Marxism And Religion
The founder and primary theorist of Marxism, the nineteenth-century German thinker Karl Marx, had a negative attitude to religion, viewing it primarily as "the opium of the people" that had been used by the ruling classes to give the working classes false hope for millennia, while at the same time recognizing it as a form of protest by the working classes against their poor economic conditions. In the end, Marx rejects religion.
In the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of Marxist theory, developed primarily by Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, religion is seen as retarding human development, and socialist states that follow a Marxist-Leninist variant are atheistic and explicitly antireligious. Due to this, a number of Marxist-Leninst governments in the twentieth century, such as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, implemented rules introducing state atheism. However, several religious communist groups exist, and Christian communism was important in the early development of communism.
Read more about Marxism And Religion: Marx On Religion, Lenin On Religion, Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky On Religion, Communism and Christianity, Communism and Islam, Communism and Judaism, Communism and Buddhism, Communism and Hinduism, Religious Criticism of Communism, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words marxism and/or religion:
“There’s something about Marxism that brings out warts—the only kind of growth this economic system encourages.”
—P.J. (Patrick Jake)
“If ... we admit a divinity, why not divine worship? and if worship, why not religion to teach this worship? and if a religion, why not the Christian, if a better cannot be assigned, and it be already established by the laws of our country, and handed down to us from our forefathers?”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)