ARGUMENTS AGAINST GOD AND RELIGION — Part III Argument from History

personal spirits; from spirits to gods; from gods to God—so crudely speaking, the evolution has gone. The particular phase of that evolution which concerns us is that of God. In one period of our Western civilization the gods were necessary fictions, useful hypotheses by which to live. The Communist philosophy too holds religion to be a historical hoax. Since Communism studies history exclusively in the light of economics, to it, all historical factors were offshoots of the economic situation. It holds that it was the feudal and capitalistic systems, prevailing in the past, which led to the birth of religion. Now that these outdated systems are dying a natural death, religions should also be treated as dead along with it. As Engels puts it, moral concepts, in the last analysis, are the product of contemporary economic conditions. Human history is the history of class wars, in which the ruling classes have been exploiting the backward classes, and religion and morals were invented to provide an ideological basis for safeguarding the interests of the ruling class. According to the Communist Manifesto, laws, morals, and religion—all are the fraudulent innovations of the bourgeoisie under the cloak of which most of its vested interests are hidden. It is impossible to satisfy those people whose bias, in favour of materialistic reasoning is so strong that they are unable to keep their minds open to self-evident facts. Addressing the third All-Russia Congress (October, 1920) Lenin had said: of course, they did not believe in God. They knew very well that the church authorities, landlords and bourgeois who spoke with reference to God, were simply interested in safeguarding their own interests as exploiters… They denied all such moral laws which had been borrowed from a Super-human power, or were not based on the concept of class. They called this a hoax, an illusion, the befogging of the minds of farmers and labourers in order to serve the interests of landlords and capitalists. They asserted that their moral code was subject to the class struggle of the Proletariat alone, the source of their moral principle being the interest of the class-struggle of the Proletariat. This is the case put forward by the antagonists of religion, on the basis of which a large number of people, in our modern age have rejected religion. An American professor of psychology sums it up thus: “Science has shown religion to be history’s cruellest and wickedest hoax.”