Karl Marx Quotes
Man makes religion, religion does not make man
Marx, Karl. "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction." Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1844. Reprinted in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 3, International Publishers, 1975, p. 175.
Without free will, it would be futile for priests, ministers, rabbis or imams to preach morality to try and get people to behave in certain ways. The concept if sin and morality breaks down, and the clerics lost most of their power and influence. Cave was very concerned with the fact that a number of scientists were arguing that human behavior is caused by neurobiology, genetics and conditioning. They question whether an individual can be held accountable for his actions by the society that raised him, educated him, influenced him, and if the individual seemed aberrant relative to all that, it must be because of his particular neurology which enables him or prevents him from being influenced by the society, or allows him to be influenced by the "darker" aspects of society.
Ibn Rushd is generally considered the greatest of the Islamic philosophers. In this famous quotation he observes that the Koran is contradictory when it addresses issues of determinism and free will, a subject inquired about in most religions philosophies. While the same thing can be said of the Bible, what surprises some, is that a great Islamic scholar could say that there were contradictions in the Koran as many think of Islam as requiring literal adherence to and faith in the validity of the Koran. Contradictions are not admitted as possible. It illustrates that not all Islamic scholars are fundamentalists, but also that the leading Islamic scholars of the 12th century could hold such a view and freely publish it. Such ideas might get one killed in fundamentalist parts of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia today. Although valid for Muslims, the Hadith is less well known than the Koran which is recited by all good Muslims.
While this was his opinion, it was never issued in a Papal Bull or had the force of Catholic law. Meanwhile, almost all of the socialist movements in the West have had Catholics in their leadership and many democrats of modern times would have been considered socialist. Many countries with high proportions of Catholic voters have elected socialist governments in secluding Spain and Italy.
Bryan participated as a prosecutor in the infamous Scopes Trial in Tennessee where a school teacher was convicted of a crime for discussing the idea of evolution in a high school classroom. This view of opposition to Evolution was actually considered too liberal by many other Biblical Fundamentalists. They were just as distressed about the other animals as well as man. Evolution explicitly contradicted the literal story of Biblical creationism and therefore was blasphemy.
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at university. He married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German thinker Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1883). Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.
