Part one of term paper
When Karl Marx said, "Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people." He was trying to summarize his very controversial point of view, that religion is a crutch that people fall back on to escape the physical reality. People u ...

Part two of term paper
... opium he felt that religion took hold or peoples lives and gave them a false sense of hope. Needless to say Marx was an Atheist (from the Greek a "without" and theos "deity",) which commonly and loosely refers to denial of the existence of a higher power. The meaning of atheism has varied considerably in history: even the earliest Christians were labeled "atheists" because they denied the existence of the Roman gods. In Western culture, where monotheism has been the dominant religious belief, a ...