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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.
Marx used the phrase to make a structural-functionalist argument about religion, and particularly about organized religion. [2] [3] In his view, religion may be false, but it is a function of something real. [7]
To support those ideological premises, Marxist–Leninist atheism proposes an explanation for origin of religion and explains methods for the scientific criticism of religion. [6] The philosophic roots of Marxist–Leninist atheism are in the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), of Karl ...
In Marx's view, Bauer fails to distinguish between political emancipation and human emancipation. As noted above, political emancipation in a modern state does not require Jews (or Christians) to renounce religion; only complete human emancipation would involve the disappearance of religion, but that is not yet possible "within the hitherto ...
The most well-known metaphor in Marx's Critique – that of religion as the opium of the people – is derived from the writings of the Young Hegelian theologian Bruno Bauer. [49] Bauer's primary concern is religious alienation. Bauer views religion as a division in Man's consciousness. Man suffers from the illusion that religion exists apart ...
Islamic Marxists believe that Islam meets the needs of society and can accommodate or guide the social changes Marxism hopes to accomplish. Islamic Marxists are also dismissive of traditional Marxist views on materialism and religion.
These claims were limited, however, to his analysis of the historical relationship between European cultures, political institutions, and their Christian religious traditions. Marxist views strongly influenced individuals' comprehension and conclusions about society, among others the anthropological school of cultural materialism.
Several historians view the early Christian Church, as described in the Acts of the Apostles (specifically the omnia sunt communia reference in Acts 2:44-45 and Acts 4:32-35), [2] [9] [10] as an early form of communism. [11] [12] [13] Among Christian communists, the view is that communism was just Christianity in practice and Jesus was a ...