgeois society is alienating and produces illusions. It is as magical as any religion, only dressed in false materialism.

There isn't much magical thinking anymore

idk maybe it's just because I'm in the deep south but that seems completely untrue to me. I'd say maybe half the people around me really truly believe the Christian God is responsible for every single thing that happens individually and things like physics are just illusions created by God choosing to do the same thing in the same situations every time. Then another like 45% of people either believe fully in some other religion or at least have some ridiculous superstition or non-specific "spiritual" belief, like astrology or believing in ghosts or whatever else. And that seems conservative to me, I wouldn't be surprised if fewer than 5% of people around me truly don't believe in any magic.

There isn't much magical thinking anymore

The state is magical thinking. The value form is magical thinking. Commodity fetishism is (explicitly!) magical thinking. Capitalism is just as "magical" as any other class society; like all class societies it has declared its magic "real" and natural and all others "fake."

their religious position is a proxy for material politics

This has always been (largely) the case (though I'd use the word "reflection" rather than "proxy").