Religion

A world view and perception associated with certain behavior and specific acts (cult or worship) and based on a belief in the existence of one or several gods and in the existence of the “holy,” that is, a form of the supernatural. Religion, which is essentially one of the idealist world views, is opposed to the scientific world view. The principal characteristic of religion is belief in the supernatural, but this does not mean that religion is the relationship that links man with god, as theologians usually argue. F. Engels observed: “All religion is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces” (in K. Marx and F. Engels, Sock, 2nd ed., vol. 20, p. 328). In religion, man is enslaved by the products of his own imagination. Religion represents a specific form of social consciousness and functions as a regulator of social behavior.
According to contemporary scientific data, religion originated approximately 40,000–50,000 years ago during the late Paleolithic period (the Stone Age), when primitive society had reached a relatively high level of development. The beginnings of hunters’ magic and the worship of animals are recorded in late Paleolithic art. Additional evidence for the existence of religious beliefs is provided by late Paleolithic burial sites, which are distinguished from earlier sites by the custom of burying the dead with tools and ornaments, indicating rudimentary ideas concerning life after death, a “world of the dead,” and continued existence of the “soul” after the death of the body. Even today, there are analogous ideas and rituals.
Religion emerges when the development of the human intellect has reached a level at which the rudiments of theoretical thought appear, together with the possibility of separating thought from reality (the epistemological roots of religion). The general concept is separated from the object it designates and is transformed into a special “being,” so that reflection by the human consciousness of that which is can serve as the basis for imaginary concepts of that which, in reality, is not. These possibilities are realized only in connection with the totality of human activity and social relationships (the social roots of religion).
Religion was a product of the limitations on the practical and intellectual mastery of the world in the early stages of human history. Primitive religious beliefs are marked by a fantastical consciousness of man’s dependence on natural forces. Not having separated himself from nature, man transfers to nature the relationships that are developing in the primitive commune. The natural phenomena that affect man in his everyday activity and that are of vital importance become the object of religious perception. Human powerlessness before nature evokes terror of nature’s “mysterious” forces, as well as an endless search for means of influencing these forces. Historically, the earliest manifestations of religion were magic, totemism, soothsaying, burial cults, and shamanism. Later forms of religion in preclass society included secret associations and the worship of leaders.
The first object of religious veneration, the fetish, was a real object to which supersensory qualities were attributed. Fetishism is associated with magic, with the attempt to influence the course of events in a desired direction by means of magical rites and incantations. Later, the supersensory qualities attributed to the fetish were separated from it and transformed into independent beings, or “spirits.” Animism, the belief in a “soul” independent of the body, emerged, and it became possible to divide the world into two parts: the world of that which actually exists and the supernatural world.
With the breakdown of tribal society, clan and tribal religions were replaced by the religions of class society. As social stratification took place, a hierarchy emerged in the “world of spirits.” With the development of farming, an increasingly important role was played by spirits of the plant world, by the cults of gods who died and were resurrected, and by rituals associated with seasonal phenomena in nature (for example, winter solstice festivities). As the patriarchal family developed, the clan ancestor cult was transformed into the cult of family ancestors and domestic gods. Esoteric (secret) beliefs and cults developed. Myths were reinforced in oral tradition and later, in written religious works, or sacred books.
With the division of society into classes and with the rise of the state, the polytheistic religions of early class society appeared: the Vedic religion of ancient India, Japanese Shin-toism, and the religions of ancient Egypt, Iran (Mazdaism or Zoroastrianism), Greece, and Rome. A special social stratum of professional priests emerged, the successors to the magicians, soothsayers, sorcerers, fortune-tellers, and shamans of primitive religions. A system of sacrificial offerings developed, cult rituals became more complex and acquired greater social significance, temples were built for sacrifices and religious services, and a system of religious training and education was established. Religion became one of the institutions of class society, defending the privileges and power of the exploitative elite. With the formation of a professional priesthood, religion was increasingly used to deliberately deceive the popular masses.
In the tribal cults of preclass society most of the gods were personifications of the forces of nature or of moral precepts. In the religion of slaveholding society, most of the gods personified social authority. “The fantastic figures, which at first only reflected the mysterious forces of nature, at this point acquire social attributes, become representatives of the forces of history. At a still further stage of evolution, all the natural and social attributes of the numerous gods are transferred to one almighty god…. Such was the origin of monotheism” (K. Marx and F. Engels, ibid., p. 329).
The religion of early class society retained many of the traditional cults that had originated in tribal society, including to-temistic cults of animals and plants and the worship of ancestors and various kinds of spirits, demons, and fetishes. A rich mythology developed. The religions of early class society were at first essentially tribal religions, but they later became the religions of nation-states, in which religious ties among people coincided with ethnic and political ties (for example, Confucianism, Shintoism, Hinduism, and Judaism, which still exist).
