Mass Opiates

Marx and Rand both hate religion.

This is not a snide accusation on my part; this is something they proclaim themselves, as everybody ought to know.

By religion, I take them to mean primarily Theism, though any sort of belief in metaphysical truths will likely suffice.

Given their reasons for despising religion in this sense, I think they have misdiagnosed their own prejudice, particularly Rand. Curing humanity of theism, deism, or any other metaphysically based philosophy, does not cure humanity of -isms in general. After all, those two left us with both Marxism and Objectivism (I'd rather call it Randism) in turn. And irony of ironies, both these ideologies have been misconstrued and used expressly against their intended meanings since their very conception.

The mass of people (particularly Randists) tend to shudder in fear at the mere mention of Marxism, but aside from native cultures, a few hippy communes, and perhaps a few other isolated incidents, the world has never seen an actual Communism in place, at least not on a grand scale. This makes a sort of sense since Communism, contrary to popular understanding, was not thought of as a totalitarian state controlling all commerce, but rather as a stateless society of small 'soviets' (kinda like a polis) which would be independent and politically free, and at that small level, they would share the means of production and therefore share the wealth of that production.

Marx seemed at least partially aware that it was not Theism that was his enemy so much as the religious mind; after all, he speaks of commodity fetishism, which surely hints that he understood man could be religious about things aside from religion. Rand, however, does not seem nearly so developed, but this is to be expected since she had many such lingual problems evident in her writing. Atlas Shrugged gives us many suggestions regarding her confusion in her own beliefs. In that book, we learn to hate "progressives" and their selfless altruism, but in reading it, it should be obvious that the progressives in that book are not altruistic but completely greedy. It is not altruism she hates, on the contrary, she seems to think that altruism does not exist, and so believing that there really is only greed, she calls disgusting greed in the guise of altruism. But if we are to read her and take her at her fictional word, then it should be apparent that it is not altruism we should hate, but greed, and it is not religion we should hate, but the mind that embraces beliefs irrationally.

Its a shame her followers do not realize this, though I suppose for the poetic justice to work, it had to come out that way.