Cú Chulainn

'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.' Karl Marx

So whenever someone quotes Marx's 'Religion is the opium of the people' they should be putting it in context with the sentences above which precede that sentence and clarify his position.

beginning with "Yet anybody..." is your thought not that of Marx. And no, Marx, against the Marxists, did not imagine real happiness comes from looting. opium has a positive sense, as a consolation, and a negative one, as a retreat from reality

This is Marx after the opium part: "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness." Putting it in context with what comes before, we can see this is only one point among many more.

And the earlier points are completely forgotten because they are more inconvenient to a binary understanding as Marx vs Religion rather than Marx AND religion:https://twitter.com/robinmonotti/status/1027198815860862976?s=19 …

Marx understands religion as the autonomy of representation in the service of ideology; thus his call for its abolition, as for the abolition of the commodity & the state, is not based on reflexive contrarianism, but on radical understanding of their historical importance

Marx speculated that if religion were abolished there may be a bigger demand for emancipation from class divisions. The West 'abolished' religion & people embraced consumerism instead, we now can see that true religious sentiment was instead an obstacle to consumerist society.