Marx makes us curious again.

Marx advocates abolishing religion, which is required to meet our radical needs and stir a radical revolution. If man created religion as Marx presupposes, it might also be true that man is inquisitive and invested in his own salvation. Of course, not all faiths presuppose God, gods, or salvation, but we can safely assert that if a man is concerned with religion, he is deeply interested in man himself.

Although there are many definitions around "religion," attempting to lean on one or prefer another always risks explaining it away. It is also possible that Marx, in his own way, without realizing it, is saying that religion's only value is its fundamental concern and curiosity over man. Once that has left us, once curiosity has solidified itself into certainty, deeming all other explorations void, Marx says that religion might be worth abolishing. But it could be another way of saying that curiosity is potentially revolutionary.

According to Marx, the status quo tricks us into believing there is no deficiency, and even if we know there is a deficiency, we are met with unbearable anxiety about what we might have to do about it. Facing or dealing with the deficiency is understanding the call towards revolution in Marx's terms. Do we want a revolution? Now, that is a curious question, perhaps the question we are afraid to ask ourselves. And once we say it to ourselves, we must decide what we should or should not do. 

Curiosity has a peculiar way of making us feel vulnerable. We have lost our child-like curiosity due to its complementary antagonism: disillusionment. The anxiety underneath our curiosity means feeling the possibility of becoming disillusioned, and if we become disillusioned, we'll be forced to do something about it. Our anxiety against curiosity is our painful disinterest in disillusionment, yet we are deeply interested in change and what that might or should look like.

Curiosity also exposes our presupposed freedom and what absolute freedom could be. If we only have our chains to lose, as Marx says, it's also true that chains are much more comfortable than what the unknown could offer. In weird and mysterious ways, we have somehow tamed our curiosity more than we have tamed our tendency toward comfort. Here might lie the fundamental contradiction in our humanist ideals: "I love humankind, but I am also afraid about what humankind could be." So long as our curiosity is tamed, humankind feels more bearable. Taming our curiosity reveals the deficiency of mankind and how they might become more human. But what could an unchained curiosity reveal? We may not know what it is to be human and how we should be.

In other words, Marx's demand to abolish religion is another way of making us curious again. And making us interested again is the potential to become revolutionary. And if religion originally began as a curious concern over man and his relation to the world, would not curiosity itself become our most revolutionary religious sentiment? Religion is whatever we have decided to do with our curiosity, tamed or untamed. And so long as we have curiosity, revolution might realize religion as religion might realize revolution.

References:
Karl Marx, Selected Writings, David Mclellan,

Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction