Quote:
Originally Posted by gabbytay
Communist are not atheists. But forced by their goverment.
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I don't think there's a difference there...
The communist ideology acknowledges no religion. Its ideological founder Marx, who's more of a 19th century social scientist than a revolutionary ideologue, argued that "religion is the opium of the masses" (I'm paraphrasing here), which he means in a class-struggle context in that the upper classes will try to keep the masses in line through religion, among other things.
So communists in the Marxist tradition are technically atheists. I don't presume to know about all the other communist ideologies out there -- there are plenty which are more or less "extinct," namely never becoming political movements in the same that Marxism became; and sometimes the line between a "socialist" and a "communist" blurs as well -- but I believe most are in agreement that religion, which to them tends to represent yet another tool of the bourgeois oppression as well as the relic of the despised
ancien régime, isn't something that has a place in their social engineering ideas.
In other words, Marxists consider religion to be competing against them for influence over the masses.
Edit: Kang Seung Jae beats me to it.
