Perhaps this is your experience of it. But I can guarantee you that for many, many people, this does not hold true and that it provides the fulcrum in fact for family and community (myself included). It could be that this is one marker or divider between the more developed and aetheist world and the world of more traditional societies. I'm not sure. But one thing I *do* know is that anything Marx said about religion is irrelevant insofar as religion existed far before his time, and will continue to exist far beyond our time, and because his words led to one of the most miserable components of the Bolshevik revolution itself, which was the closure of churches and places of worship in Communist countries. So to look to Marx for his viewpoint on religion is a bit akin to looking to a vegetarian for their view on backyard grilling.
It isn't my experience, it's the history of the human species. You don't have to guarantee that loads of people identify with a deity. I'm not arguing otherwise. Religion is the institutionalization of ideation as truth. Many people are convinced that if enough people believe something then it must be true. This is nonsense. If we look at educated cultures that do not promote proselytizing or indoctrination before a certain age (because indoctrination of children has been construed as a form of child abuse), religion is not the political force or social controlling agent that it is in most capitalist societies.
Perhaps this is your experience of it. But I can guarantee you that for many, many people, this does not hold true and that it provides the fulcrum in fact for family and community (myself included). It could be that this is one marker or divider between the more developed and aetheist world and the world of more traditional societies. I'm not sure. But one thing I *do* know is that anything Marx said about religion is irrelevant insofar as religion existed far before his time, and will continue to exist far beyond our time, and because his words led to one of the most miserable components of the Bolshevik revolution itself, which was the closure of churches and places of worship in Communist countries. So to look to Marx for his viewpoint on religion is a bit akin to looking to a vegetarian for their view on backyard grilling.
It isn't my experience, it's the history of the human species. You don't have to guarantee that loads of people identify with a deity. I'm not arguing otherwise. Religion is the institutionalization of ideation as truth. Many people are convinced that if enough people believe something then it must be true. This is nonsense. If we look at educated cultures that do not promote proselytizing or indoctrination before a certain age (because indoctrination of children has been construed as a form of child abuse), religion is not the political force or social controlling agent that it is in most capitalist societies.