Well, for Pete’s sake, it’s the best method there is for producing sane, civilized, productive, and reproductive citizens. I NEVER understood Lenin’s statement about it being the opiate of the masses. I should have thought he would have gotten behind it and taken control of it. No matter. I wish we would go ahead and crash like the Soviet Union so we could get back to a moral system.
“I NEVER understood Lenin’s statement about it being the opiate of the masses. “
Actually the quote comes from Karl Marx. Marx seems to have picked up the idea from Ludwig Feuerbach, another leftwing scribbler of that era whose atheism echoes all these years later despite the fact that no one has ever heard of him.
Here’s the Marx quote in more context:
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. 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. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”
It’s from the Introduction to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’.