Rosa asked:

Why does Marx reject religion? Why does Nietzsche reject Christianity? Why does Freud reject God?

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Marx, Freud and Nietzsche all began from a rejection of Christianity, religion and God. It should be
noted that Freud and Marx are concerned more with the psychological and social origins of religious
ideas respectively, not with their truth content. Nietzsche's philosophy is the more devastating
because at times he rejects the idea of moral truth altogether.

1. Marx saw a link between religion and society: if you change society, religion becomes
   unnecessary. Marxism combines the following two aspects: a sociological account of religion which
   shows religion to be dependent on social and economic relations, and a view that religion is alienation
   which will disappear in an socialist society. He argues for the first by claiming that the history of
   humanity is one of class struggle, ruled by the morality of private property . Moral, political and
   religious values are governed by social structures of production, exchange and exploitation.

This reflects the dominance of the upper classes — the owners of production processes who exploit
their workers' labour by keeping the surplus value produced for themselves. The product of labour is
'alienated' — separated from the workers and interpreted through the capitalist machine.

Religion is also a form of alienation to be explained in terms of social conditions. The state produces
religion and this causes in man "inverted world-consciousness". Unjust social conditions (the
exploitation of workers by the ruling classes) produces religion as something people turn to so they
can feel hope. Religion in turn also keeps the social conditions alive by the consolation it can offer.
Revolution brings social change, but in the grip of religion, society will not revolt. Religion is
ineffectual as it diverts attention from the harsh realities of everyday existence and concentrates on
the promise of an afterlife. It is, as Marx puts it, 'the opium of the masses'.

2. Freud's idea of God is that He is a magnified form of the human father. In his Totem and Taboo
   lectures of 1912, Freud explains the origin of religion: religious activities are an expression of
   neurosis. In primitive ages, he suggests that humans lived in small groups each protected by a
   dominating father figure who owned all the females. The sons were driven out and killed when they
   made the father jealous. So they joined into a group and killed the father and shared his power. The
   struggles that took place taught them the futility of quarreling which brought about a new way of
   organising society and the in first taboos forbidding incest, Memory of the father — feared and
   admired — was preserved in the ritual of sacrifice (the totem). Behind totemism therefore is the
   Oedipus complex secretly at work — attachment to the mother and a death wish to the father.

Freud also believed that Moses had been murdered by the Hebrews (see Moses and Monotheism)
and the memory of this was repressed until it appeared in the neurotic teachings of the prophets. The
story of Christianity is thus the death of the Son to atone for crimes against the father. Immortality,
retribution and the hereafter are "representations of our psychical interior".

3. When Nietzsche called himself an 'immoralist' he announced his opposition to Christian morality.
   The Church, he claims, has always insisted on the worthlessness of things in this world because of
   their transiency. It concentrates instead on the hereafter in which virtues will be rewarded and vices
   punished. This he regards as plainly offensive: it is inimical to happiness and also to survival. That
   which is not 'life enhancing' — i.e. moral ideas of equality, tolerance and altruism — Nietzsche treats
   with elaborate condemnation. He despises all forms of mediocrity — and this is how he views
   Christians.

Nietzsche is at his most interesting in his claim that the world is morally neutral; in Twilight of the Idols
he writes:

The moral judgement has this in common with the religious judgement, that each believes in a reality
which does not exist. Morality, which is only an interpretation — or better a misinterpretation — of
certain phenomena...belongs to a stage of ignorance at which the concept of reality, of any distinction
between imaginary and real is lacking.

Adam Gatward