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19th-century German philosopher Karl Marx, the founder and primary theorist of Marxism, viewed religion as "the soul of soulless conditions" or the "opium of the people". According to Marx, religion in this world of exploitation is an expression of distress and at the same time it is also a protest against the real distress.
The opium of the people or opium of the masses (German: Opium des Volkes) is a dictum used in reference to religion, derived from a frequently paraphrased partial statement of German revolutionary and critic of political economy Karl Marx: "Religion is the opium of the people." In context, the statement is part of Marx's analysis that religion ...
According to Maccoby, Marx argues in the essay that the modern commercialized world is the triumph of Judaism, a pseudo-religion whose god is money. Maccoby suggested that Marx was embarrassed by his Jewish background and used Jews as a "yardstick of evil".
In simple terms, the functional approach sees religion as "performing certain functions for society" [7] Theories by Karl Marx (role of religion in capitalist and pre-capitalist societies), Sigmund Freud (psychological origin of religious beliefs), Émile Durkheim (social function of religions), and the theory by Stark and Bainbridge exemplify ...
Karl Marx [a] (German: [kaʁl maʁks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German-born philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist.He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (written with Friedrich Engels), and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894), a critique of classical political economy which employs his theory of historical ...
Karl Marx, who synthesized anti-religious philosophy with materialism to show that religion is a social construct used for social control by the ruling class of a society. In his rejection of all religious thought, Marx considered the contributions of religion over the centuries to be unimportant and irrelevant to the future of humanity.
Indeed, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, a text that most explicitly elaborated his theory of alienation), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses, namely the study of law, religion and the state, the study of natural philosophy ...
In the Critique, Marx adopts Bauer's criticism of religion and applies this method to other fields. Marx sees Man's various alienations as peels around a genuine center. [79] Religion is the most extreme form of alienation: it is at once both the symptom of a deep social malaise and a protest against this malaise. [80]