Statistics are Fun!

The World Health Organization is concerned that 40% of the world’s smokers live in India and China.

That’s interesting.

It just so happens that 40% of the world’s population lives in India and China.

Go figure!

Marx and God

One of the most quoted writings of Karl Marx, if not the single most well known of any sentence he ever wrote, was his line from Critique of Hegel which reads, “religion is the opiate of the masses”. This passage has been repeated time and time again, and used as ammunition to rile religious folk up and direct their rage toward Communist Parties and Marxists in general.

At a glance, Marx’s remark is indeed inflammatory. Religion is the opiate of the masses? So does that mean going to church is the same thing as shooting up? It’s obvious why conservative, anti-heroin church-going folk would be turned off by this statement.

What most people fail to mention is that it’s taken completely out of context.

Directly preceding this famous statement is a largely unknown line: “Religion is…the heart of a heartless world”. Can you imagine how the perception of Communists would be if that line were repeated as often as the “opiate” line is? And are these two statements contradictory?

I have had this discussion with my wife. I am a militant atheist, she is kind of “undecided”. She is not religious but she is not an atheist, nor is she as militantly anti-religion as I am. She can understand and relate to most of my views on the topic, but I believe once she posed an interesting question to me. Maybe I don’t need religion in my life, but what about someone who is addicted to heroin (trading one opiate for another?), or waiting on death row, or people in similar circumstances who need to “find Jesus” or “become one with the universe” or whatever kind of religious experience it takes for them to straighten their life out? Do I really want to take the one hope they have away from them?

This is what Marx means. As Communists are goal should not be to obliterate religion. Religion is the product of the fucked up world we live in. People need to have some sort of reason to live their life, especially people who have fallen on hard times, people who have fucked up their lives, or have gotten fucked by someone else. If religion is the thing that can motivate them to avoid putting a bullet in their brains, who am I to say they’re better off without it?

The idea is not to eliminate religion; religion is the cause of a lot of bad things in our world but dialectics teaches us that causes can be the effects of a previous cause. Religion, like an opiate, is the way people numb themselves to the shitty world they live in. Therefore, the key link in the chain is not to eliminate religion, but to eliminate the soulless conditions that give rise to it.