User:Boguslavmandzyuk/Atheism and violence

This article on Atheism and violence addresses the acts of violence by individuals and institutions (organized groups, governments, para-national organizations) done in the name of atheism and/or science on people with differing opinions, namely religious groups.

Soviet Union
The founder and primary theorist of Marxism, the Nineteenth-century German sociologist Karl Marx, had an ambivalent 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, whilst at the same time recognizing it as a form of protest by the working classes against their poor economic conditions. In the Marxist–Leninist interpretation of Marxist theory, developed primarily by Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, religion is seen as negative to human development, and communist states that follow a Marxist–Leninist variant are atheistic and explicitly antireligious. Lenin states:

Religion is the opiate of the people: this saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the entire ideology of Marxism about religion. All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class.

The Soviet Union had the elimination of religion and its replacement with state atheism as a fundamental ideological goal of the state. Believers were never officially attacked for being believers, but they were officially attacked for perceived or invented resistance to the state and its policies. These attacks, however, in the broader ideological context were ultimately meant to serve the ultimate goal of eliminating religion and replacing it with atheism, and the perceived resistance acted as a legal pretext to carry this out. Through this method believers were effectively widely attacked for being believers and promoting religion, but officially they were only attacked for disobedience to the state.