Wednesday, January 30, 2013

The True Opium of the People

"Religion, opium for the people!  To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in afterlife.  And now we are witnessing a transformation.  A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.  The Marxist creed has now been inverted.  The true opium of modernity is the belief that there is no God, so that humans are free to do precisely as they please."

~ excerpt from The Discreet Charm of Nihilism by Czeslaw Milosz, Polish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.