At a later stage of historical development the world, or supranational, religions emerged: Buddhism (sixth to fifth centuries B.C.), Christianity (first century A.D.), and Islam (seventh century). The world religions unite people of the same faith, regardless of their ethnic, linguistic, or political ties. Monotheism is one of the most important distinguishing features of world religions such as Christianity and Islam. Characteristic of Christian monotheism is the cult of “abstract man” (ibid.). The cult of “abstract man” is the product of the relations of commodity production and an understanding of man in which real social characteristics, social inequality, and differences in wealth, legal rights, and other factors are discarded and “overcome,” or rejected as nonessential, from the standpoint of the most important relationship defining man’s essence: his relationship to god. In this sense, belief in god is associated with denigrating the “worldly” and with orienting man not toward social reforms but toward an ideal life emphasizing “salvation” from worldly bonds and retreat from the vanities of the world. In the supranational religions new forms of organization and relations emerged: the church, the clergy, and the laity. Theology developed, and missionary work evolved as a means of spreading the world religions. The specific features of each world religion are the product of differences in the material life and the political and cultural forms of the social milieu in which they originated and spread.
The essence of religion was most profoundly revealed by Marxism, which continued and developed the critique of religion in the tradition of progressive social thought, raising the critique to a qualitatively higher level by integrally linking it with the struggle for the revolutionary transformation of social relations that create the need for religious illusions. The gods do not create man but are created by man in his image and likeness. This was the main thesis of the atheistic critique of religion from antiquity to the time of L. Feuerbach, who asserted that man, in worshiping a god, was worshiping his own essence, which he had alienated from himself. Feuerbach reduced the religious world to its earthly foundation. However, he gave no reason for the duplication of the world or the self-alienation of man. There was not yet an answer to the question why “the secular foundation detaches itself from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm” (K. Marx, in K. Marx and F. Engels, ibid., vol. 3, p. 2). Marxism, which is based on a materialist understanding of history, shows that this “is really only to be explained by the self-cleavage and self-contradictori-ness of this secular basis” (ibid).
Concrete sociohistorical relations are cited by Marxism to explain the existence of religion. Since the emergence of class society, these relations have been based on the exploitation of man by man. The inverted world, in which evil and injustice triumph, engenders an inverted consciousness, in which humanity, downtrodden in this world, acquires an imaginary existence in another world. By associating the realization of man’s ideals with a place beyond “this” world, religion reconciled man to social injustice. This was precisely the social function of religion to which Marx was referring when he described religion as the “opiate of the people” (ibid., vol. 1, p. 415).
In developing and critically transcending Feuerbach’s anthropological approach to religion, Marxism emphasizes that religious alienation stems from the real alienation of man in a society in which “the human essence has no true reality” and therefore achieves an illusory realization in god. “This state, this society produce religion, an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world.” Religion represents “the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again” (ibid., vol. 1, p. 414).
According to Marx, religion will be overcome with the revolutionary reconstruction of society in conformity with communist principles. “The religious reflex of the real world can only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellow men and to nature. The life process of society … does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan” (ibid., vol. 23, p. 90).
As religion was subjected to scientific investigation, its earthly sources became increasingly evident. Ethnologic studies by E. Tylor, J. Frazer, R. Marett, and K. Preuss have shown that the emergence of religion was related to the low level of development of production and intellectual culture. In describing the rudimentary manifestations of religion, ethnology helped to reconstruct the history of the origins of religious beliefs. The study of the oldest religious texts provided extensive comparative material for the elucidation of similarities in the myths, beliefs, and cults of peoples in various parts of the world. Similarities in beliefs are the outgrowth of similarities in the forms of productive activity and everyday economics during the early stages of social development. Studies showed that there was a connection between religious consciousness and the development of language and culture in antiquity. For example, Judaism was linked with the cultural world of the ancient East, and Christianity was an outgrowth of eastern Hellenistic syncretism.
As an element of the social structure of class society, religion performs certain social functions, acting as one of the instruments by which the ideas of the ruling class become the ruling ideas in a particular society. Thus, religion serves as the spiritual buttress for an inverted world based on social inequality and oppression. At the same time, because religion is involved in the class struggle, it can, under certain conditions, express the interests and aspirations of the exploited masses, whose struggle against the exploiters has often taken the form of a struggle between religious ideas. In many countries, revolutionary peasant movements have based their antifeudal programs on early Christian demands for brotherhood and equality. However, the religious guise in which the ideas of progressive social movements appear at certain stages of history is evidence of the immaturity of these movements.
The concepts of god and the supernatural vary in social meaning precisely because judgments about god are always judgments about the world. Belief in the existence of god shapes different attitudes toward reality and is manifested in different kinds of social behavior fluctuating within a rather broad range between secular service and monastic renunciation of the world, between exaltation and quietism, and between reconciliation with the status quo and protest. Thus, the orientation toward earthly problems in contemporary religious ideology reflects changes in the consciousness of the broad masses of the working people who are believers and who increasingly strive for the realization of social justice on earth by participating in the struggle to change the unjust world.
