Antitheism
Internet
Since religious faith is a mind virus that can infect others in our society, then in order to help get rid of it we must get serious about containing it as we try to eradicate it.
We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion. Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the bourgeois progressist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so: “Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm
The French Revolution
Reign of Terror
Another anti-clerical uprising was made possible by the instalment of the Revolutionary Calendar on 24 October. Hébert's and Chaumette's atheist movement initiated an anti-religiouscampaign in order to dechristianise society. The program of dechristianisation waged against Catholicism, and eventually against all forms of Christianity, included the deportation or execution of clergy; the closing of churches; the rise of cults and the institution of a civic religion; the large scale destruction of religious monuments; the outlawing of public and private worship and religious education; the forced abjurement of priests of their vows and forced marriages of the clergy; the word "saint" being removed from street names; and the War in the Vendée.
The enactment of a law on 21 October 1793 made all suspected priests and all persons who harboured them liable to death on sight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
War in the Vendée
The Civil Constitution required all clerics to swear allegiance to it and by extension to the increasingly anti-clerical National Constituent Assembly. All but seven of the 160 bishops refused the oath, as did about half of the parish priests.Persecution of the clergy and of the faithful was the first trigger of the rebellion; the second being conscription. Nonjuring priests were exiled or imprisoned. Women on their way to Mass were beaten in the streets.Religious orders were suppressed and Church property confiscated. On 3 March 1793, virtually all the churches were ordered closed. Sacramental vessels were confiscated by soldiers and the people were forbidden to place a cross on their graves. Nearly all the purchasers of church land were Bourgeois, very few peasants benefited
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Vend%C3%A9e
Toll on the Church
Under threat of death, imprisonment, military conscription, and loss of income, about twenty thousand constitutional priests were forced to abdicate and hand over their letters of ordination, and six thousand to nine thousand of them were coerced to marry. Many abandoned their pastoral duties altogether. Nonetheless, some of those who had abdicated continued covertly to minister to the people.
By the end of the decade, approximately thirty thousand priests had been forced to leave France, and others who did not leave were executed. Most French parishes were left without the services of a priest and deprived of the sacraments. Any non-juring priest faced the guillotine or deportation to French Guiana. By Easter 1794, few of France's forty thousand churches remained open; many had been closed, sold, destroyed, or converted to other uses.
Victims of revolutionary violence, whether religious or not, were popularly treated as Christian martyrs, and the places where they were killed became pilgrimage destinations. Catechising in the home, folk religion, syncretic and heterodox practices all became more common. The longterm effects on religious practice in France were significant. Many who were dissuaded from their traditional religious practices never resumed them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianisation_of_France_during_the_French_Revolution
Paris Commune
The decrees separated the church from the state, appropriated all church property to public property, and excluded the practice of religion from schools. (After the fall of the Commune, separation of Church and State, or laïcité, would not enter French law again until 1880-81 during the Third Republic, with the signing of the Jules Ferry laws and the 1905 French law on the separation of Church and State.) The churches were allowed to continue their religious activity only if they kept their doors open for public political meetings during the evenings. Along with the streets and the cafés, the churches became centres for political discussions and activities.
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