“Religion is an expression of material realities and economic injustice... It is used by oppressors to make people feel better about the distress they experience due to being poor and exploited.” |
Karl Marx Views on SufferingKarl Marx was an influential revolutionary thinker and philosopher, who lived from 1818 to 1883 (BBC, 2014). Marx’s analysis and critique of religion is one of the most famous and most quoted (Cline, 2013). He adapted a point of view about human suffering that caused him to have reason to disbelieve in God. For Marx, religion was a way he critiqued society. He said religion was a false way of helping people to come to terms with suffering. His idea was to overcome evil one must fight against social problems – poverty, injustice, inequality, and so on that cause suffering (Smith and Raeper, 1991). Marx’s most famous statement, in relation to religion, is from a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, another fellow philosopher. He said, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation... It is the opium of the people… The elimination of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness” (Shagor, 2012). This statement is criticizing religion on a whole, and is saying that religion’s purpose is to create false fantasies for the poor, promising that they will escape the current economic suffering and find happiness in the next life. According to Austin Cline (2013), a news journalist, to Marx “Religion is an expression of material realities and economic injustice... Thus, problems in religion are ultimately problems in society... It is used by oppressors to make people feel better about the distress they experience due to being poor and exploited.” Overall, Marx’s ideas of religion can be summarized to conclude that he believed that religion is an illusory protest, providing false hopes to the poor, and that religion is an ideology, where it distorts the socio-economic realities of the world (Shagor, 2012). Karl Marx did not have faith in religion; therefore he believed that suffering was a reason to have disbelief in God.
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