> Yoshie writes: > >It is hoped that, in the process of fighting the power, people will also > >drop any religious faith. > Some hairy old German guy said that religion was the opiate of the masses > (quoting others, including Kant, I believe). But he broke with the > hard-core atheism of the Young Hegelians (who seem to have viewed religion > as a basic cause of the world's manifest imperfection) to point to the > societal basis of religious faith. He then argued the need to change that > society rather than to try to convert the world to atheism. > Jim Devine "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction" (1844): 'Religious suffering is at once the *expression* of real suffering and the *protest* against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the *opium of the people*.' _Capital, vol. 1 (1867) The religious reflex of the real world can...only...finally vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature.' "Critique of the Gotha Programme" (1875): 'Everyone should be able to attend to his religious as well as his bodily needs without the police sticking their noses in. But the workers' party ought at any rate in this connection to have expressed its awareness of the fact that bourgeois "freedom of conscience" is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of *religious freedom of conscience*, and that for its part it endeavours rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion.' Michael Hoover
