Which people are we more effectively talking to by attacking other people's religious beliefs?
I do not know how I managed to convey the impression that I thought Marx was saying something good about religion when in the last (not first) clause of the famous passage he called it "the opiate of the masses." His intent in using that simile is obviously critical as well as explanatory. However, the general thrust of the passage is explanatory, not judgmental. Marx, following Feuerbach, thought it more important to understand the origin and function of religious belief than to refute it. I don't believe he ever bothered to try to refute it. And in explaining it, he was not even attempting, particularly,, to undermine it in the manner of Nietzsche's genealogy. I think that like Feuerbach Marx believed that religion would "wither away" when and only when the circumstances that created a need for it had been abolished.
I think there is no point in speculating about whether Marx would rank Islam or new age religion as more or less progressive. In On The Jewish Question he does follow Hegel, sort of, in treating protestant Christianity as some sort of advance over what he calls Judaism, which OJQ is a very complicated document, and it is not entirely clear whether and when he means the Jewish religion when he discusses Judaism in that text. OJQ is also a pre-Marxist (that is, pre-historical materialist, still Young Hegelian) text, and it is uncertain and probably unknowable to what extent Marx would have stood by its claims, or those of any of his early writings, had he been asked. In some cases, for example in the recurrence of the theme of alienation, later writes show that he didn't change his mind; in other cases they show that he did. On the relative ranking of religions according to some criteria of progressivity, the later corpus is silent.
--- James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> "fruitlessly alienate people to no purpose
> and miss the point. "
>
> well it is always good to alienate some people, the
> better to talk to the
> others.
>
> Marx did not pursue the critique of religion,
> because he thought that it was
> complete, i.e. Feuerbach had done it already, it was
> time to move on to the
> critique of civil society. It did not mean that he
> thought there was
> anything in it. But as against Feuerbach he did not
> think that you could
> shift people's alienated belief systems except by
> changing their social
> conditions.
>
> People misunderstand the 'heart of a heartless
> world' schtick. The 'heart of
> a heartless world' is no heart at all, obviously,
> the mirage of a heart, a
> con, or a desire that arises out of absence. Don't
> forget the first part,
> the 'opium of the people'. Marx was no 'sixties
> druggy. He thought opium was
> very bad indeed. The image he had in mind was not Wm
> Burroughs but the opium
> that the British Empire had used to get the Chinese
> addicted, so they would
> be forced to give up their tea.
>
> In today's circumstances, which is something like a
> slip backwards from the
> high point of Enlightenment rationality, I can
> understand the point that the
> critics of religion are sometimes worse than
> religion itself. I mean that
> the Nietzsche/Kojeve/Sartre humanism is a
> disenchantment with humanity that
> strips out exactly that which is best in Hegelian
> Geist, the active,
> subjective side.
>
> But if anyone wants to make a Marxist defence of
> religion they should bear
> in mind that, like a good Hegelian, Marx would think
> Protestantism superior
> to catholicism, and catholicism superior to Judaism,
> and all of them
> superior to Islam, which is plainly a descent into
> mumbo-jumbo, and all
> organised religions superior to new age beliefs,
> with the worship of the
> Earth mother Gaia at the bottom of any list he would
> be likely to draw up.
>
>
>
>
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