Evaluate the View That Religion in an Important Source of Moral Values in Contemporary Societies

Over the past century there has been a great differ in the views of the people of how people see religion and how important and how influential it is to our modern contemporary societies today.

Too a large extent in our infrastructure today religion does play a vital part in how society runs. Religion especially helps integration between people. Before the industrial revolution quite a vast population would integrate with each other through church services and would socialise through that agency. Even in modern societies such activities take place for example in the Gurdwara there are youth clubs and clubs for the elderly whereby people can get to know each other.



Religion also teaches us how to behave and acts as a unconscious policing action.

As most fundamental religions have some sense of moral values, for e.g. sex before marriage, abortion and murder is forbidden.

To Marx, religion is an illusion, which eases the pain produced by exploitation and oppression. It is a series of myths that justify and legitimate the subordination of the subject class and the domination and privilege of the ruling class. It is a distortion of reality, which provides many of the deceptions that from the basis of ruling class ideology and false consciousness.

In addition, Marx argues that religion operates as an ideological weapon used by the ruling class to legitimate the suffering of the poor as something inevitable, as God given. Thus religion misleads poor people into believing that their suffering is a virtue and that they will be favored in the afterlife, such ideas as this, create a false conscience that prevents the poor from acting to change their situation.

From a Marxist viewpoint, religion is an instrument of oppression, it acts as a mechanism of social control, maintaining the existing system of exploitations and reinforcing class relationships, i.e. It keeps people in their place. In addition, by making unsatisfactory lives unbearable, religion tends to...