SOC250Y1 Lecture Notes - Recapitulation Theory, Homo Sapiens, James George Frazer
Document Summary
Religion as alienation: empowering the divine entails the diminution of man. In seeking supernatural deliverance humanity avoids full responsibility for its own affairs. Vesting our hopes in imaginary beings of our own projection. Religion and irreligion would both disappear with the self-creation of a new humanity. Mark takes feuerbach as a point of departure. Religion as projective alienation feuerbach succeeds in identifying the psychological basis and earthly origins of faith. But feuerbach errs in seeing religion as the imaginary realisation of the human essence . This is too abstract: marx: the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations . Feuerbach attends to existential alienation: he believes that dispelling myths, illusions, is prior to revolutionary action. Feuerbach sees religions superstition/phantasy as the cause of this-worldly misery etc. Marx argues that religion is a result or a by-product of worldly oppression, despair, etc.
