The German sociologist and economist Karl Marx was born in 1818 to Jewish parents. However, his parents had converted to Protestantism just before his birth, and he was baptised into the Church. Marx’s views on religion hardened over time. In his manuscript Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843) he declares ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature […] the opium of the people.’1 For Marx, the promise of heaven and everlasting life blinded the working classes to their exploitation on earth.A hundred-and-sixty years later, Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund published Radical Atheism (2008), a book which questions the very desirability of the everlasting life for which Marx’s masses supposedly yearned. Hägglund argues that an afterlife spent in a sea of endless time — assuming that were possible — would be, in fact, entirely undesirable.Imagine having an endless amount of time to catch a fish. For every failed attempt, you would be safe in the knowledge that there was always time to improve your technique. With all the time in the world, however, there would be no urgency to master the skill, and although you would eventually succeed, there would be little worry or excitement. For such an immortal being, patience would be neither virtue nor vice, and to take the time to finesse the cast brings little pleasure when there are no odds to overcome.For Hägglund, it is the temporal finitude of life, the certitude that life will end one day, that makes life meaningful. Every moment is meaningful only because it automatically entails a certain amount of risk — such as the failure to catch a fish. Hägglund describes this irreconcilability as the autoimmunity of time. Autoimmunity is a biological term that describes the body’s self-destructive failure to recognise certain bodily substances as its own, which it then seeks to destroy through an immune response. According to Hägglund, time is autoimmune because the very moment in which we experience joy begins to burst no sooner than it bubbles into existence. And it is this knowledge of self-destruction inherent in living in time that makes life worth living.Having cast doubt on the desirability of eternal life, it is a short step for Hägglund to reject all religions that hold forth such a promise. In their place, Hägglund develops his own, secular faith. Hägglund urges the cultivation of a faith in people, places and pursuits. According to him, every human act has the potential to funnel energy into creating good, and that should be the purpose of our finite time on earth.Marx, for whom religion distracted the masses, would go on to develop his ideas of global communism by which the means of production would be socially owned. Hägglund’s solution of ‘democratic’ socialism, on the other hand, would apparently provide everyone the ‘spiritual freedom’ to choose how best to spend their precious time.2 This inherently conjures up the same vision of society as Marx, where men and women would be free to ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner’.3Although not without its scruples, Hägglund’s radical atheism confronts the problem of eternal life — best exemplified by rock band Talking Heads who sing, Heaven, heaven is a placeWhere nothingNothing ever happens.— Heaven (1979)