Karl Marx on Religion

Although Karl Marx makes a valid point that religion acts in the place in which people cannot explain their origin or purpose, he does not point out the positive benefits of religion and tends to say religion both is and is not “the opium of the people.”
Marx has a negative outlook on religion, and in having such, he emphasizes how it is a device people use to explain and understand themselves and their existence. Marx believes religion is like a crutch people use because they cannot understand their own reality. “Man...has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven,” he insists. When men “no longer feel disposed to find the mere appearance of [themselves],” they will then be able to “seek [their] true reality.” Marx believes religion holds the place of a higher understanding until men realize that there is more to understanding than believing in a higher power, according to Marx, shaped in their image. “Man makes religion, religion does not make man,” he claims; according to Marx, men shape what they believe to be the power which controls or guides their existence. The power did not exist before they created it, and will not exist once men are aware that religion is simply the “universal basis of consolation and justification.”
Religion is not only the “universal basis of consolation,” it is much more than Marx credits it for in both a positive and negative sense. Through religion, one can discover what they truly value or define their ethics. An influence of religion can bring many different types of people together who otherwise do not have many similar interests. Conversely, religion can turn people, groups, or countries against each other. Religion is both a positive and negative concept, which Marx sees as contradictory. Referring to “religion as the illusory happiness of the people,” he notes, “to call on [people] to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusion.” Giving up an illusion, but using an illusion to do so is contradictory, just as struggling against religion is struggling against a “world whose spiritual aroma is religion,” you can’t fight it.
Religion supports a person, but to say that it is “the opium of the people” is to say it makes individuals numb to other concepts or ideas. Not all who are religious have a deaf ear to other ideas. However, simultaneously, Marx believes they are numb to the idea that they must move past religion. “It is...the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world,” he insists. Marx bestows the power of seeking reality on history once people do not believe in “other-world of truth,” the higher power. The belief in something causes people to become numb to the concept that they “must seek [their] true reality.”
Marx’s ideas of religion are all reasonable, though he does fail to address the positive qualities of religion and how they can benefit a person or society. However, he is right to say that religion will not cease, because the world now and in many centuries before is one “whose spiritual aroma is religion.”