Indoctrination is the process of inculcating a person with ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or professional methodologies.
State atheism or atheist state is the incorporation of hard atheism or non-theism into political regimes. It is considered the opposite of theocracy and may also refer to large-scale secularization attempts by governments. To some extent, it is a religion-state relationship that is usually ideologically linked to irreligion and the promotion of irreligion or atheism. State atheism may refer to a government's promotion of anti-clericalism, which opposes religious institutional power and influence in all aspects of public and political life, including the involvement of religion in the everyday life of the citizen. In some instances, religious symbols and public practices that were once held by religions were replaced with secularized versions of them. State atheism in these cases is considered as not being politically neutral toward religion, and therefore it is often considered non-secular.
Religion in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was dominated by the fact that it became the first state to have as one objective of its official ideology the elimination of existing religion, and the prevention of future implanting of religious belief, with the goal of establishing state atheism (gosateizm). However, the main religions of pre-revolutionary Russia persisted throughout the entire Soviet period. Christians belonged to various denominations: Orthodox, Catholic, Baptist and various other Protestant denominations. The majority of the Muslims in the Soviet Union were Sunni, with the notable exception of Azerbaijan, which was majority Shia. Judaism also had many followers. Other religions, practiced by a small number of believers, included Buddhism and Shamanism.
Atheism is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities and any statements to the contrary are false ones. The English term 'atheist' was used at least as early as the sixteenth century and atheistic ideas and their influence have a longer history.
The League of Militant Atheists, also Society of the Godless or Union of the Godless, was an atheistic and antireligious organization of workers and intelligentsia that developed in Soviet Russia under influence of the ideological and cultural views and policies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1947. It consisted of party members, members of the Komsomol youth movement, those without specific political affiliation, workers and military veterans.
Criticism of atheism is criticism of the concepts, validity, or impact of atheism, including associated political and social implications. Criticisms include positions based on the history of science, philosophical and logical criticisms, findings in both the natural and social sciences, theistic apologetic arguments, arguments pertaining to ethics and morality, the effects of atheism on the individual, or the assumptions that underpin atheism.
Throughout the history of the Soviet Union (1917–1991), there were periods when Soviet authorities suppressed and persecuted various forms of Christianity to different extents depending on state interests. Soviet Marxist-Leninist policy consistently advocated the control, suppression, and ultimately, the elimination of religious beliefs, and it actively encouraged the propagation of Marxist-Leninist atheism in the Soviet Union. However, most religions were never officially outlawed.
After the October Revolution of November 7, 1917 there was a movement within the Soviet Union to unite all of the people of the world under Communist rule. This included the Eastern bloc countries as well as the Balkan States. Communism as interpreted by Vladimir Lenin and his successors in the Soviet government included the abolition of religion and to this effect the Soviet government launched a long-running unofficial campaign to eliminate religion from society. Since some of these Slavic states tied their ethnic heritage to their ethnic churches, both the peoples and their churches were targeted by the Soviets.
19th-century German philosopher Karl Marx, the founder and primary theorist of Marxism, viewed religion as "the soul of soulless conditions" or the "opium of the people". According to Marx, religion in this world of exploitation is an expression of distress and at the same time it is also a protest against the real distress. In other words, religion continues to survive because of oppressive social conditions. When this oppressive and exploitative condition is destroyed, religion will become unnecessary. At the same time, Marx saw religion as a form of protest by the working classes against their poor economic conditions and their alienation. Denys Turner, a scholar of Marx and historical theology, classified Marx's views as adhering to Post-Theism, a philosophical position that regards worshipping deities as an eventually obsolete, but temporarily necessary, stage in humanity's historical spiritual development.
The USSR anti-religious campaign (1921–1928) was a campaign of anti-religious persecution against churches and Christian believers by the Soviet government following the initial anti-religious campaign during the Russian Civil War. The elimination of all religion and its replacement with scientific materialism was a fundamental ideological goal of the state. To this end, the state began offering secular education to believers, intending to reduce the prevalence of superstition. It was never made illegal to be a believer or to have religion, and so the activities of this campaign were often veiled under other pretexts that the state invoked or invented in order to justify its activities.
