The Influence Of Religion By Karl Marx

According to Karl Marx, religion is society’s main crutch. He believed that religion uses “persuasion and…distraction” (Pals, Introducing, 145) in order to distract the poor from their real problems. Religion, to Marx, was a way to “suffocate” (Pals, Introducing, 145) the possibility of revolt among the people and “’God’ is a fantasy” (Pals, Introducing, 145) for humans that emulates their own standards and “ideals” (Pals, Introducing, 145). Any god that humans created was for the purpose of man to have an idea of the next life, and the church was created in order to steal from the poor. Religion and “God” were only used as a distraction from the everyday toils and oppression that was in front of them. The constant oppression of the poor was too much for the people to handle in their day-to-day lives, and so they turned to religion, believed by Marx to be the “sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world” (Pals, Critique: Intro, 146). Through religion, they could escape

He believed religion to be “the self-consciousness and self-esteem” (Pals, Critique: Intro, 146) of a man who was “lost” (Pals, Critique: Intro, 146). Religion was considered by Marx to be the “fantastic realization of the human essence” (Pals, Critique: Intro, 146) purely because of the fact that the “human essence” is not actually real, and thus religion cannot be based in reality. To him, it was only a way to escape the hardships of everyday life. Religion allowed people to imagine a better future without forcing them to actually work for it. It seemed to Marx that a few good deeds and a couple confessions was work enough for the church to hand out tickets to Heaven. The church kept the poor from working harder to accomplish their goals because they guaranteed a better life after death in Heaven. The people loved it and held onto that guarantee. They used it to comfort them when everything else looked