8 Answers

  1. In my opinion, atheism has now become the opium of the people. They literally revel in it to insensibility, self-forgetfulness and complete hysteria. “The madman said in his heart,' There is no God.' “In his arrogance the wicked despises the Lord: 'He will not seek'; in all his thoughts: 'There is no God!'

  2. Opium for the people is the program of any political party. In a public democracy, populism is the only way to win the votes of a largely uneducated and naive electorate. To strike fear about “enemies” from other parties and promise with three boxes about a decisive improvement in life. Gather huge halls of supporters, bringing the masses of people to ecstasy. What's not opium?

    Any traditional religion, on the other hand, first of all draws people's attention to themselves, admonishing people to do less bad and more good. People get help in organizing their own lives, and this really allows them to find harmony and meaning in life. Opium has nothing to do with it.

  4. Depends on which one.�

    There is a religion where I can just come to the temple to communicate with a person who will support and give wise advice. And I can not communicate and just sit-stand-what they have in the temple is there. To feel calm, to think all these thoughts that we are all bugs, that we are in the hands of some huge incomprehensible creature, who just needs to be trusted and everything will be fine, and if something happened, then it was necessary.

    By temple, I do not mean a church here, but a place that a person considers acceptable for communion with what he calls God. For example, a monastery. Or a clearing in the woods. Or a rock concert.

    It's-yes, it's opium. In the meaning of painkillers and sedatives.

    And there is a religion, when I think that my religion is the most correct and it is necessary that everyone lives by these rules, fuck, why are you yawning, completely fucked up? You're in the temple of God, motherfucker! Don't sin, you little snot, God sees everything! He doesn't strike this sinner with lightning, was he dreaming? I need to help my God fuck sinners, otherwise he won't be able to do it himself.

    By God, I do not mean the creator of the universe, but an idea that seems to dictate to us to act in a certain way. For example, Allah. Or common sense. Or a spelling dictionary.

    It's not opium. This is a crocodile for the people.

  5. Religion is opium. A phrase popular with atheists is taken out of context.

    Karl Marx wrote in the introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law (1843): “Religion is the air of an oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless situation. Just as it is the spirit of a soulless order, religion is opium for people!” That is, religion reduces the pain of social existence in an inhumane society.

  6. Freud wrote that the church, as an organization, is a good defense against natural instincts that people have not quite learned to resist. In this regard, religion is very convenient.

  7. Neither Marx nor Ostap Ibrahimovich, aka Ostap-Suleiman-Berta-Maria-Bender-bey, aka Ostap Zadunaisky, with all due respect to his charisma, are very good guides, so their definitions of religion are purely subjective. Marx in general gave the people something similar to LCD with his teaching. This gives reason to suspect him of competing, and therefore biased motives.

    Religion is a broad concept – it is difficult to answer your question because it is difficult to understand what exactly you mean by this expression. If we talk about religion in general as an attempt to return to the Creator of the world, from which humanity fell away and since then has been wandering, in the mazes of ideological piles, in darkness, in eternal questions and contradictions – then religion, in my opinion, is the right vector – a person needs a higher – order Being-it will never cope with the challenges that it meets�

    If we talk about religion as a way for some crafty people to deceive other gullible people and inspire them with false ideas-then yes, religion can be quite a dope:

    14 Leave them alone; they are blind leaders of the blind; but if a blind man leads a blind man, both of them will fall into the pit.
    (Matthew 15: 14)

    However, it should be added that such a dope can be anything, absolutely any worldview that gives a false interpretation of what is happening. A person needs an objective truth that calls white white and black black. Otherwise, his expectations will be disappointed.

  8. It depends on what you mean by “opium”. Today, opiates are definitely a drug for us. In the era of Marx and Kingsley, individuals who were well versed in medicine at the time, opium was naturally a drug, but it was still primarily an analgesic. To make the concepts and metaphors more understandable, it is better to replace the word opium with the word datura deceptiondrug.
    So the thesis “religion = dope/drug/deception”. Now the questions arise: what kind of religion or religion in general? For whom exactly or for all believers in general?
    As a result, we get a whole string of variants of statements that can be hidden under this thesis. I haven't read Marx, but I did Google specifically to find the entire quote. Since this phrase is most often used in connection with Marx, it would be logical to take his quote. The well-established expression itself, by the way, does not belong to Marx himself, and in general, if my memory serves me correctly, in the original source code this expression had a positive characteristic of religion (Christianity), as the element that relieves pain. It was only later that they remembered with a malicious sneer that it was still a drug.
    Thus Marx quotes in its entirety: “Religious squalor is at the same time an expression of real squalor and a protest against this real squalor. Religion is the sigh of an oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a soulless order. Religion is the opium of the people.”- Yadreno, twisted, famously, and, personally, I don't understand anything even more. Obviously, Marx wrote everything in the context of a class struggle and regarded religion as an instrument of the ruling classes to oppress the working class. To some extent, this consideration of religion, especially in the history of Europe, is fair, but this is only part of the truth, or rather half-truth. Well, a half-truth with the right sauce can become a blatant lie, which is exactly what happened.
    I don't think this is a unique thought, but I would still prefer to look at this issue a little differently. Consider this question not from the point of view of a religious researcher who finds religion a drug / deception / dope, but from the point of view of an ordinary person. That is, how the person himself relates to his religion. Naturally, in many cases, a person's religion will be a source of pain relief for him, but on the other hand, the same religion can cause pain to the person himself (this is already inconsistent with the thesis). And most importantly, religion is not limited to this thesis. This is only a small part of the overall picture, but considering the particular leads to a false understanding of the general.

    As Yuri Tikhonravov noted above, today for most people opium is atheism or “secular Humanism”. People hide behind it as much as they can, which just looks insignificant from the outside.

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