Every great historical upheaval in the social order is accompanied by an upheaval in people’s religious concepts. Thus, medieval Catholicism represented the feudal variety of Christianity. Protestantism, the bourgeois variety of Christianity, emerged with the development of capitalism, as a counterweight to Catholicism. From the second half of the 19th century, Catholicism pursued a policy of adapting to the conditions of bourgeois society. Since the Renaissance, there has been a growing trend toward secularization, characterized by a steady decline in the influence of religion and by the liberation of various aspects of social and personal life from the control of religion.
Secularism is particularly widespread today. At a time of radical social transformations and scientific and technological progress, religion is experiencing a profound and irreversible crisis. Religion is acknowledged as the state ideology in fewer countries. As a result of the separation of church from state and school from church, religion controls a steadily narrowing sphere of society’s intellectual and cultural activity. Religion is no longer a dominant form of ideology. Its prestige and the number of its adherents are noticeably declining, and what remains of religiosity is increasingly superficial.
The scientific and technological revolution has undermined the religious picture of the world and strengthened man’s confidence in his capacity to use his own powers to solve the problems confronting him. In the period of transition from capitalism to socialism, it becomes increasingly obvious that religion has outlived its historical role as a form of social consciousness. Characteristic of contemporary religious consciousness is a conflict between traditional and reformed versions of faith. The opposition between religion and the scientific world view has been underlined by attempts to eliminate the conflict between science and religion and reconcile them by freeing religion of archaic elements, mythology, and naïve anthropomorphism.
The factors that undermine religion coexist with the factors that nourish and support it. The rise of state-monopoly capitalism is accompanied by an intensification of social contradictions, exploitation, and the oppression and devastation of the individual. The inverted world, of which religion is the spiritual offspring, is exemplified by state-monopoly capitalism. The achievements of science and technology do not automatically lead to the extinction of religion, the existence of which is rooted in social relations. In capitalist society the scientific and technological revolution is accompanied by a series of negative social consequences, which religious ideologies blame on science and the rational intellect. The crisis of capitalism, which is foundering in contradictions, is interpreted as the crisis of man, who has forgotten god. The proposed solution for the crisis is not politics but religion.
To modernize religion, or adapt it to a changing world, there have been attempts to interpret religion, in conformity with a “theology of revolution,” as a spiritual force that stimulates social activism. However, this approach does not radically change the social character of religion. Belief in god remains the concomitant of lack of belief in human powers, extinguishing social protest by providing illusory consolation. The longer capitalism outlives its historical role, the more the ruling classes rely on religious justifications for capitalism’s existence. In the epoch of imperialism, all means of bourgeois propaganda are used to inculcate religion in the people, since religion is considered one of the principal means for counteracting the spread of a scientific materialist world view and communist ideology.
Profoundly scientific and materialist, the Marxist-Leninist world view is opposed to religion as an expression of illusory, inverted consciousness. Communism, which has revealed scientifically sound prospects for the establishment of social justice and which has transformed socialism from a utopia into a science and into social reality, is the opposite of religion. Communism is genuine humanism, which does not recognize the humanism of consoling lies or self-deceptions. “To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness” (K. Marx, ibid, vol. 1, p. 415).
The emergence of socialism was accompanied by the development of a social system fundamentally different from the “heartless world” and “soulless order” for which religion is an illusory compensation. The feeling of religious community and a tie with god serves as illusory compensation for the weakness of social ties among people, an inherent characteristic of antagonistic socioeconomic formations that is eliminated by socialist transformations.
As long as religion survives in socialist society, believers have the constitutionally guaranteed opportunity freely to participate in religious worship. The church is separate from the state, which does not interfere in the relationship of citizens to religion and religious beliefs. Thus, the state abides by the slogan of freedom of consciousness, which has been defended by Marxism-Leninism at all stages of its history. At the same time, socialist society is characterized by efforts to create the preconditions for liberating the consciousness of citizens from religious views. Scientific atheistic propaganda is conducted. The broad masses of the people were not attracted to freethinking and atheism in the historically limited forms in which they were manifested in antagonistic social formations. In a socialist society, religion confronts the opposition of mass atheism.
Marxist atheism goes beyond the limitations of the Enlightenment critique of religion, which failed to overcome idealist illusions that to change the world it was sufficient to change human consciousness. Warning against “playing up to” religion, V. I. Lenin also opposed any escapades in the “political war on religion.” In his opinion, “subordinating the struggle against religion to the struggle for socialism” was essential (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 17, pp. 417, 425).
The preconditions for a regular, lawlike evolution toward a society free from religion are established by the creation of the material and technical basis for communism, the constant improvement of socialist social relations, and the rising level of culture of the working masses. Historical experience confirms Marx’ idea that “religion will disappear to the extent that socialism develops. Its disappearance must take place as a result of social development, in which a major role belongs to education” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Ob ateizme, religii i tserkvi, Moscow, 1971, p. 470).
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Category:Religion