epronovost
Well-Known Member
Marx, Lenin, Stalin, etc.: "I think this..."
Chap on the internet who nominally claims to be rational and makes decisions based on evidence: "Actually, you are all wrong and you all think something completely different that conforms to my ideological prejudices."
Technically, I would say you are both right; you are simply interpreting those facts from two different frame. The goal of marxism and early maxist-leninist was to make a communist revoltion in which the old powers needed to be overthrown to build a socialist utopia. The Church was one of these old powers. Marx critique of religion isn't theological or scientific, it's political. To him, religion is an enemy of humanity because it places God above humans and anything that place somthing above humans will be used to crush and abuse humans once it gains political power. Yes, all major communist thinkers and politcians were convinced atheists and their anti-religious sentiment and politics have political concern at their core.
It would be good to note that most of the people who died and suffered under the USSR or Communist China didn't suffer and die due to their religious convictions, but due to other faillures and wars that have little to do with the place of atheism in communist philosophy.