4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Marxist Critique of Religion The rise of religious beliefs in the early stages of human development are traced by Marx and Engels to the primitive man's helplessness in the struggle with the forces of nature. In class societies the social root of religion is the apparent helplessness of the working , people, suffering under class oppression and exploitation, in their uneven fight against the exploiters and oppressors. The feeling of helplessness of the masses finds expression in idealistic and metaphysical beliefs, in a better life after death and rewards in heaven for the sufferings on earth. Religion has been a powerful form of social consciousness, one of the effective elements of the superstructure of class society. Studies of the socio-economic formations in various parts of the world in the epochs of feudalism and capitalism reveal that the exploiting classes had a specific interest in fostering religion as a means for blunting the class consciousness of the people, as a means of keeping the masses in blindness or ignorance. It was against the backdrop of such a historical analysis that Marx wrote in 1844 that "Religion is the opium of the people." Marx wrote: Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.4 Karl Marx also stated: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. In other words, religion is the self-consciousness and self-feeling of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, a reversed world-consciousness, because they are a reversed world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, as spiritualistic point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its universal ground for consolation and justification . . . s . .. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore mediately the fight against the other world, of which religion is the spiritual aroma.6 Again, "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion."7 The task of history, according to Marx, is to establish the "truth of this world," and this can be done fully only when "the world beyond the truth" has disappeared. "The immediate task of philosophy, which is