Religion in Communist States
The founder and primary theorist of Marxism, the Nineteenth-century German sociologist Karl Marx, had an ambivalent 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, whilst at the same time recognizing it as a form of protest by the working classes against their poor economic conditions. In the Marxist–Leninist interpretation of Marxist theory, developed primarily by Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, religion is seen as negative to human development, and communist states that follow a Marxist–Leninist variant are atheistic and explicitly antireligious. However, several religious communist groups exist, and Christian communism was important in the early development of communism.
Read more about this topic: State Atheism
Famous quotes containing the words religion, communist and/or states:
“Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“I am a communist because I believe that the Communist idea is a state form of Christianity.”
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“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
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