With the Bush Administration continuing to unleash its theocratic agenda, and its constant promoting of fundamentalists into key positions of society, I feel very concerned (nay, TERRIFIED) as an Atheist. Separation of Church and State is VERY important to me as an atheist living in a mainly Christian nation, because I refuse to have my rights trampled on!
Also, I am a Communist, and I envision religion being handled in a very different way in a socialist society:
Religion
An important question that the proletarian state will have to deal with is religion and religious activity. The socialist state will uphold people’s right to worship and to hold religious services and will provide them with the necessary facilities and materials for doing so. Religious people will not, however, be allowed special privileges, nor will they be permitted to use religious activity as a means to promote reactionary political movements. The proletarian state will monitor and regulate their finances to prevent them from becoming a source of capital or otherwise employed in violation of the principles and laws of the socialist state.
When forces do arise within the new society who attempt to carry out counter-revolutionary political activities and/or the exploitation of the masses under the cloak of religion, they will be prevented from doing so and politically suppressed, together with counter-revolutionaries of all other kinds. But as long as religious people do not actively organize against the continuing revolution, they will be allowed to hold services and other similar activities.
At the same time, communists are atheists: they do not believe in supernatural forces or beings of any kind and instead understand that it is the masses themselves who, through taking up and applying the principles of Marxism, must and will achieve their own emancipation and continually advance humanity’s understanding of and transformation of nature. And further, they recognize that the role of religion is to instill in the masses the sense that they are powerless before the forces of nature, and those that rule over them in society, and to console them in their misery rather than arousing them to rise up and abolish the source of it through revolutionary struggle.
The Party, as the leading force of the working class and in the proletarian state, cannot and must not attempt to force people to give up religious beliefs. Rather, it must wage an ideological struggle over this question and rely on those among the masses who hold such beliefs to cast them off on their own. And this they will do, as they come to see—through the advance of the revolution, the masses’ increasing mastery over society, and their continually developing ability to know and change the world in general—that these religious beliefs are incorrect and, more, that they are a burden carried over from capitalism and the dead weight of backward tradition.
Therefore, the proletarian state will, on the one hand, uphold the right of people to believe in religion and, on the other hand, will propagate atheism and educate the masses in the scientific world view of Marxism in opposition to all religious beliefs.
Through the educational system and other means, the Bible, the Torah, the Koran and other religious works and doctrine will be analyzed and criticized with the science of Marxism. In this way—and in general through the process of ideological struggle and persuasion, together with the overall advance through the socialist revolution toward communism—the masses themselves will be enabled to break and cast away the bond of religion and other mental and material shackles and achieve their full emancipation.-from
The Draft Programme of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, available at
http://revcom.us/What do you guys think?