The Atheist’s Hubris

I was always intrigued by the confidence and arrogance of Karl Marx when it came to his pronouncement and verdict on the subject of religion. That pronouncement, from his 1843 work, “AContribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of right.” became one of his most quoted phrases, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”

In full, the quote is, “Religion is the opium of the people. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions.”

Much of Marx’s most famous work (the extremely boring and badly written) Das Kapital, was written in Manchester, England. He used to write in the oldest public library in Britain, “Chetham’s.”

In it, he argues that religious institutions and doctrines obscure the brutal exploitation of labor under capitalism and offers workers false mystical comfort. 

I used to give assemblies in the adjoining, Chetham’s School of Music and would take the opportunity to visit Chetham’s Library. They still preserve the desk Marx used.

I marveled at the man's hubris. Even a superficial review of his comments on religion shows that his familiarity and knowledge of theology was scant. His knowledge of Judaism and Jews was even scanter. That should not have been surprising. Marx was the son of Jewish parents, Heinrich and Henrietta who lived in West Prussia.

In 1817, his father, who was a successful lawyer, encountered a new edict that banned Jews from practicing law. Heinrich promptly converted to Protestantism. In 1824, when Karl was six years old, his father converted his eight children to Christianity too.

His attitude toward his ex-people became deeply antisemitic. In an 1843 essay, “On the Jewish Question” as well as in some of his private correspondence, he casually employs deeply troubling tropes and antisemitic stereotypes.

That is an important fact for Jews who identify as Left-wing in America today to remember. They scratch their heads at how their political home, the Democratic party, has so quickly embraced antisemitism. Wake up and smell the Starbucks! The founder of today’s lefts was an antisemite.

But it is Marx’s most famous quote on religion that always intrigued me. How could someone so galactically ignorant on any topic, so arrogantly weigh in to pontificate on its merits and demerits?

The appalling suffering of the working class in Manchester and surrounding towns at the end of the nineteenth century is undeniable. The level of formal education for most children was almost zero. The teaching of the Churches at the time, as Marx noted, was indeed that a better world awaits.

But was that really a comfort?

All monotheistic religions (and indeed many polytheistic ones too) teach that the promise of a better world depends on a heavenly court examining every aspect of your life to see if you merit entry into that “better world.”

They all identify an alternative destination to heaven and that one is considerably worse.

I believe that the vast majority of people, weighing their chances of passing their heavenly exam, would conclude, that they are “Toast.” Bearing in mind the name of that alternative location, they very soon might be!

Where is the comfort in that?

A rabbi and friend of mine told me that he is dreading his heavenly examination saying, “You are made to watch the video of your life including all the most embarrassing bits. Unless I get a remote control with a “delete” button, heaven offers me no comfort whatsoever. "In fact,” he continued, “if some atheist could convince me that there is no world to come, and video show, I would find that a comfort.”

Since the recent surreal volte-face of the President of America and his administration towards Iran and Israel, I am no longer sympathetic to my friend's position.

I look around at the reaction of my secular Israeli friends and family now. It is plain to see how raw and awful their pain and feeling of betrayal is.

They might not like President Trump, but they simply can’t seem to get their heads around Israel’s greatest supporter and friend doing this to them.

They seem not to have been familiar with the quote from another famous Jew, Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, which has been popping up all over the internet, “It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."

President Trump’s “Memorandum of Understanding” with Iran and his reprimand to Israel for attacking Hezbollah and Vice President Vance’s increasingly regular threats to cut off weapons to the Jewish State, seems to vindicate Kissinger’s words.

Watching the stunned bewilderment and hearing the “How could this be?” question, over and over, evokes a painful feeling of déjà vu.

Nobel Prize winner and Auschwitz survivor Elie Weisel, wrote and spoke often of how secular Jews suffered so much more than religious ones in the camps. They believed in Germany; its values and culture. Their inability to understand how what was happening to them came from the, “Spitze Kulture,” supreme German society, added an extra dimension of pain.

That’s when I was reminded that believing in Hashem does in fact offer comfort and a clear answer to this historically painful moment.

Now my friend’s whimsical suspicion that being convinced by an atheist might offer comfort, has evaporated. It is the atheists and Jews whose beliefs in human beings whom they thought they could trust whose faith has been exposed. To paraphrase Marx, “Secularism is the drug of the masses. It is the promise of an elusive tomorrow, a promise that is always broken and a betrayal that always repeats.”

That baffling behavior of the White House does not afflict or even surprise Jews familiar with and loyal to our Torah.

One of the pillars of our faith after all, was best expressed by King David in his Tehillim 146:3, “Al tivtichu b’nedivim…” “Do not put your trust in Rulers.”

Religious Jews learn that idea from a very early age. They are familiar with Jewish history. There they find ample evidence of the wisdom of King David’s words.

President Trump’s apparently throwing us under the bus is quite simply "History as normal."

For non-religious and atheist Jews who feel “Liberated” from Judaism’s “Comforting” delusions, it is different.

Some put their trust in Donald Trump others in Barak Obama until they felt the sting of perfidy from both.

The Jews who were initially welcomed into Egyptian society felt that too, when Pharaoh first threw them under his chariot wheels. Surely Hellenized Jews felt the same when their Greek heroes became genocidal foes. It was the same for the Jews of Spain in 1492 or the Soviet Jews with the rise of Stalin. It has been the same in thousands of other smaller places and different times too.

As King David insists, whenever you put your trust in a human being, you have made a mistake.

For trust to be justified and belief to be a comfort, it cannot be placed in people. It has to be sent to a different address. For that, you have to believe in something and Someone, completely different. Only that offers any comfort at all.