>Religion is the opium of the masses
what did he mean by this?
>>1268539
I don't fucking know man
>>1268546
/His/ in a nutshell
>>1268539
It sucks and people fight wars over it.
Do you think you'll get even a slight chuckle from anyone with this ?
>>1268539
He meant it as if religion is like a painkiller to alleviate the suffering of life. The more accurate translation is "opiate", is in things like morphine, co-codamol, codeine and so forth. Medical painkillers as opposed to just smokable opium.
There's a reason the following sentence was
>the sigh of the oppressed creature
>>1268546
/His/ in a nutshell
Idiots, all of you.
>>1268539
but that was Karl Marx
>>1268553
People fight wars over anything, even women. Dumbfuck
>>1268539
socialism is the opium of the intellectuals
>>1268553
>It sucks and people fight wars over it.
>Op's pic
the irony, the typical.
So you are a worker in an industrial city. Your life basically sucks- you work long hours for meager pay and prospects for advancement are grim to say the least. Your family is fractious and prone to sudden upheaval both in the forms of workplace death and people moving.
So what makes you happy? The prospect of the afterlife of course. But you have to do certain things to get into heaven: you shouldn't ask why the owner has so much money, as that is greed you see. And why would you question the Tsar/King/Prince? God wanted them to rule over you. God blesses his favorite children, and maybe you deserve to be poor. But you still need to work hard, as you need to make lots of little Christian babies and support them. Oh, and the Church, too. Don't shake the boat too much. Lucifer rebelled against God, so don't mirror him.
Just worry about going to heaven. Don't worry about real things.
>>1268631
People fight with more conviction in wars that involve religion. Eternity is a long time, and that clouds people's already turbid view of the world.
>>1268847
this
The world, and who run it, don't matter, so stfu about the miserable and squalid life they've set out for you, basically.
God is pretty much what they tell kids before they abuse them desu.
>>1268636
fuck off aron
>>1268539
First of all, it was Karl Marx who said this.
Second of all, Karl Marx was remarking on the fact that organized religion is often a means of controlling the working class - through religious leaders and religious edicts alike.
Karl Marx also remarked that religion is a way of blinding people from seeing the truth about society, the economy and what their part in it is.
>>1268539
>>http://www.thinkatheist.com/forum/topics/giving-up-on-atheism-atheism-promotes-promiscuity-and-is-bad-for?commentId=1982180%3AComment%3A1261552&xg_source=activity
he was wrong though
>>1268928
I fail to see how this is germane in the slightest.
>>1268539
iirc the meaning of that phrase was a little bit different in its context
>>1268539
He didn't say it you stupid neckbeard.
>Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the people.
There's a lot of nuance that gets left out by the truncated quote. It is a lot less iconoclastic, a lot more sympathetic.
>>1268636
nice how tankies and liberals can agree in their anti-intellectualism
>>1271241
People also forget that in Marx's time, morphine was basically the only painkiller available.
>>1268636
YOU ARE IN NO POSITION to change the world, if you do not fucking understand the world. And you fucking don't. You and the rest of the Left carve out an island of the world and make it the object of your criticism, but you leave the rest. There is always a sacred space you spare in criticism - your own lives, careers, 'personal business', 'emotions', and generally your own personal interaction with the real world. You know nothing of the 'actual' world. You do not look around and see the 'actual world' as a contingent world that can be mastered. You are totally fucking dwarfed, perplexed and mesmerized by all of 'this', all of the cars on the road, all of the highways which they are driving on, all of the skyscrapers and buildings, your local restaurants, your cities, your homes, your sewage, sanitation, your consumer goods, the buildings where they are sold, and so on. You are... Totally helpless before all of THIS. And frankly, deep down, you and the pseudo-Letists are scared of tampering and affecting THIS, affecting life at the level of its most raw and direct level. Are you really ready to transform the world to the point where you have nothing, truly, to lose? Where everything, the world around you, is actually affected. You rely on too many unknown processes that guarantee your life. You are not ready for this, because you have not encompassed the actuality of the world in its entirety in your consciousness. You have spared it. You have not become socially or historically conscious, and you apologize for it by speaking of 'the intellectuals' as opposed to the workers.
>>1268539
*Opiate
It means religion was created to entertain and addict us
People use religion to escape reality
>>1268539
It keeps the people happy such that other forces can keep taking more and more without the people rising up and taking what is rightfully theirs.
>>1268539
What he meant was, "My intent is to subjugate under subversive means."
>>1271293
There is nothing wrong with anti-intellectualism.
It's not unlike anticlericalism in the XIXth century. It doesn't mean you oppose intelligence, it means you oppose the cultural and political power of a parasitical caste.
>>1271320
This guy has over 300 confirmed kills
>>1272355
>It doesn't mean you oppose intelligence
that's exactly what it means though
