Marxism and religion  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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search  The founder and primary theorist of Marxism, the
nineteenth-century German thinker Karl Marx, had a negative
attitude to religion, viewing it primarily as "the opium of the
people" that had been used by the ruling classes to give the
working classes false hope for millennia, while at the same time
recognizing it as a form of protest by the working classes
against their poor economic conditions.[1] In the end, Marx
rejects religion.[2]  In the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of
Marxist theory, developed primarily by Russian revolutionary
Vladimir Lenin, religion is seen as retarding human development,
and socialist states that follow a Marxist-Leninist variant are
atheistic and explicitly antireligious. Due to this, a number of
Marxist-Leninst governments in the twentieth century, such as
the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, implemented
rules introducing state athe