Religion

“Religion is the opiate of the masses” today sounds like Marx was calling religion a harmful addiction. But in 1840’s Europe, opiates weren’t used (at least not primarily) as recreational drugs, but as medical painkillers. In other words, while Marx didn’t believe there actually was a God, he didn’t think of religious people as deceived addicts destroying society around them but as fundamentally reasonable people using the idea of another, fairer plane of existence to cope with their often unpleasant material situations.