People on the internet are saying it’s not a condemnation of religion and to Marx opium means medicine, Im confused help me bear website!

Edit: what did Karl Marx think opium was?

  • emizeko [they/them]
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    11 months ago

    anticommunists chop it to a sentence or two. read the quote with more context:

    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, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. 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.

    Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

    The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

    from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]
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      11 months ago

      Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

      Man. Shit makes me tear eyed tbh. It seems he’s more sympathetic towards religious people than any of these capitalist freaks considered evangelicals and dominionists.

      • AlkaliMarxist
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        11 months ago

        My interpretation is that religion itself should be opposed, but not in the sense that the "new atheist" might oppose it as an expression of their own intellectual superiority but in a way which is informed by an understanding of what religion is and what purpose it serves within bourgeois society. To remove the need for the opiate by treating the affliction which causes the pain that it soothes, not to withdraw the opiate without addressing the pain.

        • worldonaturtle [they/them]
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          11 months ago

          That religion will wither away once human suffering ends and hostility towards religion is a bad thing unless religion is acting as the state doing oppression on people. I dont know. Personally Im an atheist, Im kind of interested in atheistic takedowns of the r/atheism crowd, I guess Im interested in learning what bad atheism is.

        • worldonaturtle [they/them]
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          11 months ago

          My fault for not asking the question better. If he’s calling religion opium I need to know what his opinion about drugs was because it changes the meaning a bit of the quote.

          • thirtymilliondeadfish [she/her]
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            11 months ago

            This was written a year after the first opium war, and twenty years after confessions of an english opium eater. Opium has (and had) long been in the zeitgeist as seductive, panacea, dream-like, destructive.

            I don't read it as supportive of either