system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What did Marx mean when he said that religion was the opiate of the masses?
gpt
It's very important to stress that Marx never said this as a standalone sentence. The full quote reads very differently to the sentence fragment usually cited:

" *Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions; it is the opium of the people.* "

Marx's point in context thus becomes much clearer: religion is an expression of people's suffering and an attempt to survive in the face of it. 

Marx was unambiguously an atheist materialist, but he was not an "anti-theist" in the way that he has often been presumed to be.

[edit: spelling]