The famous and eloquent passage on religion by Marx tends to disguise its misanalysis of religion. The latter is not a simple entity to ‘analyze’ and while secular humanism rightly attempts liberation from false religion it does notion general find its true understanding.
Here the eonic model can help to see that in the classical era religions emerged in the context of the ‘evolution of civilization, often deviating from their starting points to social ideologies with political aspects of domination. But that does not really justify the reductionist assumptions said to liberated thought from ‘religion’. The result was imply inadequate as an analysis of religion as such, here meant perhaps the case of the very weak and distorted Christianity of the era after Constantine. The evolution of man has always generated vehicles to deal with his unique, and uniquely confusing psychology with its ambiguities of ‘consciousness’.
Karl Marx, in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), famously said: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”
Source: Marx, Spinoza, and the Political Implications of Contemporary Psychiatry – CounterPunch.org
1848+: The End(s) of History 