Marx on Religion

It is well known that Karl Marx believed religion was opium for the masses. God was an illusion as religion was nothing more than an instrument of the bourgeois. Marx again was wrong in his logic. Further, it puzzles me why some many people naively quote Marx and do not think about his irrational fuzzy logic.

Why Marx was totally wrong about religion

Even if the idea of God was opium for the masses, something that the capitalist class used to calm the workers and keep them down in their place, it does nothing to prove or disprove the reality of God. The reality and existence of God are independent of what I think. Similarly just because Freud said God is an infantile illusion does not prove or disprove God. What I think has no bearing on the reality of something.

Just because at one point in time some people thought the world was flat did not change the reality that the world is round.  To swallow Freud’s and Marx’s arguments about religion and God is nothing more than flawed logic and magical thinking.

Just because sunny weather makes people feel relaxed and the bourgeois takes advantage of this to keep people from rebelling has nothing to do with the fact it might rain. Two different things. One is connected to the reality of existence and one is connected to economics. It is beyond me how many people do not understand this.

If anything evidence that religion almost seems to be programmed into human thinking and gives people peace is evidence that maybe people have always perceived the complex stratification of reality (Hegel).

Han Kung gives a pretty detailed roasting of the Marxist theory of religion in his book Does God exist.  he says Marx (and Freud) may describe something about society but speaks nothing about existential or scientific realities.

Religion liberates not represses

In a modern global economy, belief in God transcends all social classes. In fact, most people I know who believe in God do not see it as something of a drug like Marx saw it, but a call to action. Clearly in the Bible Jesus had a metaphor of the person who buried his ‘talents’ and the master was angry on his return because he did nothing with what he was loaned. In my experience religion brings people to rise up from their situation and take responsibility for their lives, be entrepreneurs and use what they have. It is no coincidence that the Amish are Americas most successful business community.

I live in Eastern Europe and I invite you to go to Russia and see how the absence of religion has if anything made people more ruthless towards each other and more prone to repress. While in Poland, a country that kept its religion even during communism is civil and the church was a rallying point to bring down the repression of communism.

Let us look at Marx quotes on religion for entertainment purposes.

Marx quotes on religion

These are from the communist manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

This sounds ridiculous to me. It sounds like some pseudo-intellectuals smoking, wearing a black t-shirt and hanging out in coffee shops with no experience in the real world or reality. Some people believe Marx was out of touch mentally with reality and lived in an illusionary world.

Karl Marx’s false economics brought more suffering to the world under the Soviet Union than perhaps any other system the world has ever seen. Some people think Marx was the devil. I think he was just a man out of touch with reality. What he wrote was something like a form of spam or something to get people’s emotions going, but useless.

Here is another Marx on religion quote.

There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc. that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience

Would you trust a man who thinks this way? To abolish all classical understanding of justice and truth, 4000 years of human wisdom from the ancient Greeks like Plato to Issac Newton to Adam Smith gone in once stroke of a pen. Sounds like someone not too well-balanced and like a rebellious teenager who is screaming it is wrong, all wrong, everything is bad.  Karl Marx gave nothing to humans except suffering and trouble, it was a false religion a false light.