Question by : How do people know that Vladimir Lenin was an atheist? Just because he was, like Marx, critical of religion?
Spellbound- That doesn’t mean anything. He simply criticized organized religion. He had ancestors of both Christian and Jewish identity, and himself hated antisemitism. I am not suggesting he was a practicing Christian or anything of the sort, but is it possible he simply hated organized religion and did indeed have a personal faith, as did most people of the era. Criticizing religion (which Hitler, a Roman Catholic also did) doesn’t mean anything.
Answers and Views:
Answer by AverageJoe
Lenin was a VERY evil man.
That by itself does not prove atheism but it is highly probative of same.
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Spellbound says
Lenin was most definitely an atheist.
Lenin said:
"Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people."
and:
"Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image…"
He was against religion because he saw the way that the Orthodox Church was used as a pillar of the monarchy, and he saw the way that it made a virtue of poverty and supported the bourgeois social order.
See: http://www.marxists.org/index.htm
Edit – you have a point. But, as far as I know there are only two documented occasions when Lenin attended a church: his baptism as an infant, and his wedding – weddings in the Russian Empire had to be in a Church, Mosque or Synagogue.
It is very unlikely that he was a secret believer – his antipathy towards the Orthodox Church was very strong.
As for some sort of non-specific personal faith – absolutely not. Lenin was a practical man who thought of himself as a scientist, and used (marxist) scientific principles to analyse the issues which he thought were important: religion and spirituality he thought of as bourgeois traps for the proletariat.