Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification...The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. 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. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.
People always want an explanation of everything. It is the consequence of centuries of bourgeois education. And for everything for which they cannot find an explanation, they resort in the last instance to God. But what is the use of that? Eventually they have to explain God!
The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.
— Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
We should have expected the ideologies of the twentieth century to glory in the triumphs of science, which are the triumphs of the human mind, as the secular ideologies of the nineteenth century had done. Indeed, we should have expected even the resistance of traditional religious ideologies, the great redoubts of nineteenth-century resistance to science, to weaken...religion itself became as dependent on high-science-based technology as any other human activity in the developed world...It became far harder to overlook the conflict between science and holy writ in an age when the Vatican was obliged to communicate by satellite and to test the authenticity of the Turin shroud by radio-carbon dating: when the Ayatollah Khomeini spread his words from abroad into Iran by means of tape-cassettes, and when states dedicated to the laws of the Koran were also engaged in trying to equip themselves with nuclear weapons...In some ways the superiority of science was even accepted officially. The Protestant fundamentalists in the U.S.A. who rejected the theory of evolution as unscriptural...demanded that Darwin's teaching should be replaced, or at least countered by the teaching of what they described as "creation science".
— Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes
Eleanor: [in the afterlife] Um, so who was right? I mean about all of this?
Michael: Well, let's see. Hindus are a little bit right, Muslims a little bit. Jews, Christians, Buddhists, every religion guessed about five percent, except for Doug Forcett.
Eleanor: Who... who's Doug Forcett?
Michael: Well, Doug was a stoner kid who lived in Calgary during the 1970s. One night, he got really high on mushrooms, and his best friend, Randy, said, "Hey, what do you think happens after we die?" And Doug just launched into this long monologue where he got like ninety-two percent correct. [chuckles] I mean, we couldn't believe what we were hearing. That's him, actually, right up there. [points to a portrait on his wall] He's pretty famous around here. I'm very lucky to have that.
Michael: Well, let's see. Hindus are a little bit right, Muslims a little bit. Jews, Christians, Buddhists, every religion guessed about five percent, except for Doug Forcett.
Eleanor: Who... who's Doug Forcett?
Michael: Well, Doug was a stoner kid who lived in Calgary during the 1970s. One night, he got really high on mushrooms, and his best friend, Randy, said, "Hey, what do you think happens after we die?" And Doug just launched into this long monologue where he got like ninety-two percent correct. [chuckles] I mean, we couldn't believe what we were hearing. That's him, actually, right up there. [points to a portrait on his wall] He's pretty famous around here. I'm very lucky to have that.
