AS181: Portable Atheist: Karl Marx on Religion
Serious Inquiries Only
Thomas Smith
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 19 October 2015
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It has been a few months since the last portable atheist, and this one’s a weird one. Today’s reading is the essay which features the famous quote “Religion is the opium of the people.” What did Marx really mean by that quote? Hitchens, among others, has always said that people misinterpret those words. Find out … Continue reading AS181: Portable Atheist: Karl Marx on Religion
The post AS181: Portable Atheist: Karl Marx on Religion appeared first on Atheistically Speaking.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to, atheistically speaking. Oh, Hello and welcome to atheistically speaking this is episode 181 and I'm your host |
| 0:36.0 | Thomas Smith. Well it has been a little while I guess I let a little bit more time |
| 0:42.3 | go by than I wanted to between portable atheist segments. |
| 0:47.0 | For anyone who's not familiar, I'm slowly going through the portable atheist and really getting in deep on the readings |
| 0:55.0 | and analyzing and providing some background on the authors, kind of going above just |
| 1:01.2 | what's written down in the portable atheist or rather what's |
| 1:04.7 | collected in the portable atheist and trying to get to some of the themes and |
| 1:08.8 | get to a deeper understanding of it. It's usually pretty enjoyable for me anyway and I know there |
| 1:14.3 | are those who who enjoy it as well. This time I went two months so I kind of |
| 1:20.0 | I'm almost need to do two. We'll see what happens. But this reading is interesting. |
| 1:27.8 | The official title is Contribution to the Critique of Hagel's philosophy of Wright by Karl Marx, but we may not exactly |
| 1:37.3 | be covering that because, okay, there, it's a little interesting. So I started to read this and there's a lot of interesting stuff because this of course is the work where Marx has the famous religion is the opiate of the people or the masses depending on how it's translated. |
| 1:54.1 | This particular one says opiate of the people. |
| 1:57.1 | And so that's certainly fascinating and that's something I want to talk a lot about. |
| 2:00.3 | I want to talk about how people misinterpret that. |
| 2:04.0 | At first, I didn't really understand how it was being misinterpreted. |
| 2:08.0 | I think I understand it now. I've done a lot of research into it. |
| 2:11.0 | I'm going to maybe play a little bit of |
| 2:13.8 | Hitchins talking about this quote because that's definitely the most fascinating |
| 2:18.3 | part about the reading. But here's the thing. The rest of the reading is, well, it's borderline unreadable to me. |
| 2:26.7 | It's really interesting. I'm curious if there are any Marxists listening. I don't mean to say that all of Marx is unreadable. I don't have |
| 2:36.1 | that much experience with Karl Marx. I've done a lot of research for this show and I've |
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