Oppression Of Karl Marx's View Of Religion

133 Words1 Pages
Karl Marx believed that religion arose out of oppressive conditions and supported the status quo by justifying inequality, consoling the downtrodden, and dulling the pains of daily life. To Marx, religion was fundamentally conservative in that it confirms and reinforces existing social arrangements. It justifies laws that limit people’s freedoms, it validates the rule of the powerful and oppression of the weak and it makes sense of economic inequality and other forms of social disparity. In so doing, religion also suppresses people’s resistance to oppressive systems. To serve these purposes, religion need not take any specific form, posit a god or supernatural beings or embody particular practices. It need only justify existing conditions and