Actually, Akzent, Lenin's vision of the role of religion in society wasn’t too much different from the role it plays in American constitution. Lenin’s own vision of the World was more practical than America’s. Like Americans, Lenin believed in globalization. However Lenin’s version would include globalization on a much more modest scale as far as materialism goes. American globalizationist ideas cannot be fulfilled due to limits of the resources as we already starting to see with starvation and rising energy prices due to lack of supply:
Like Engels and Marx, Lenin believed that religion was an historical phenomenon, tied to the oppressive structures of human history such as feudalism and capitalism. Just as they believed that the state, as we know it today, would no longer be needed and would "wither away" after the world had turned completely to socialism, so too they believed that religion would wither away when there was no longer a need for it. In Lenin's words, "the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society."
Lenin cites Marx and Engels that due to the fact that religion has deep roots in capitalist oppression, it will not disappear until the people completely overcome their oppression: He writes in The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion that "No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy or the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way."
Marx, Engels and Lenin all agreed that there should be complete separation of church and state and that the state should never make laws about religious belief, either to support one religion or to ban another. All three were opposed to arguments that religion should be banned under socialism. Lenin agreed with Engels when he wrote in The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion: "Engels frequently condemned the efforts of people who desired to be "more left" or "more revolutionary" than the Social-Democrats to introduce into the programme of the workers' party an explicit proclamation of atheism, in the sense of declaring war on religion. Commenting in 1874 on the famous manifesto of the Blanquist fugitive Communards who were living in exile in London, Engels called their vociferous proclamation of war on religion a piece of stupidity, and stated that such a declaration of war was the best way to revive interest in religion and to prevent it from really dying out."
Indeed, religion wasn’t banned in Soviet Union as I saw functioning churches in the 80s. Instead, its false presumptions were debunked in schools in a clever way.
I meant "churches" in more general sense - as institutions: the Orthodox, the Catholic, and the Islam as well.
In particular sense: After the WW2, only a few churches functioned. All other were turned in museums, stocks, in the countryside even in barns.
A colleague of mine makes field-researches in Russia (topic: revitalization of religion) right now and she says - in the villages, there are still a lot of churches which were used as barns of socialist collective farms and which haven't been re-opened yet. In other villages, the villagers cleaned, renovated and reinaugurated the buildings.
Re: Hey Big! Look what I found! 
Linear Mode
