Marx and Religion
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The point of view that Marx uses to criticize religion on one hand and Feuerbach's idealism on the other is materialist. In The German Ideology, he criticizes religion for constructing "phantoms" that are "sublimates" of "material life process," which means that the religious focus on what is immaterial, or invisible, diverts human beings' attention away from their direct experience of material reality, or the unfolding "process" of existence. That diversion is a form of alienation because it blocks human consciousness from owning itself. That is supported by Giddens' analysis of Marx when he, who says that in Christianity, when certain "qualities" are "attributed to God" (Giddens, 1971, p. 11), that means that human beings are deprived of such qualities. They are therefore put in the position of relying on religion instead of themselves.Meanwhile, the very material conditions of human experience, filled with injustice and oppression, remain intact. Those conditions shape consciousness of what reality is. When religious consciousness, which focuses on spirits and intangibles, becomes the preoccupation of people, their attention is drawn away from the injustice and oppression, and they are what Marx aims to eliminate. Feuerbach attempts to reject religion as the proper human preoccupation, apparently because if he cannot do that he is not writing philosophy but theology. Thus he states that humanity in general turns away from religion to secularism: "man progressively appro
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The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness [Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality of non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question (Marx, Theses, p. 3)
In Marx's view, what is relevant is the truth: what is real, objective, tangible. The truth of experience is contained in the "activity and the material conditions under which [people] live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity" (Marx, German, p. 3). Human beings are uniquely capable of producing their conditions by producing "their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization" (p. 3). How they produce their subsistence is a feature of the conditions under which they do so. He sees these conditions emerging out of the historical process of social evolution.
Marx looks at (a) the facts of physical history and environment to find philosophical meaning, instead of (b) philosophical meanings or theories that are applied to the facts of physical history. That is the rea
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1367
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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