ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 begins with Georg William Friedrich Hegel and looks at how his Christian beliefs influenced Karl Marx, both positively and negatively. By turning away from Hegel and even rejecting Comte’s secular religion, Marx sought to strip the world of religious beliefs by characterizing them as illusionary and in the process substituted a purely materialistic/secular worldview. Marx dismissed any religious basis for the newly emerging social science as he relegated religious beliefs to nothing more than a false consciousness whose only purpose was to keep the powerless in line. Marx, as an atheistic thinker, laid the groundwork for what would become a fatalistic science, one that saw human beings as nothing more than creatures who follow nature’s laws. In particular, Marx’s denunciation of religion as the “opiate of the people” would usher in economic and later forms of determinism that constitute so much of today’s social science. It is also shown that paradoxically Marx’s emphasis on the immorality of capitalism has produced a Christian-based “theology of liberation.”
