What Makes Karl Marx Became Atheist

[cassiane]

How does Karl Marx became atheist when his religion background was Jewish Lutheran?

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

How does Karl Marx became atheist when his religion background was Jewish Lutheran?

What are you talking about? The official stance on Jews in Christendom at the time of Marx was that de facto all Jews goes to Hell. This wasn't changed officially by Lutherans, Catholics, etc. until like the 1960s. Luther himself was a rabid anti-Semite.

As for what made him become Atheist who knows. God reveals to some and closes the eyes and hearts of some. I don't really think about such things, His Will is sufficient. That's what I believe anyway.

[Zukunftsmusik]

What are you talking about? The official stance on Jews in Christendom at the time of Marx was that de facto all Jews goes to Hell. This wasn't changed officially by Lutherans, Catholics, etc. until like the 1960s. Luther himself was a rabid anti-Semite.

I think they refer to Marx's family being Jewish prior to converting to Lutheranism.


How does Karl Marx became atheist when his religion background was Jewish Lutheran?

I think Feuerbach had a lot to do with it.

[Zanthorus]

Marx was the new Jesus, tasked with absolving the sins of the world and preparing the way for the coming of the eschaton. In order to do this he had to take within himself absolute negativity, the purely negative attitude towards his own existence, and thus he became Atheist as such, that is Atheism in toto rather than any particular Atheist, and yet in so doing annulled it's power over us, so that we might see the way towards a higher truth.

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

I think they refer to Marx's family being Jewish prior to converting to Lutheranism.


Really? Hmm.

Oh my science, this is interesting.

[Hrafn]

Really? Hmm.

Oh my science, this is interesting.

How on earth did you interpret it?

[MarcusJuniusBrutus]

I guess I just naturally assumed that he realized that there is no god/s.

[exeexe]

Because the church gave money to the poor, so the working class didnt see that capitalism was robbing the workers and created poverty out of nothing. Its basically what the welfare state is doing today. It prevents people from becoming revolutionaries.

[ComradeOm]

As others have suggested, the early university years in Berlin were key. There Marx came into contact with the then fashionable intellectual trends of rationalism and bible criticism (Germany being a noted centre of the latter). Particularly important was the influence of both Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer but, in general, the whole Young Hegelian milieu was fairly questioning of religion.

Edit: There was, as far as I'm aware, no single moment that led to a Damascene conversion

[Rafiq]

Marx had further reinforced his atheism when he broke with the young hegelians and developed a materialist conception of history. What partially distinguishes Marxism from other Communist currents of the time was the legacy of Hegel - the new champion of hegelianism opposed his own mentor (as with Lenin and his mentor Kautsky).

[Slavoj Zizek's Balls]

That is assuming of course that Karl Marx was even 'atheist', which he wasn't.


It would probably be hard to imagine a more prevalent or commonsense belief about Marx than that he was an atheist. Afterall, even those who know nothing substantial about Marx "know" he was an atheist. D. W. D. Shaw believes he does, although he acknowledges a brief period of belief, albeit "cerebral" belief. Shaw says, " ...while he was a student in Berlin...he became philosophically a naturalist, a realist, a materialist and an atheist." (Shaw 1978: 29) This seems to be conventional wisdom about Marx. The only problem is that Marx did not call himself an atheist and in fact, found the whole matter quite irrelevant. In the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts" (1844), Marx said:

Once the essence of man and of nature, man as a natural being and nature as a human reality, has become evident in practical life, in sense experience, the quest for an ALIEN being, a being above man and nature (a quest which is an avowal of the unreality of man and nature) becomes impossible in practice. ATHEISM, as a denial of this unreality, is no longer meaningful, for atheism is a NEGATION OF GOD and seeks to assert by this negation the EXISTENCE OF MAN. Socialism no longer requires such a roundabout method; it begins from the THEORETICAL and PRACTICAL SENSE PERCEPTION of man and nature as essential beings. It is positive human SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, no longer a self-consciousness attained through the negation of religion. (Marx 1964A: 166-67)

