Karl Marx

• opium of the people - prevents people from making demands for social change by dulling the pain of oppression, the promise of an afterlife makes it easier to put up with misery knowing you have eternal bliss waiting
• religion offers the hope of supernatural intervention to solve problems on earth which makes it pointless for humans to try and do anything to improve their conditions
• justifies social order: hymn all things bright and beautiful: god made them high and lowly and ordered their estate
• makes a virtue out of suffering : easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven
• religion makes social inequalities out to be gods will and thus unchangeable
• Marx and Engels: religion and social control: the bourgeois and the church supported one another in feudal England - the former generously funded the latter and in return the church legitimated social inequality