Faith & Spirit Quote by John Desmond Bernal

Religion gets framed here less as superstition to be mocked than as a social symptom to be diagnosed. Bernal, writing as a scientist with a Marx-adjacent toolkit, builds the line like a lab report: two simultaneous functions, one human and one political. Religious suffering is both “expression” and “protest” because it records pain in the only language many people are allowed to speak, while also gesturing toward the injustice that caused it. That doubling is the point: belief isn’t treated as pure delusion, it’s treated as evidence.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical violence. “Sigh,” “sentiment,” “soul” are warm, intimate words, then he snaps to the cold chemistry of “opium.” It’s a controlled tonal shift that forces the reader to hold compassion and critique in the same hand. Opium isn’t just a drug; historically, it’s also an instrument of trade, control, and managed dependency. The subtext is that religion can soothe the injured psyche while leaving the injury-inducing machinery intact - even stabilizing it by turning rage into ritual, despair into meaning.

Context matters: a 20th-century scientist watching industrial modernity, war, and class conflict grind people down. In that world, “heartless” and “soulless” aren’t metaphysical insults; they’re descriptions of institutions that treat humans as inputs and outputs. Bernal’s intent isn’t merely to dunk on faith. It’s to argue that if you want less religion-as-anesthetic, you don’t start by confiscating the bottle; you stop producing so much pain.