Marx’s Critique Of Religion And Modernity

Religion, as a complex social and cultural phenomenon, has showed great influence on reality in human history. Christianity is a sort of monotheistic religion characterised by dualistic divisive spiritualism, and its inherent tension between faith and science, reason and revelation did not disappeared with the arrival of the movement of religion criticism and secularization since modern times. Instead, as globalization intensifies in the new century, the tension appears in a more intimate way, such as "Spiritual Religion", and Fundamentalism. Although religion criticism is not a major problem and centre of Marx’s philosophy, the value of Marx’s religion criticism and its influence on contemporary philosophical and theological thoughts is remarkable. Unlike Young Hegelian’s humanism critique on religion and classic sociology of religion’s religious function theory, Marx’s critique of religion represents a unique direction of "critical" religious studies. Firstly, this direction is related to Marxist philosophy’s "sensuous activity" revolution, that through the fundamental critique of the system of Western metaphysics, transforming the abstract understanding of human of modern Western philosophy and theology for thousands of years, to put the human in the reality of production practices and communication activities; secondly, it made the understanding of the nature of human to have a fundamental change, has opened a understanding about a specific, "total " person in process of historical social practice, not only expressed the critique on Kant, Hegel’s philosophy as a form of speculative nature of modern theology, but reach for the critique of secularised structure of modernity——capitalist civil society.The studied of the secular sources of the rise of modernity indicate that the break with the traditional religious society mainly due to the rejection of religious mystery and the supernatural elements, the secularized religion accepted the modern thinking, which views a belief in technological progress as the driving power. Meanwhile, this progressive secular beliefs, make people believe that human society will once and for all progress toward the direction of eternal development and reached what Francis·Fukuyama calls "the end of history", with the development of modern science and capitalist welfare state. However, when the secularization movement faded the divine transcendental of the solid reliability of the ultimate of the Western world provided by religion in past 2000 years, the new faith of God established by the Protestant based on the direct contact between human and God, and its result of making "atomistic" individualist exist, led to nihilism situation of modern Western civilization that cannot overcome. Through criticizing the religious understanding tradition of Western religion and metaphysic, reaches deep to the material production practices of "person in reality", reveals the nature of the human as the sensuous "labour exist", gives human labour the dynamic creation role of "change the world" which is more important than "interpreting the world", opened the critique for the secular structure of modernity-civil society and capitalist commodity economy. Through this ontological revolution, Marx breaks the theologians and philosopher’s fascination for the abstract spirit, and point out that religious consciousness do not have independent nature. Furthermore, through decoding the secular foundation of the mysteries of religion-civil society and capitalist commodity economy, Marx discovers the double dimension of the theory of alienation, which includes religion and labour alienation. Religious alienation not only exists in the field of human ideas, but what is more in real life, based on this Marx raises a new view on history. For Marx, only communism which sublates the imprison of capitalist private ownership and the structure of the commodity economy, can truly achieve to overcome the nihilist "cage " caused by modernity...