Talk:On the Jewish Question/Comments

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This article concentrates on the second part exclusively, and in so, misses much of the point.

The point is not to 'abolish religion'!

It is more in the realm of the discussion on the 'Separation of Church and State'.

The second part is a take off from a small section of the first. {'...[L]ife in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.'}

In simplified terms, it is about the de-institutionalization of religion, religion on a 'human basis'.

'Not Christianity, but the _human basis_ of Christianity is the basis of this state. Religion remains the ideal, non-secular consciousness of its members, because religion is the ideal form of the stage of human development achieved in this state.

In the perfect democracy, the religious and theological consciousness itself is in its own eyes the more religious and the more theological because it is apparently without political significance...

Christianity attains, here, the _practical_ expression of its universal-religious significance in that the most diverse world outlooks are grouped alongside one another in the form of Christianity and still more because it does not require other people to profess Christianity, but only religion in general, any kind of religion. The religious consciousness revels in the wealth of religious contradictions and religious diversity.

And '...[R]espective religions are no more than different stages in the development of the human mind...' and 'the opposition between the Jew and the Christian' can be solved by 'abolishing religion'..., that is, by making 'the relation of Jew and Christian [] no longer religious but [] only a critical, scientific, and human relation. Science, then, constitutes their unity. But, contradictions in science are resolved by science itself.'

He further shows alliance:

The duality of' ...Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen, religious man and citizen'... which 'is political emancipation itself'

'This secular conflict, to which the Jewish question ultimately reduces itself, [is] the relation between the political state and its preconditions, whether these are material elements, such as private property, etc., or spiritual elements, such as culture or religion, the conflict between the general interest and private interest, the schism between the political state and civil society... '

And plainly states:

'...[Giving] it even externally the form of a purely individual affair. It has been thrust among the multitude of private interests and ejected from the community as such. But one should be under no illusion about the limits of political emancipation. The division of the human being into a _public_ man and a _private_ man, the displacement of religion from the state into civil society, this is not a stage of political emancipation but its completion; this emancipation, therefore, neither abolished the real religiousness of man, nor strives to do so.'

How is that 'abolishing religion'?! That conclusion is a completely unformed misconception of the point!