Religion as an opiate
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Marx seems to have been literally and not just rhetorically right as scientists have produced evidence that religious rituals do act as an opiate:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/going-to-church-its-just-like-taking-drugs-jz0s6lprx
ALB,
It is the last bastion of security for so many. It offers a world view, a safeguard, and a powerful opposition to cruel elite.
Religious expressions are not homogeneous- and if Social Capital (substitute capital term for relations) studies is taken into account- the wellbeing of the individual increases in healthy community of conviction settings.
I have read some of the science on faith based communities and its relational benefits (biopsychosocial), and the benefits are massive!
It can be what helps prevent a fatal event (I sound cryptic!) in the lives of people who otherwise would have had adverse outcomes.
You see, it is choosing the drug/opiate you are on. And all communities of conviction offer that world view, that need to feel part of something, and that need to be noticed and useful. The true high!
I do not think Marx was being derogatory to persons of faith (or else he was master theologian too and dismissed it with casual remarks).
I might be stating these ideations on a reflexive position (experience, observation and knowing), but that true high: spurs to action and to security for people who may not have held on to being here.- and let go in dire consequences.
I have seen so remarkable “bounce backs” in the health and social sector for people who find that: true high, that stuff of belief!
Okay… I am sounding warm and fuzzy… but the science behind it is still catching up…
Imagine how connected many of us felt when finding a community of conviction in socialism
LB
The word itself, Religion, is not synonymous with belief, or faith. To the Romans and the Hindus it is closer to social behaviour. Rites are its centre, not belief. Even Judaism, the first of the three great monotheistic religions, was and is about social norms and behaviour, not faith. In fact, only Christianity, and especially the rite-denying evangelical variety, holds faith as religion’s definition.
There are materialist Hindus, and Jews who deny resurrection.
Which is why, in general, it is only evangelical protestants, and conservative Muslims, who have a problem with Darwin.
I wouldn’t deny that our “rites” as a group of socialists, eg big public meetings, rallies, don’t have the same opiate effect as religious ones. As humans are social animals you would expect humans to enjoy feeling part of a larger community.
Marx wasn’t of course religious but his criticism of religion was not that of those atheists who see it as a con for religious leaders to get a good living at the expense of their gullible followers. It was that capitalist conditions were so bad that they gave rise to the need for consolation— religion as “the heart of a heartless world” as he put it. And his answer to the pure and simple atheists was that their justifiable criticism of religion should give rise to a criticism of the social conditions that gave rise to the need for it as a consolation.
In evangelical expressions, Christianity is a belief/ a faith, not a religion.
Religion for the sake of it is a legalism: faith is a post legalism
Religion is considered a state of following a tradition, and is automatic thinking, almost nominal. And so faith is conscious attention to practising a way of life, decentred from non discursive reflections, It is active and cognised.
Communities of conviction are a way of seeing the world, of being in the world.
There is a conflation of people turning to communities of conviction as negative world events increase.
There is also an episteme (a cultural and repeating practice) and anthropological constant in expressions of faith in society that has been/ and so will be.
To belong is such a deep and socially entrenched need/want.
Capitalism and its social divisions excludes. I know Marx did not go further into theologies and social studies as we know them today (and other ‘oligies’)- but in this period of modern-and its elusive post modern- these issues draw us together or create oppositions.
There are so many points of equivalence that draw us together- socialism becomes a shared reality trip (non opiate reference) in so many communities. I once felt down as a kid, and read a text on socialism- and my mood for the world lifted.
The word itself, Religion, is not synonymous with belief, or faith. To the Romans and the Hindus it is closer to social behaviour. Rites are its centre, not belief. Even Judaism, the first of the three great monotheistic religions, was and is about social norms and behaviour, not faith. In fact, only Christianity, and especially the rite-denying evangelical variety, holds faith as religion’s definition.
It is interesting that the word “religion” derives from the latin word re-ligare meaning to re-bind or re-connect (like the “ligament” which joins the muscle to the bone). The great 19th century sociologist, Emile Durkheim, looked on religion from this perspective. He argued that society was essentially a moral order and religion traditionally served as the “vehicle” par excellence for diffusing a sense of moral solidarity among individuals, thus facilitating the functional well-being of society as a whole.
This original meaning of the term perhaps helps to explain the occasional characterisation one comes across of the state-sanctioned atheism of some countries, like North Korea, as constituting the “official religion” of the country in question. In this sense the term is stripped of any supernatural connotations, such as belief in a God or an afterlife, and is rendered virtually synonymous with the concept of social solidarity.
In his analysis of the religious rituals of the Australian aborigines which, he argued, were based on a simple kind of religion called “totemism”, Durkheim attempted to show that the real purpose of such rituals was to revitalise and reinforce the collective consciousness of the participants. In short, to dramatise and strengthen the moral bonds between them in order to create a more cohesive social unity and counteract the effects of dispersal and isolation arising from a hunter-gatherer way of life.
Traditional religion, argued Durkheim, played an essentially symbolic role as the “concentrated expression of the whole collective life”. Behind the ritualistic facade, it was actually society that was the real object of religious devotion. By prostrating themselves before a deity in the act of worship, individuals unwittingly or inadvertently betrayed their sense of absolute dependence on society itself.
And just as religion was intrinsically social so, conversely, was society also in a sense a religious phenomenon insofar as it was predicated upon the collective conscience. The transcendent all-encompassing nature of this consciousness was precisely what vested it with sacred qualities, that necessarily separated it from the profane world of routine daily life and commanded a sense of reverential awe. Of course, in societies undergoing modernisation (and along with that, secularisation) the influence of traditional religion has tended to decline. However, this did not necessarily herald the break up of society as such in Durkheim‘s view; what was required was the development of “rational substitutes” for traditional religious ideas which would nevertheless serve as functional equivalents of the latter by illuminating the direct dependence of individuals on society hitherto mediated by religious representations.
Thus did he carve out an important role for the discipline of sociology in the development of modern society, no doubt earning the gratitude of Sociology Departments everywhere ever since!
And of course there is Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophical theory, expressed in his The Essence of Christianity which “George Eliot” translated into English, that “God” was humanity’s distorted reflection of their own powers which they had yet to realise that they had. God as one big Fetish, from which his contemporary, Marx, would have got his idea of the “fetishism of commodities”.
Among protestants “way of life” is not a factor, but faith alone, as Luther said, echoing St. Paul. Evangelicals make the point of saying “Only faith saves; good deeds won’t save you.” It is the antithesis of how ancient Romans and Hindus define religion. Catholicism and Anabaptism stress good deeds (St. James).
“…saying “Only faith saves; good deeds won’t save you.” It is the antithesis of how ancient Romans and Hindus define religion. Catholicism and Anabaptism stress good deeds (St. James).”
Thomas, and is an interesting point. When Christians state that salvation is through the doctrine of faith: it liberates people of faith from ‘good works alone’. Can yo imagine the euphoria released in that knowledge, and the sense of liberation from a ceaseless penitential cycles. Of course good deeds occur due to faith.
It couples the terms “way of life’ with ‘faith’- Many faith communities express feeling of euphoria (Marx might say opiate), connectedness and fulfilment living a certain way- and it becomes an anecdote to capital material expressions- and an opposition to it….
That counter to capitalism shows that Rosa’s “socialism or barbarism” is a question that has many points of equivalence across political and social domains- there is a barbarity to capitalism- but a euphoria and utopia in the other
Not as nuanced or as intricate explanations as those offered here but here is something
https://www.worldsocialism.org/wsm/2020/10/13/religion-thy-name-is-superstition/
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