Reply To: Good News: And No Religion, Too
On “spiritually”, during the break I am reading Rachel Holmes 500-page biography of Eleanor Marx. At the end of chapter 20 she writes that Marx
“was famously critical of the tyranny of all religions but was sympathetic to the spiritual impulse.”
A footnote refers the reader to pages 55-6 of Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx. When you check, Wheen is referring to the anti-Semitic insults Marx used in some of his letters to Engels such as referring to Lassalle as a “Yid” and worse.
It looks as if Holmes has got her notes mixed up. In any event, she produces no other evidence was sympathetic to “the spiritual impulse” (whatever that might be), though she does quote Karl Marx as saying:
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
She describes Eleanor Marx “a resolute secularist and atheist”.
Her book is quite good.