Rather than merely labeling Marx an atheist, it would seem to be more accurate to say Marx was as much opposed to atheism as to religion. Marx did not really feel it was all that important to deny God and as McKown says:

...he wished to transcend all circumstances in which either the affirmation or denial of a being beyond man was at issue. (McKown 1975: 20)

If Marx was not denyiny God, what was he doing? Contrary to Shaw's belief that Marx was indeed denying God, Quentin Lauer says:

Marx is not out to get rid of God; he is out to free man--not free him from God but from himself and from his enslavement to religion, whlch is his own creation. It is not God but the belief in God which must go, if man is to be free. (Lauer 1968: 54)

As Howard L. Parsons points out, Marx (like Camus) " refuses to take atheism seriously. It misses the point."(Parsons 1964: 156)

The whole concept of atheism is one derived from the religious sphere itself. Atheism itself comes from a religious stance and is a religious term. Louis Dupre characterizes atheism as no more than an ideology itself, "...an idle and ill-directed theoretical attitude that only drains much needed energy away from the battle for a true humanization." Dupre continues by pointing out that Merleau-Ponty " refused to be called an atheist, because atheism is still an inverted act of faith." (Dupre 1982: 22) Marx did not start with the denial of God, but with the affirmation of man, the sole source of meaning.

Thus, calling Marx an atheist may be seen as an "admission" by the caller that he is defining Marx in religious terms and not on Marx's own terms. To use phrases which indicate that Marx was "denying'' god, "attacking" religion, or "attacking the faith," is more an admission of religious bias on the part of the commentator than it is an accurate portrayal of Marx himself. The whole matter of atheism involves a willingness to take Marx at face value, on his own terms.

Source: http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/msor.html

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

How on earth did you interpret it?

Eh? I don't get what you're asking?

[Hrafn]

Eh? I don't get what you're asking?

Instead of interpreting the text as what it meant, that he became from a Jewish Lutheran background, you went off on a tangent about the Lutherans hating Jews, and how this somehow made something impossible.

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

Instead of interpreting the text as what it meant, that he became from a Jewish Lutheran background, you went off on a tangent about the Lutherans hating Jews, and how this somehow made something impossible.

That's what I was commenting on. The label "Jewish Lutheran" is kind of confusing given history and theology. I didn't know that either Marx or his family converted to Christianity or Lutheranism. I just thought it was weird and I think this thread is weird but kind of interesting. STFU

[Catma]

If atheism really is what Marx and whoever wrote that article are saying it is, then it is a meaningless position which no rational person could ever hold.

What people mean when they ask if Marx was an atheist is "did Marx believe in god?" The answer is clearly no:


Once the essence of man and of nature, man as a natural being and nature as a human reality, has become evident in practical life, in sense experience, the quest for an ALIEN being, a being above man and nature (a quest which is an avowal of the unreality of man and nature) becomes impossible in practice.

Let's use useful terms instead of talking about how atheists used to be when the church was powerful:

Atheist - One who doesn't believe in any god.
Agnostic - One who doesn't claim knowledge (regarding belief in a god.)

Marx says the quest for a being above man is IMPOSSIBLE in practice. He doesn't give a damn about the question and asserts that neither should anyone else. In terms of religious people who think in the binary of Belief-Nonbelief, the space between Marx and a Capital-A Atheist is so small, you could fit a god into it.

[synthesis]

There's a neologism called "apatheism" which, although its common usage isn't quite the same as what's being discussed here, might provide a more accurate label for his attitudes on the existence of God.

[Jemdet Nasr]

I think the reason that Marx didn't term himself an atheist was less to do with the denotation (obviously, he didn't believe in any sort of higher being), and more to do with the connotation. Many atheists define their belief not simply in terms of non-belief, but also in the active rejection of belief in God(s). To Marx, this railing against God revealed a certain mindset, the mindset of someone still defining themselves in terms of religion. Marx, who wished to surpass religion, thus did not want to couch himself in terms of religion. Because you cannot really have surpassed religion when you define yourself by your belief in it, Marx rejected defining himself in terms of it.