Seeing as I am doing everything in my power to avoid this assignment, I
will put a paragraph or two up so not only everyone can see what kind of pain
I'm in but also because I suspect that in a year or two I will look back on this
and laugh at how easy it was. Yes a little something to look foward to
obviously.

In relation to the individual as a social entity, religion is an important
factor that very much determines how the individual person places themselves in
society. Particularly when the majority of a country accepts a certain religion,
like the Catholic Church in Europe, does religion seem to define its society
through the individual. Durkheim believed that religion was a positive and
necessary influence of society, in the sense that whatever an individual will
believe about spirituality will simply be the result of society as a single,
collective entity. (Bessant ed. al. 2007 p. 245) In The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life, Durkheim defines three key ideas of religion as follows.

“[R]eligion is society becoming ‘conscious of itself’, although in a
symbolically transmuted form, [secondly] that the representations created in
religion are thus the initial source out of which all subsequent forms of
human
thought have become differentiated, [and last of all] that, as
creations of the
superior being which is society, religious symbols are
accorded a peculiar
respect…” (Giddens, 1972, p. 20)

Marx on the other hand was much more passionately opposed to religion. He strongly believed that god and spirituality was a form of repression against the individual. Rather than establishing a relationship with a spiritual superior, Marx believed in establishing relationships between man and his external world. In ‘The
Thought of Marx’, this perception is described in the form of alienation. “It
was god who had usurped man’s own position; religion served the double function
of a compensation for suffering and projection of man’s deepest desires.”
(McLellan, 1981, p. 106) In this way Marx’s concept of alienation does apply to
religion. Like his perception to work, Marx thought rather than be governed and
suppressed by a higher being, man must be his own superior. In this way
Durkheim directly opposes Marx as to whether religion and spirituality
contribute to or hinder society and the individual. (Stupid work)