Ludwig Feuerbach , who separated philosophy from religion to allow philosophers the freedom to interpret the material reality of
nature In training as a philosopher in the early 19th century,
Karl Marx participated in debates about the
philosophy of religion, specifically about the interpretations presented in
Hegelianism, i.e. "What is rational is real; and what is real is rational." In those debates about
reason and
reality, the Hegelians considered philosophy an
intellectual enterprise in service to the insights of Christian religious comprehension, which
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had elaborately rationalized in
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Although critical of contemporary religion, as a 19th-century intellectual, Hegel pursued the
ontology and the
epistemology of Christianity, as a personal interest compatible with Christian theological explanations of
Dasein — explanations of the questions of
existence and of
being — which he clarified, systematized, and justified in his philosophy. After his death in 1831, Hegel's philosophy about
being and
existence was debated by the
Young Hegelians and the
materialist atheists — such as
Ludwig Feuerbach — who rejected all
religious philosophy as a way of running the world; Karl Marx sided with the philosophy of the materialist atheists. Feuerbach separated philosophy from religion in order to grant intellectual autonomy to philosophers in their interpretations of
material reality. He objected to the religious basis of Hegel's
philosophy of spirit in order to critically analyse the basic concepts of theology, and he redirected philosophy from the heavens to the Earth, to the subjects of human
dignity and the
meaning of life, of what is
morality and of what is the
purpose of existence, concluding that humanity as a species (but just not as individuals) possessed within itself all the attributes that merited worship and that people had created God as a reflection of these attributes. About the conceptual separateness of Man from God, in
The Essence of Christianity (1841), Feuerbach said: But the idea of deity coincides with the idea of humanity. All divine attributes, all the attributes which make God God, are attributes of the [human] species — attributes which in the individual [person] are limited, but the limits of which are abolished in the essence of the species, and even in its existence, in so far as it has its complete existence only in all men taken together. Feuerbach thought that religion exercised
power over the human mind through "the promotion of fear from the mystical forces of the Heaven", and with "an intensive hatred of the old God" said that houses of worship should be systematically destroyed and religious institutions eradicated. Experienced in that praxis of materialist philosophy, thought, and action, the apprentice Karl Marx became a radical philosopher.
Karl Marx , who synthesized anti-religious philosophy with
materialism to show that religion is a social construct used for social control by the ruling class of a society In his rejection of all religious thought, Marx considered the contributions of religion over the centuries to be unimportant and irrelevant to the future of humanity. The autonomy of humanity from the realm of supernatural forces was considered by Marx as an
axiomatic ontological truth that had been developed since ancient times, and he considered it to have an even more respectable tradition than Christianity. Marx held that the churches invented religion to justify the ruling classes'
exploitation of labour of the working classes, by way of a
socially stratified industrial society; as such, religion is a drug that gives an emotional escape from the real world. In
A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx described the contradictory nature of religious sentiment, that: Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering, and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heart-less world, and the soul of soul-less conditions. It [religion] is the opium of the people. Thus for Marx atheist philosophy liberated men and women from suppressing their innate potential as human beings, and allowed people to
intellectually understand that they possess individual
human agency, and thus are masters of their individual reality, because the earthly authority of supernatural deities is not real. Marx opposed the social-control function of religion, which the churches realised by way of societal atomization; the
anomie and the
social alienation that psychologically divide human beings from themselves (as individual men and women) and that alienate people from each other (as parts of a social community). Hence, the
social authority of theology (religious ideology) must be removed from the
law, the
social norms, and the
traditions with which men govern society. In that vein of political emancipation, represented in the culturally progressive concepts of
citizen and
citizenship as a social identity, in
On the Jewish Question, Marx said that: The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen, religious man and citizen, is neither a deception directed against citizenhood, nor is it a circumvention of political emancipation, it is political emancipation itself, the political method of emancipating oneself from religion. Of course, in periods when the political state, as such, is born violently out of civil society, when political liberation is the form in which men strive to achieve their liberation, the state can and must go as far as the abolition of religion, the destruction of religion. But it can do so only in the same way that it proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it goes as far as the abolition of life, the guillotine.At times of special self-confidence, political life seeks to suppress its prerequisite, civil society, and the elements composing this society, and to constitute itself as the real species-life of man, devoid of contradictions. But, it can achieve this only by coming into violent contradiction with its own conditions of life, only by declaring the revolution to be permanent, and, therefore, the political drama necessarily ends with the re-establishment of religion, private property, and all elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace. Therefore, because organised religion is a human product derived from the objective material conditions, and that economic systems, such as capitalism, affect the material conditions of society, the abolition of unequal systems of
political economy and of stratified
social classes would wither away the State and the official religion, consequent to the establishment of a
communist society, featuring neither a formal State apparatus nor a social-class system. About the nature and social-control function of religious sentiment, in ''A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right'' (1843), Marx said that: The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of the people, is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. In that way, Marx transformed Feuerbach's antireligious philosophy into a political praxis, and into a philosophic basis of his nascent ideology,
dialectical materialism. In
Private Property and Communism (1845), Marx said that "Communism begins from the outset (Owen) with atheism; but atheism is, at first, far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction", and refined the atheism of Feuerbach into a considered critique of the material (socio-economic) conditions responsible for the invention of religion. He therefore held that atheism was the philosophical foundation stone of his ideology, but in itself was insufficient. About the
social artifice of religious sentiment, in the
Theses on Feuerbach, Marx said: Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself, and [then] establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself, be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then, itself, be destroyed in theory and in practice. Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the "religious sentiment" is, itself, a social product, and that the abstract individual [person] whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society. The philosophy of dialectical materialism proposed that the existential condition of being
human naturally resulted from the interplay of the material forces (earth, wind, and fire) that exist in the physical world. That religion originated as psychological solace for the
exploited workers who live the reality of
wage slavery in an industrial society. Thus, despite the working-class origin of organised religion, the clergy allowed the
ruling class to control religious sentiment (the praxis of religion), which grants control of all society — the
middle class, the
working class, and the
proletariat — with Christian slaves hoping for a rewarding
after-life. In
The German Ideology (1845), about the psychology of religious faith, Marx said that: It is self-evident, moreover, that "spectres", "bonds", [and] "the higher being", "concept", [and] "scruple", are merely the idealistic, spiritual expression, the conception, apparently, of the isolated individual [person], the image of very empirical fetters and limitations, within which the mode of production of life, and the form of [social] intercourse coupled with it, move. In the establishment of a communist society, the philosophy of Marxist–Leninist atheism interprets the social degeneration of organized religion — from psychological-solace to social-control — to justify the revolutionary abolition of an official state religion, and its replacement with
official atheism, the latter being characteristic of a
Marxist–Leninist state.
