By Joe Pisani
Anyone who studied Karl Marx in philosophy class is familiar with his famous punchline, “Religion is the opium of the people.” To Marx and his Communist colleagues, religion was nothing more than an illusory happiness of the downtrodden.
Well, Marx had it only half right. The real opium of the people is politics. The real illusion is political progress. And in modern America, we have an entire generation turning away from faith and substituting political ideology for the real deal … Christ.
For many, politics has become a religion with its own set of dogmas. It was G.K. Chesterton who once said, “The special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it.”
The atheists and socialists historically have accused the faithful of fantasizing about heaven to escape their misery on Earth. Religion couldn’t bring us true happiness…only the state could, so the narrative goes. Was that ever an insidious piece of propaganda. It was the monumental deceit of Communist China and the Soviet Union and more recently, modern America.
The Marxists, the Communists, the Socialists typically accuse Christians of being too other-worldly. But what’s wiser? To put your hope in Christ or in politics?
Retired Pope Benedict XVI, who often confronted the fundamental conflict between Christianity and Marxism, said, “The state is not the whole of human existence and does not encompass all human hope. Man and what he hopes for extend beyond the framework of the state and beyond the sphere of political action.”
Read the news any day of the week, and you’ll see that the moral wasteland is getting worse. Nevertheless, the secular institutions largely responsible for this state of affairs promote an ideological optimism, which Benedict called “a surrogate for Christian hope.”
It has no real foundation and it has no future, and it is never going to be a substitute for faith in Christ. The great tragedy is we have a younger generation pursuing that delusion. They’re leaving religion and turning to the opium of politics. They don’t place their hope in everlasting life or the Kingdom of God.
For all the secularist talk about making the world a better place, from Marx right on down to modern socialists, they have failed. Why? Because they have divorced themselves from God. Even worse, they’ve tried to usurp the role of God.
Throughout history, Christians have been accused of being “other-worldly” and ignoring the problems of this world. They have been accused of living a delusion and fantasizing about life after death. To my thinking, the truth isn’t that we think about heaven too much. We don’t think about heaven enough.
There’s a lot of despair in modern America, and when it becomes overwhelming, that’s the time to think about heaven and the eternal joy of paradise. When you feel afraid, when you feel discouraged, when you feel desperate, think of heaven.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness.
Heavenly existence is beyond anything we can comprehend. There’s infinite joy, infinite love, infinite peace and a lot of other infinites our feeble minds can’t comprehend. You’ll see your friends, your family members and, I’m convinced, your pets again.
Heaven is our eternal reward. Heaven is why Jesus was born, suffered and died, for our redemption so that we could live with him forever in paradise.
When my mother lay dying, she said more than once that her family members and friends visited her because they wanted to prepare her to pass over to what was her true home — heaven.
Those who have experienced the threshold of heaven in near death experiences never want to return to this vale of tears, we’re told. And they no longer have a fear of death.
I think about heaven every day because I need hope when I look at the increasing hate, anger, division, evil and moral confusion in the world.
At the end of the day, I ask Jesus to please share some of the peace of heaven with me so that I can get up and face the world again in the morning.
Our reward will be beyond human comprehension, Jesus said. But my hopes are modest — a small cottage by a stream in the woods where there is peace and quiet and friendship and opportunities to walk with Jesus by the running waters.
It is a genuine hope that atheists and secularists don’t have in their grim, dark and angry world. You can put your hope in Christ and the hereafter or you can put your hope in political causes. The choice is simple. I’m going with Christ. Viva Cristo Rey!