4. ELIMINATION OF RELIGION

4.  ELIMINATION OF RELIGION

The third main idea of socialists is elimination, abolition, or annihilation of religion. What is a background of this idea? The following statement of F. Engels may shed some light here:

‘A division of people into two sharply different groups, into humans and bestial humans, into good and evil, sheep and goats, is known, apart from the philosophy of reality, only to Christianity, which quite consistently also has its judge of the world to make the separation’.¹

First, a humiliating and mocking tone of F. Engels attracts attention. Second, there is little truth in his statement. Christianity does not know any groups of ‘humans and bestial humans'. It is an obvious F. Engels's invention. The division of people into good and bad is indeed a typical feature of Christian world view, in contrast to the socialist one. In principle, one may speak of a division of people into sheep and goats by Christianity. Such utterances occur in the Gospel. But it is only a metaphor, a figurative sense, i.e., all the same ‘good and bad’ are meant. F. Engels's mockery therefore gives him a sleazy appearance. At the same time, F. Engels passes over in silence another Christian division of people, viz. that into sheep and wolves. For example, here is what Jesus has told, 'Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothes, but inwardly are ravenous wolves’.² Sure enough, it is also a metaphor, i.e. good and bad humans are referred to here too, only with emphasize on the cruel and wolfish side of bad people. But why has F. Engels passed over in silence this division of people by Christianity? Is he perhaps such a ‘wolf’ himself? By heaven, it looks so very much!

It is also an obvious lie in his attributing the idea of division of people into bad and good humans only to Dühring and Christianity. This division is virtually known to all traditional world religions. Moreover, many poets and writers, as already mentioned above, shared this idea too. Here one should also refer to a great number of playwrights, e.g., Shakespeare, Schiller, and Henrik Ibsen as well as many artists, e.g., Giotto di Bondone, Leonardo da Vinci, Jerome Bosch, etc.³

One may ask why F. Engels does not mention the fact? Obviously because he tries to squeeze reality into the Procrustean bed of the allegedly popular prejudice about human equality, which is either perfectly absolute in denying even differences of individuals in abilities, or is such one in which there is no dynamics and no understanding of the fact that different directionalities or orientations of human abilities are possible.

I have no doubts that a refusal from the socialist prejudice about equality of people and a return to reality imply a rehabilitation of the traditional religions of mankind.

First, as I have shown, Marxism has no grounds to be proud of its allegedly scientific nature because a stupid, blind, irrational, fantastic, and fanatical faith in equality of people is its foundation. Curiously enough, but the Marxist materialism is something like an ideological screen (by analogy with a smoke-screen in military terminology) to conceal the fact that it is based on an idea, and, what is more, a very silly one. If it had been exposed to a general public survey as the main issue, many humans would have rejected it at once. But, as it is, the main issue of the socialist religion is officially that of the primacy of matter or thought (consciousness, spirit). And, this being the case, socialists appear to support the primacy of matter. Meanwhile, they, at a tepid pace, smuggle in their quite absurd idea, which is the genuine main or principal idea of all socialists.

Second, this is exactly the error that is lacking in the traditional religions. All of them stem from the idea that 2 principles, viz., good and evil fight in man, and, correspondingly, that there are good and bad, decent and indecent individuals. This idea conforms to reality and everyday experience of people. The traditional religions are therefore virtually more scientific than the socialist religion in this respect.

1F. Engels Anti-Dühring (my own translation). The official English translation is as follows: ‘A division of mankind into two sharply differentiated groups, into human men and beast men, into good and bad, sheep and goats, is only found – apart from the philosophy of reality – in Christianity, which quite logically also has its judge of the universe to make the separation’.

2Matt., 7-15.

3In Russia there were also many artists who painted pictures on the subject of Christianity, e.g., A. Ivanov, N. Ge, I. Kramskoy, V. Polenova, I. Repin, G.Semiradskiy, V. Vereshchagin, V. Surikov, M. Nesterova, V. Vasnetsov, N. Goncharova, V. Kandinskiy, P. Filonov, etc.