Friedrich Engels , who identified religion as a person's need for a fantastic spiritual reflection of the
self, by which to have some control over life and reality In
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Ideology (1846) and in the
Anti-Dühring (1878),
Friedrich Engels addressed contemporary social problems with critiques of the
idealistic worldview, especially religious interpretations of the
material reality of the world. Engels proposed that religion is a fantasy about supernatural powers controlling and determining humanity's
material poverty and
dehumanizing moral squalor since early in human history; yet that such a lack of human control over
human existence would end with the abolition of religion. That by way of
theism, a people's need to believe in a deity, as a spiritual reflection of the self, religion would gradually disappear. In the
Anti-Dühring, Engels said: . . . and when this act has been accomplished, when society, by taking possession of all means of production, and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself, and all its members, from the bondage in which they are now held, by these means of production, which they, themselves, have produced, but which confront them as an irresistible alien force, when, therefore, man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes — only then will the last alien force, which is still reflected in religion, vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect. Engels considered religion as a
false consciousness incompatible with communist philosophy and urged the communist parties of the
First International to advocate atheist politics in their home countries, and recommended scientific education as a means to overcome the
mysticism and
superstitions of people who required a religious explanation of the real world. In light of the scientific progress of the Industrial Revolution, the speculative philosophy of theology became obsolete in determining a place for every person in society. In the
Anti-Dühring, Engels said: The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proved, not by a few juggled phrases, but by a long and wearisome development of philosophy and natural science. By scientific advances, socio-economic and cultural progress required that atheistic materialism become a science rather than remain a philosophy apart from the sciences. In the "Negation of a Negation" section of the
Anti-Dühring, Engels said: This modern materialism, the negation of the negation, is not the mere re-establishment of the old, but adds to the permanent foundations of this old materialism the whole thought-content of two thousand years of development of philosophy and natural science, as well as of the history of these two thousand years. It [materialism] is no longer a philosophy at all, but simply a world outlook, which has to establish its validity and be applied, not in a science of sciences, standing apart, but in the real sciences. Philosophy is therefore
sublated here, that is, “both overcome and preserved”; overcome as regards its form, and preserved as regards its real content.
Vladimir Lenin who developed on the theories of
Marx and
Engels and deemed religious organizations "instruments of bourgeois reaction". As a revolutionary,
Vladimir Lenin said that a true communist would always promote atheism and combat religion, because it is the psychological opiate that robs people of their
human agency, of their volition, as men and women, to control their own
reality. To combat the political legitimacy of religion, Lenin adapted the atheism of Marx and Engels to the
Russian Empire. Since the social ideology of the
Eastern Orthodox Church supported the Tsarist monarchy, voiding the credibility of religion would void the
political legitimacy of the Tsar as the Russian head of state. Additionally, the populace also needed to be prepared in order to make a transition from religious beliefs to atheism, as Soviet Communism would require of them. Scientific atheism became a philosophic basis of
Marxism–Leninism, the ideology of the Communist Party in Russia, as with other Marxist-Leninist countries, such as the
People's Republic of Albania. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin enshrined the dissemination of Marxist-Leninist atheism as a task of the Communist Party, believing it to be an "urgent necessity." Lenin held a hostile attitude towards religion and this came to characterize Bolshevik atheism. He was a staunch critic of
Anatoli Lunacharsky, who proposed the concept of
God-Building, which held that because religion "cultivated in the masses emotion, moral values, [and] desire", revolutionaries should take advantage of that fact. As such, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin "appealed to militant atheism as a criterion for the sincerity of Marxist commitments as a testing principle." This rigid stance in favour of atheism and against religion resulted in the alienation of "some of the sympathetic, leftist-minded yet religious believing intellectuals, workers or peasants." == Soviet Union ==