“Religion is the opium” Karl Marx is Quoted under the wrong Context.


Religion is the opium that dulls the anguish that humans bring forth to fellow humans. Marx’s works-1843 work Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right which was subsequently released one year later in Marx’s own journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher The quotation, in context, reads as follows (emphasis added): Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. ~Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. ~It is the opium of the people. ~The abolition of religion as the