Religious Criticism
According to many Marxism thinkers, religion provides the “other” ways that tend to harm people instead of providing solutions and opium to existing problems. In general, people think that religion is a guide for human life. It is because it is a guide to life. Humans will be lost if they do not adhere to the value system that religion proffers.
Such a religious value system is regarded as a transcendent entity that is the creator of the man himself. People prefer to call him God. When guidance plays a role in religion, people assume that religion itself is capable or able to solve all existing problems. Both problems concerning issues related to social reality and the secrets of the universe, religion also teaches how individuals deal with God himself. In short, all the problems that exist in the world will be solved if one bases himself on religion.
The Sins
In 1957, the Church under Pope Leo X gave birth to what people call the Taxa Camerae. It is a religious practice that people claim can save individual souls. The depiction of Christian religious practice is very detrimental. If individuals can pay the Church, then performers of such ritual practices assume that individual sins can be atoned for only by paying a suitable amount of money. Whether it’s small or big sins, it fits the scale of the sins people commit.
Instead of showing sacred religious rites, such practices show the opposite, namely hypocrisy. When talking about class, it is in charge of making offerings to God, who is nothing but the oppressor class. The religious practice is not an offering in itself. However, it only serves as the slavery of the majority by the minority. Pastors act as liberation from all workloads. In essence, they get the above privileges and pleasures.
Opium of the People
According to Marxism, religion is not a guide and direction for the opium of the people. However, it acts as a trap or cage. Marx said how religion is the groan of oppressed beings, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of a soulless condition. In essence, it is the opium of society. Religion is not a guide, but it is nothing more than the problem of the man himself. It represents Marx’s position when dealing with religion. Such opium means a drug that can forget or relieve real pain instead of giving instructions to get away from a problem.
Apart from being a sedative, it means a mere illusion. It does not at all solve the real problems that exist in society. In short, religion is a fake. The problem is that religion is not the liberator and guide of mankind. From such a point, it appears that the assumption that should be the criticism of such a phenomenon is the religious person himself. Religion and its adherents are two different entities in another sense. If the two realities separate from each other, then religion itself may be indeed present as a guide. However, it is because there are deviants or unscrupulous persons that religion turns into a bad thing. Regardless of which, it is not certain.
Hegel’s Alienation Concept
Besides Marx, there is Hegel who says that religion acts as alienation, an unhappy consciousness. Such alienation occurs when there is an individual who is in a separate state from his basic essence. The condition occurs when an individual or a subject feels that his or her soul or essence is far apart. When speaking of the essential base, it served as the universal base of the world’s soul. However, it was different for Hegel.
According to him, alienation in religion is important because it is one of the phases of the historical development of a spirit. Thus, when the spirit is in a state of alienation, it seeks to reconcile with the alienated breath within itself. When the spirit is alienated, a form of reconciliation occurs in the form of an individual’s individuality. In the next phase, it becomes an object for its consciousness. In other words, such an individual begins to realize that he is the spiritual force of the soul that knows himself.
The Delusion of God
Hegel’s position wants to say that alienation is only overcome if there is what is called reconciliation. Reconciliation occurs when the individual begins to realize that he is connected to the universal basis of the soul of the world. In other languages, the basic essence is not always separate from the individual himself. Such inseparability occurs between individuality and the basic essence of all spirits as well as God himself.
In another sense, the process of resolving alienation occurs when an individual begins to put or realize his faith in God. In short, alienation is a very crucial concept in Marx’s view of religion. Apart from Hegel’s adoption of the concept of alienation, it is still idealistic. In the sense that the alienation that occurs, in reality, is still considered by people to be alienation that occurs at the idea and non-material level, Hegel’s concept of alienation is not considered by people to occur in the material order.
Practical Dimension
Regardless of whether humans are present as natural or material beings, humans are not passive creatures. Rather, it is an active being. By acting as a praxis dimension, it becomes the most fundamental thing in humans. The meaning of praxis, in short, refers to production, acting as a form of effort to seek sustainable livelihoods for the human species.
In other words, humans interpret themselves as social beings. According to Marx, the difference between humans and animals is not in the fact that humans are thinking creatures. Instead, the difference lies in its dimensions of subsistence search. The concept is central to Marx’s philosophy, named by the term historical materialism.
