I blogged earlier wondering why the NY Times is so hypocritical when it comes to a willingness to offend Christian sensibilities versus Muslim.
Calling the NY Times Marxist is name-calling, but they do lean towards the socialistic side of things, which might help explain their antipathy to Christianity - see this illuminating passage from Blankley's book "The West's Last Chance":
The alleged role of Christianity in deadening the pain of capitalist oppression was forever immortalized in the truly beautiful words of Karl Marx: "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. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness."...
Karl Marx, as he does so often, brilliantly diagnoses the relationship of forces, but gets the underlying fundamentals exactly wrong. He argues that people seek religion to give them comfort from the pain caused by capitalism. Get rid of capitalism, enact socialism, and the pain will end; then people won't need religion.
The idea became the central tenet of progressive thought in Europe (and elsewhere)...during which time most progressive, educated Europeans bought into Marx's proposition (whether they knew he was the author or not). Christianity's affiliation with reactionary monarchy and cruel capitalism gave it a bad odor. Smart, sophisticated people - or people who wanted to think of themselves as smart and sophisticated, and who does not? - said they were not taken in by the "old lies" of capitalism and Christianity.
But in 1989, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the contradiction inherent in Marx's system of analysis was revealed: It is socialism, not capitalism, that causes the greater pain for humanity....For the first time in 150 years Christianity is unyoked from its bondage to...despised capitalism. Christianity can now begin again to be considered on its own merits.
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