p Religion is an historical phenomenon. Mankind did not know religion in the earliest stage of its history. There will be no religion in the future, although ideologists of the exploitative classes try in vain to prove that it is eternal. Nevertheless, while the emergence of religion was spontaneous, its disappearance involves deliberate actions aimed at destroying the old society and creating a new one.

p The rise of atheism, the conviction that religion is doomed historically was a gradual process. As science and culture developed religious concepts of the origin of the world, of nature and human society were increasingly subjected to criticism which cast doubts on their credibility and relevance. Specifically, religion was sharply criticised by French philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, Holbach, La Mettrie, and the German philosopher Feuerbach. Treating religion as the enemy of free thought, reason and enlightenment, and basing themselves on achievements of natural science, those philosophers demonstrated the groundlessness of religious conceptions of the immortal soul and existence of God, denounced the hypocrisy of the clergy and substantiated the need for freedom of conscience in any civilised country.

p Having absorbed the atheistic traditions of the 18th-century materialists, Marx and Engels went further in their critique of religion and applied materialist dialectics to history and public life. Drawing upon the many centuries of struggle against religious superstitutions and revising views and conclusions drawn by 9 thinkers of the past, Marx and Engels provided a scientific explanation of the origin and essence of religion and showed how to overcome it. “Religion,” Engels wrote, “arose in very primitive times from erroneous, primitive conceptions of men about their own nature and external nature surrounding them."  [9•1 

p Marx and Engels showed that it is not nature but men’s specific attitudes to it that produce religion. A low level of the productive forces did not permit men to master the forces of nature. Their impotence in the struggle against stronger natural and social phenomena made them fall back on cult actions, on illusory methods of influencing their world. The reflection of real phenomena of nature and society in religious beliefs is regarded by Marxism, in addition to being caused by human ignorance, as a result of certain social conditions. “All religion,” Engels wrote, “is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men’s minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces."  [9•2 

p Primitive man was powerless against the formidable forces of nature. He was especially afraid of the difficulties in obtaining food when so much depended on chance, on nature’s “whims”. He gradually formed a notion of his total dependence on forces above him with supernatural properties. A reflection of social relations was added to the fantastic reflection of natural forces later on, as class antagonisms emerged.

p The founders of scientific communism revealed and explained the essence of religion in social terms, showed how to overcome it. “Man makes religion" Marx wrote, “religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again.. . . Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. . . . The struggle against 10 religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma."  [10•1 

p Marx and Engels proved that the emergence of religion was based on material causes—society’s economic system at certain stages in its development. First of all, Marxism singles out the social roots of religion. Historical materialism is known to proceed from the primacy of social being over social consciousness. Religion was brought about by a certain level of social relations and economic conditions which showed that man had been totally dependent on nature. He was poorly armed against the elements and could neither understand nor explain natural phenomena because of his low intelligence, therefore he was frightened. This incomprehension of natural processes and phenomena caused our distant ancestor to deify them. Further development of the productive forces helped expand the areas where man could influence nature and create what seemed like favourable conditions for weakening his dependence on natural forces. But the same growth of the productive forces changed the relations of production. Antagonistic classes and the machinery of coercion emerged. These conditions made it possible for man to exploit man. The ruling classes adopted religious ideology as a tool to maintain and strengthen social inequality.

p Marx and Engels tied in the struggle against religion and the proletariat’s class struggle. Stressing religion’s transient character, they demonstrated that it was impossible to overcome religion without revolutionary transformation of the social system based on man’s exploitation and oppression. “The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production,” Marx wrote, “does not strip off its mystical veil -until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan."  [10•2  They therefore linked emancipation from religious prejudices to involvement of the working masses in political activities for the revolutionary reconstruction of society. The experience of the USSR and other 11 socialist countries shows that it is only during class struggle and socialist and communist construction that the materialist worldoutlook is formed and religious prejudices are shed away.

p In addition to the historical and social roots of religion, Marxism-Leninism scientifically traced its epistemological roots. The powerlessness of a savage facing the forces of nature was not the only cause of religion. A certain level of consciousness was needed for man to become aware of this. His intellect had to be mature enough to be able to separate images and perceptions from real, existing phenomena. Lenin thus explained the process: “The approach of the (human) mind to a particular thing, the taking of a copy (=a concept) of it i s no t a simple, immediate act, a dead mirroring, but one which is complex, split into two, zigzag-like, which includes in it the possibility of the flight of fantasy from life; more than that: the possibility of the transformation (moreover, an unnoticeable transformation, of which man is unaware) of the abstract concept, idea, into a fantasy (in letzter Instanz=God). For even in the simplest generalisation, in the most elementary general idea (’table’ in general), there is a certain bit of fantasy."  [11•1 

p Lenin viewed the epistemological roots of religion in close connection with the social roots. The fantastic distortion of reality is possible only under certain social conditions.

p The scientific explanation of the origin of religion and the analysis of its social and epistemological roots made it possible for the classics of Marxism to be the first in the history of atheism to disclose the essence of religious ideology and church organisation.

p The essence of religion was profoundly exposed by Marx. He wrote: “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people."  [11•2  Lenin valued highly Marx’s conclusion and called 12 it “the corner stone of the entire world-view of Marxism in the matter of religion.” He described religion, in his turn, as ”. . .a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man."  [12•1 

p Marxism-Leninism was the first to give a fundamentally new. true, and scientifically sound point of view on religion as a form of social consciousness reflecting the conditions of human material life like any other form of social consciousness. But, in contrast to the other forms of social consciousness, natural phenomena and social relations are reflected in fantastic shapes by the religious consciousness.

p Religion acts as an instrument for the spiritual oppression of the working people in class society. Lenin wrote: “All oppressing classes stand in need of two social functions to safeguard their rule: the function of the hangman and the function of the priest. The hangman is required to quell the protests and the indignation of the oppressed; the priest is required to console the oppressed, to depict to them the prospects of their sufferings and sacrifices being mitigated (this is particularly easy to do without guaranteeing that these prospects will be “achieved”), while preserving class rule, and thereby to reconcile them to class rule, win them away from revolutionary action, undermine their revolutionary spirit and destroy their revolutionary determination."  [12•2 

p In class-divided, antagonistic societies, the real causes of human suffering are economic, political, military, and national oppression which hurts body and mind. These social forces, which dominate people in their everyday lives, take the shape of supernatural forces.

p Ideologists of the church deny that religion’s main function is to justify and defend social inequality. They try to persuade the toiling masses that suffering is mankind’s eternal fate, that social inequality and injustice have been established by God and 13 are the result of man’s Fall. As Pope Pius XII once said, the rich and the poor have always existed and the unalterability of man’s being gives reason to suppose that it would remain like that forever. Other leaders of the Vatican spoke in the same vein.

The acceptance and defence of the exploitation of man by man reflect the social essence of religion. Inasmuch as social inequality has been established by God, it says, it would be senseless to resist social injustice. To seek to alter the social order is to apostatise. To please the ruling classes, ministers of all religions teach believers that the majority of the people cannot expect terrestrial happiness, but can only hope for paradise beyond the grave. The church has always done everything in its power to divert the working people from class struggle.