It is a reading framework as well as the reality of the social order and plays a role in the macro-sociological realm. Historical materialism describes the causes of change to stability in society. In another sense, Marx assumes that there has never been a society that is not bound by the laws of historical materialism.
For Marx, praxis only has its manifestation in social organization, producing the praxis if it occurs in material nature itself. However, such a production pattern cannot only be understood by people as a physical mode of reproduction. Humans do praxis to reflect on their mode of life. Thus, what humans produce determines their identity. Humans will coexist in society in the way they live. In essence, Marx said that both things cannot be separated by humans.
Marx’s Materialism
When talking about historical materialism, Marx in such a position asserts that ideology in society is a reflection of a basis. The basic structure constitutes the economy, anchoring the pattern of analysis of its society to economic analysis. It is because it is a fundamental thing for society.
However, what people need to know is that the mode of production in society is not fixed. The pattern of production that exists in society is historical. Therefore, each phase of history retains a specific form of production. Therefore, it produces a different ideological system. The era of capitalism also marked the increasingly massive production using modern machines. Trade and commercial activity also have a really wide scale.
Such activities take place in a factory where the middle class produces commodities massively. For Marx, such an early phase became primitive communism. In the simplest of societies, it doesn’t exist with what people call class. At first, people met their needs by hunting. Since production in the hunt is collective, the division of labor is necessary.
Such division arises because every individual in the community has different capacities. The capacities include people who are weak, who are strong, and who also have different skills. The phase is ideal because each individual is bound by his communality. It results in no private ownership. In essence, they cooperate in sustaining their lives, sharing in the results of their products without any inequality of results.
Patterns of Production
Talks about class struggle become necessary when talking about modes of production as well as society. According to Marx, a relation of production itself creates what people call social classes. The social classes that exist at every stage of history are the history of class struggles. History is the embodiment activity of antagonism between classes. Such a range occurs from slavery, and feudal society, to capitalism.
In a capitalist society, two classes are at odds with each other, namely the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The proletariat is a class that cannot work without being attached to the bourgeoisie. Their work only works that they can call forced labor. They would not be able to live unless they depended on the bourgeoisie for their work. Thus, their work can only be understood by people as work aimed at increasing the capital of the bourgeoisie itself. The proletariat is a commodity that sells its labor power to the bourgeoisie.
Class Struggle
In essence, they are an internal part of the trading system itself. As such, they reflect the misfortune of competition from the market itself. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie is people who aim to increase capital or capital as much as possible. They are the class that buys their power to the proletariat, that is, has private ownership of the means of production. According to Marx, capitalism will collapse at the “end” of history, believing that history will end with the victory of the proletariat.
When the capitalist system collapses, a new order emerges, namely an order in which every production is no longer private. Regardless of the note, such property itself cannot just disappear in the new order. What is lost is only the property of the bourgeoisie, understood as self-owned. Such a new order or communism acts as an order in which society as a whole is communal. Broadly speaking, the proletariat plays the role of a communist revolution in the world.
Inference
For Marx, religion is part of the ideology of the body. Religion is an effect of the base only if people call religion part of the ideology of the body. Thus, religion is a human creation that acts as a perpetrator of social order. In a meaningful way, the custodian acts as a custodian of the exploits that occur in order. Strictly speaking, he proclaims that religion is an illusion.
Religion is just a picture of the Marxism that exists in the opium of people. Apart from being an illusion, it is a definitive form of evil itself. Ironically, the religious doctrine in front of Marx is not so significant and useful because it only acts as an effect. Other than that, every form of religion does not have a fixed form. Every religion has various forms according to the conditions of the times that surround it.
The Doctrine Condition
Marxism affects the diversity of each doctrine in religion and the opium of the people. Being a pain reliever is an internal mechanism of an ideology. Religion is nothing more than a complaint of suffering, an expression of the real condition of alienation, and also a cry of protest against the condition of alienation as well. By functioning as the opium of society’s misery, the removal of the illusory happiness of religion is a real attempt at bringing about true happiness.
The effort to get rid of everyone’s dependence on religious illusions is an attempt to direct them to the struggle that exists in concrete reality. Therefore, philosophy works to remove all masks from heavenly illusions to the real worldly order. In addition, criticism of the heavenly world must appeal to the criticism of the world of materialism. Likewise, with the critique of theology, the disappearance of religion is the removal of false happiness into real happiness.
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