Up@dawn 2.0

Monday, November 24, 2014

Karl Marx and Religion (4 of 4)

Like capitalism, Karl Marx had a strong dislike for religion.  To Marx, religion was something the oppressors used in society to distract the people in the lower classes.  To put it in Marxist terms, the bourgeoisie used religion to distract the proletariat from the terrible working conditions and low wages.
 
Marx was very critical of religion.  He felt that religion was a product of man.  Marx felt that religion was made by the individuals who were “in charge” in society.  He believed that in order for a perfect classless society to exist religion could not exist.

Marx’s famous quote on the aspect of religion is that “religion is the opium of the masses”.  This goes back to what I mentioned earlier about Marx thinking that religion is used to distract the workers or the proletariat from realizing the impoverished conditions with which they were living in.

The information for this post came from this website.


By: Lauren Williams Section 9 Group 3

1 comment:

  1. "He believed that in order for a perfect classless society to exist religion could not exist." I don't know that he thought religion strictly incompatible with a classless society, so much as just superfluous. He seems just to have assumed that people would forget all about religion, once their material desires were satisfied and they were free to pursue life's secular/spiritual satisfactions. This seems true for some of us, don't you think, but by no means all of us?

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