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How the Spiritually Pious Inadvertently Prove Marx Right

 Religious/spiritual people will scoff at Marx's critique of religion, especially the infamous quip that "Religion is the opium of the masses". Marx points out that their need for God is a desire for consolation, a need for a reason beyond all particular reasons for any specific suffering that allows them to accept the reasons for their suffering. It is an attempt to explain and cope with their deprivation and misery, but not to get rid of these reasons for the misery in the first place. They want an ultimate explanation for suffering as such, which they are convinced is simply the condition of man in total abstraction from any particular conditions or relations. (Thus the gloomy obsession with death.) 


Obviously Marx's criticism is simply scandalous to the religious mind because religion prohibits such heretical questioning from the start. Not questioning as such, but any questioning that calls this religious mode of questioning the world into question. 


And, in total outrage, they will then say something like: "I needed reassurance of some deeper justice, some cadence or rhythm that lurked beneath the heartache or chaos". (JD Vance, Hillbilly Elegy)


Or what else? Something along the lines of, "I believe in a loving God because it makes me happy to know that there is more to life than this reality I experience every day! I was depressed and thought everything was meaningless, that I was alone, but now that I believe, I have found bliss, beauty, communion, and purpose in the suffering. The suffering is there as a trial, a pathway to pass through to the real reason: as a test of our faith. This world is not all there is, but it is a vale of tears necessary to arrive at the true spiritual kingdom." 


In other words, in the very way they deny Marx's criticism of religion and affirm their own faith, they prove and demonstrate precisely that what Marx said about religion and theology -- in both its banal and crude forms and its sophisticated philosophical forms -- was true.

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