Sunday 18 March 2018

Religious Opium


Smoking Religious Opium on a Hazy Sunday

Much has been written about the dangers of illicit drugs. Indeed they can be addictive and destructive. 

However, few have spoken about another drug that has subtly taken root in our society. Many have been unknowingly numbed by it.

It's time to awake from our slumber induced by religious opium.

It's religious opium when religions have been divorced from realities and have become irrelevant, when we are asked to ignore oppressions, when religions tolerate injustices and stifle natural instincts. 

A counterfeit, false gospel offers care for souls, a place in paradise, and neglects present struggles in this life.

Soothing words, tumbling from lips of well-fed, pale looking preachers, is the opiate that Marx wrote about.

Karl Marx in 1843 wrote his famous indictment, "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". 

He wasn't alone.

Before Marx, Novalis wrote: "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".  

Even Charles Kingsley, a professor and canon of the Church of England, observed, 

"We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable's hand book, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded, a mere book to keep the poor in order."

A fuller exposition of Marx's analogy was written by Lenin in 1905:

"Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man."

I should say I'm not interested in advocating Communism. 

What I'm interested in is to bring religion back to earth, back to our bodies. Only when we do this, The Holy Other will return.


Let those who have ears, listen well.









Notes

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-fredericks/debate-is-religion-the-op_b_9876628.html

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