God-Building is an idea proposed by some prominent early Marxists in the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Inspired by Auguste Comte's Religion of Humanity, the concept had some precedent in the French Revolution with the Cult of Reason. The idea proposed that in place of the abolition of religion, there should be a meta-religious context in which religions were viewed primarily in terms of the psychological and social effect of ritual, myth, and symbolism, and which attempted to harness this force for pro-communist aims, both by creating new ritual and symbolism, and by re-interpreting existing ritual and symbolism in a socialist context. In contrast to Leninist atheism, the God-Builders took an official position of agnosticism.
The USSR anti-religious campaign of 1928–1941 was a new phase of anti-religious campaign in the Soviet Union following the anti-religious campaign of 1921–1928. The campaign began in 1929, with the drafting of new legislation that severely prohibited religious activities and called for an education process on religion in order to further disseminate atheism and materialist philosophy. This had been preceded in 1928 at the fifteenth Party congress, where Joseph Stalin criticized the party for failure to produce more active and persuasive anti-religious propaganda. This new phase coincided with the beginning of the mass collectivization of agriculture and the nationalization of the few remaining private enterprises.
Nikita Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign was the last large-scale anti-religious campaign undertaken in the Soviet Union. It succeeded a comparatively tolerant period towards religion which had lasted from 1941 until the late 1950s. As a result, the church had grown in stature and membership, provoking concerns from the Soviet government. These concerns resulted in a new campaign of persecution. The official aim of anti-religious campaigns was to achieve the atheist society that communism envisioned.
Following the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik seizure of power led to the Russian Civil War which continued until 1922. The victory of the Bolshevik Red Army enabled them to set up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Throughout the civil war various religions, secularists and anti-clericalists of the Bolsheviks played a key role in the military and social struggles which occurred during the war.
Christopher Columbus, on his first Spanish-sponsored voyage to the Americas in 1492, sailed south from what is now the Bahamas to explore the northeast coast of Cuba and the northern coast of Hispaniola. Columbus, who was searching for a route to India, believed Cuba to be a peninsula of the Asian mainland. The first sighting of a Spanish ship approaching Cuba was on 28 October 1492, probably at Bariay, Holguín Province, on the eastern point of Cuba.
The Polish anti-religious campaign was initiated by the communist government in Poland which, under the doctrine of Marxism, actively advocated for the disenfranchisement of religion and planned atheisation. To this effect the regime conducted anti-religious propaganda and persecution of clergymen and monasteries. As in most other Communist countries, religion was not outlawed as such and was permitted by the constitution, but the state attempted to achieve an atheistic society.
The anti-religious campaign of communist Romania was initiated by the People's Republic of Romania and continued by the Socialist Republic of Romania, which under the doctrine of Marxist–Leninist atheism took a hostile stance against religion and set its sights on the ultimate goal of an atheistic society wherein religion would be recognized as the ideology of the bourgeoisie.
Irreligion in Estonia pertains to atheism, agnosticism, and secularism of the people and institutions of Estonia. Irreligion is prominent in Estonia, where a majority of citizens are unaffiliated with any religion. Estonian irreligion dates back to the 19th century, when Estonian nationalists and intellectuals deemed Christianity a foreign religion in opposition to Estonian independence. Irreligion in Estonia was later accelerated by the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states, in which state atheism was enforced. By some metrics, Estonia is the most irreligious country in the world.
Marxist–Leninist atheism, also known as Marxist–Leninist scientific atheism, was the state atheist and antireligious element of the former Soviet Union before the extensive glasnost reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev. Under Bolshevism, this was a variant of Marxism–Leninism, the official communist state ideology of the Soviet Union. Based upon a dialectical-materialist understanding of humanity's place in nature, Marxist–Leninist atheism proposes that religion is the opium of the people; thus, Soviet Marxism–Leninism advocates "scientific atheism", rather than religious belief.
A new and more aggressive phase of anti-religious persecution in the Soviet Union began in the mid-1970s after a more tolerant period following Nikita Khrushchev's downfall in 1964.
