According to Marxism, the epistemological roots of religion are not specific to it, but are common to all ” illusory, false consciousness, whether it be religion, idealistic philosophy, or some other form of perverse consciousness.”

The essence of the epistemological roots of all false consciousness associated with cognitive processes consists in the absolutization, inflating the subjective side of human knowledge. The ability of human thought to isolate the General, essential and necessary, distracting from the individual, non-essential accidental, is the greatest conquest of mankind, which made possible all the achievements of scientific, theoretical knowledge. This ability is directly related to the development of language as a material means of fixing the General and essential in knowledge. Without the development of language and abstract thinking, human progress is impossible. But this same ability makes it possible to transform General concepts into independent entities, independent of the material world. The total, essential, apart from sporadic, random, irrelevant and turned into an independent entity (substance) is, according to Marxism, epistemological basis of idealism and religion. V. Lenin wrote about this in the “Philosophical notebooks”: “the Split of human knowledge and the possibility of idealism (religion) are already given in the first, elementary abstraction (“house” in General and individual houses).”

Max Weber and his “Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism” – religion has value orientations, i.e. religion is considered from the point of view of management. Some religions require a departure from the world, others require a change in the world; Weber says that religion covers not only the moral aspects, but also the ways of farming, doing business, and so on.

There was also an animistic theory, by E. Taylor, the author. The man simply did not understand some phenomena, which made him sad. To amuse themselves, they invented the soul.