Karl Marx famously described religion as the “Opium of the People”. Was he right? Join us for a discussion of the nature of religion, how did it come about, and what role has it played in society.

Marx asserted that:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion.

Alan Montgomery, chair of Reading Humanists, will lead a discission of whether this holds true, or if there is another way to understand religion.