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?
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?
I read it. I was just hoping to get some interpretations from people.
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.
What's your interpretation?
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.
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.
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