07.18.11

Marx’s misunderstanding of religion

Posted in General at 12:28 pm by nemo

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/do-lifes-uncertainties-promote-religion-a-flawed-study/

As much as I respect Marx, I find his views on religion to be mistaken, and, ironically, a source for the style of ‘new atheism’ we see now. The generation of Feuerbach in the collapse of the Hegelian school came with the rise of the age of positivism and, quite unnecessarily, the left assumed all the confusions that came into being at that point. You would think the left could at least, instead of simply discarding the whole of German classical philosophy could have taken up its riches and its breadth as a keynote and ‘secular reformation’, instead of the kneejerk anti-Hegelianism that excused the first birth of the ‘braindead’ antireligion we see revived again in the Age of Big Science. Let us grant the extravagance of Hegelianism, but the realm of Feuerbach is impovershed. The critique of religion, and its exploitation, is entirely cogent, but Marxists got it wrong on many fronts, and the sad irony is that they ended up forgetting what religious exploitation really was, because their reductionist attitude censored out all of the hidden evils of religion. The Marxist critique and its successors are without nuance and speak in the grossest terms of a category ‘religion’ without defining its meaning, its differentiations, and, most importantly, its devolutions from sources to hardened ‘religions’. Thus the source of religion is totally missed in Marx: the left fails to see what in the study of the eonic effect we see as the correlation with ‘macro’ evolutionary histories: the classic case being the Axial Age, whose mystery devolved into the myth of an age of revelation (not far off in some ways) in an exclusive monotheistic sense.
In general religion arose with civilization, before it in fact, in the late Neolithic and its place in man’s social history seems to be beyond the capacity of the cultic mentality of the New Atheists.
In any case, the one-dimensional thinking of Marxists has seeded the very type of the ‘new atheism’ we see now, and the result in the history of the left has been an element of its failure.

The current campaign against religion is illogical and confused: religion is an effort, pegged to the understandings of the men and eras in which they arise, to assist man in the understanding of his own ‘software’. The results have often been poor to worse, but that does not invalidate the effort, as the mental state of the current society of scientism makes all too clear.
Attacking religion so totally gets to resemble attempts to abolish the FAQ, and religion attempts to provide a ‘manual’ of human evolutionary psychology.
The exploitation Marx points to is real, and religion has all too obviously fallen into the hands of elites who have used it to control populations.
But the same charge can be laid against Science, whose reductionist strategy is too obviously a method to make man ignorant of his potential, as a robotic ‘smart moron’ and economic drone used for elite control. So the shoe is also on the other foot.

In a critique of Hegel, Marx wrote the following paragraph, whose third sentence has become a classic:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

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