re: Televangelist Pat Robertson Predicts Trump Win That Sparks War, Assassination, 'End Times'

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So is that the reason Vladimir Lenin said religion was "an opiate of the people?"

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It’s not relevant at all to this discussion, but because I believe in education we should clear a few things up.

First, Lenin didn’t come up with that. It was Karl Marx and is not from either the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital as many believe but rather a much less well known work, “Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right”. Second, Karl Marx wasn’t an atheist. Finally, the quote is part of a fairly lengthy dialogue on the subject which gives a lot more context and depth.

The full quote is as follows:

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The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

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For all the flaws in Marx’s worldview, I find his belief that organized religion serves as an attempt to ease cognitive suffering by generating pleasant illusions to be inescapably true. He primarily fixated on it as a barrier to the socialist revolution however, and there are certainly far bigger real world barriers to that than our imaginary friends.