Atheists, Work With Us for Peace, Pope Says on Christmas

[SpartanDem]

40. State atheism

was common part of communist states. Part of the Marxism Leninist ideology is that order to bring about a communist society religion needed to be eliminated. Ever wonder where the phrase "godless commies" comes from? Well this is it.




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.[28] 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.[29]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism


The policy that began with Lenin and continued for the course of Soviet history was that religion was to be tolerated by the state, but the Party was to do whatever it deemed necessary in order to gradually remove it from society.[40][41] Thus, the Soviet state and the Communist Party - which were two separate institutions - were supposed to have two different attitudes towards religion, with the first being neutral and the second being hostile to it. However, since the USSR was a one-party state, the distinction between Party and state became very blurred over time, with the result that religion was sometimes repressed and sometimes tolerated, to varying degrees.[42] When writing about the Party's anti-religious stance, Lenin did not see the replacement of religion with atheism as an end to itself, but wrote that it needed to be accompanied by a materialist world-view.

Marxism as interpreted by Lenin and his successors required changes in social consciousness and the redirection of people’s beliefs. Soviet Marxism was considered incompatible with belief in the Supernatural. Communism required a conscious rejection of religion or else it could not be established.[43] This was not a secondary priority of the system, nor was it a hostility developed towards religion as a competing or rival system of thought, but it was a core and fundamental teaching of the philosophical doctrine of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[44] Marxist philosophy traditionally involved a thorough scientific critique of religion and an attempt to ‘demystify’ religious belief.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist%E2%80%93Leninist_atheism