Marx Response Paper

Marx famously declared that religion is “the opiate of the masses.” I largely agree with Marx’s view of religion’s role in society as a source of complacency. In referring to religion as an opiate, Marx asserts that its use is an expression of the suffering of the people and that it is used to dull their suffering. Marx thinks that religion is a “fantastic” abstraction, a “heart in a heartless world.” It is purely illusory. He encourages the masses, the lower and middle class laborers who are truly suffering to get over their fantastic abstraction (religion), though it dulls their pain, and face reality, the material world, and make their own lives better. It is Marx’s idea that once religion is abolished, man will “move around himself like his own true sun”; man will know/understand himself and will be the center of his universe. “Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.” Again, religion is “illusory,” not material, and is so powerful as to control man until he realizes that it is his own creation. This echoes Marx’s earlier statement that religion is “the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again.”

Marx is not wrong to refer to religion as the “opiate of the people.” It is human nature to seek an escape from suffering, and religion, as the “encyclopaedic compendium” of the world, is a very accessible outlet for the people. Marx does acknowledge the positive aspects of religion, calling it a “protest against real suffering.” However, like Marx, I think that religion is to an extent “illusory” and “fantastic”. Why should the masses live in an “inverted” world, where an emphasis is placed on an abstract entity and not on the material world? The material world is certain; the best man or society or the state can do is indeed to pluck “the imaginary flowers on the chain,” (the chain being the complacency of religious people) so that he can “pluck the living flower,” essentially find the truth of the real/unholy world. I would rather not spend my life in the “vale of tears” looking to “the halo” of religion as my only hope for escape from the status quo of suffering. I agree with Marx that religion is so prevalent that “the struggle against religion is…the struggle against the world,” however, Marx is held back by the idea that man is society, not a singular being, and thus, society must altogether abolish religion. In contrast, I think that isolated individuals can effectively pursue their beliefs. Fixation on an “illusory happiness” is the problem of the individual, not of society. It is possible for a person to find meaning in his own life, through self-realization and connection with others, without turning to religion to find a nonexistent “superman.” Indeed, “man makes religion, religion does not make man.”