The Exploration Of The Basis Of Marx’s Early Religion Methodology

Marx’s critique on religion plays an important role in Marx’s thought, the critique on religion was considered the premise of all other criticism by Marx and Engels. Marx turned into the criticism of the reality of the society from the critique of religion, then complete the construction of whole his philosophy. Marx’s religious thought are mainly concentrated in his early works, especially in the book of "On the Jewish Question" "The preface of Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right" "Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844" and "The German Ideology"and several other literature. We can clearly found the relationship between Marx’s early religious criticism and the transformation of his philosophy thought:from religious criticism to political criticism, from the filed of religion to the filed of practice, and then completed the historical criticism on the production relationship based on private ownership. Finally he established the historical materialism. Therefore, the theory of Marx’s religious criticism also has the logical track of the continuous development with the gradual formation and establishment of Marx’s philosophy.For the research of Marx’s early religious criticism thought, the majority of domestic scholars in China focus on the discussion from the perspective of text analysis and theoretical significance, and don’t notice the change between the early and late of Marx’s religious criticism thought. In fact, Marx’s early religious criticism is not only different from each other, but the theoretical paradigm that his criticism follows is not the same. According to the research of this paper, it is found that these differences are mainly in the methodology of religious criticism in the process of the development of Marx’s early thought, which are synchronous with the development of Marx’s early philosophy thought. The methodologies are mainly the methodology of humanism, the methodology of materialism and the methodology of historical materialism. And corresponding them are Marx’s religious alienation, the reversed view on social consciousness and ideology theory. So, studying the methodology of Marx’s religious view can not only benefit us to understand the differences between his early religious criticism thought, but also benefit us to grasp the logical clue of the development of Marx’s early religious thought.In this paper, the study on Marx’s early religion increases the theoretical dimension of Marx’s religious thought, at the same time, it can also help us clarify some theoretical misunderstanding when we understand religion.