Marx On Religion

Study Guide for Students

PART I 1. Why did Marx turn his curiosity from Romantic poetry to the philosophy of Hegel and Feuerbach and, finally, to the economic writings of John Locke, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo? What was his longing, his passion? 2. What is the complaint Marx brings not just to Judaism but to religion in general? What was religion doing and not doing in Germany and Great Britain in the early years of the 19th century? PART II 1. Why did our species evolve a highly self-reflective kind of consciousness? How did the neocortex, the opposable thumb, and the human use of tools help us establish our species’ specific way of survival? 2. What does Marx mean by “sensuous life activity”? Why does he disagree with Hegel? Why does Marx insist that the purpose of human life is “to change,” not just to understand the world in various ways? 241 Study Guide for Students 3. What does Marx do with the idea of freedom if consciousness merely reflects (passively) the given realities of the material world? Without freedom to reflect critically and to act on that reflection, how can we change the world? PART III 1. What does Marx mean by “free conscious life activity”? What is the nature and purpose of human work? Isn’t work good if it pays a good income and is secure? 2. If Marx is right, why do so many workers today experience their work under democratic capitalism as not “estranged” but satisfying? Why did the impoverishment of workers anticipated by Marx not happen? 3. What are the effects (both good and ill) of global capitalism upon people ’s lives: In older industrial countries? In the newly developing countries? 3. What is the human score card on work at the beginning of the twenty-first century? 4. What for Marx would be good work? What would make it good? What would be its distinguishing characteristics? PART IV 1. What does Marx mean by “the opium of the masses”? Besides consolation in face of injury and loss, can religion be a source of resistance and social change? If so, what did Marx miss in his analysis of religion? 2. What did both Marx and Engels find interesting in the religious idea of the messiah and of the messianic vision? 3. What did Marx mean when he said, “the more of himself man gives to God the less he has left in himself”? What does he mean by claiming that religion is “an inverted consciousness”? 4. What would Marx or Engels make of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in which the churches and the clergy seemed to play a leading role, first in resisting and then in transforming a legally segregated society? 242 Study Guide for Students ...