Religion and “unmatched wickedness”

If you’re tempted to avert your eyes, please don’t:

“Inside China’s ‘thought transformation’ camps – BBC News”:  The BBC has been given rare access to the vast system of highly secure facilities thought to be holding more than a million Muslims in China’s western region of Xinjiang.

“‘Unmatched wickedness’: Reports allege child separation, organ harvesting against China’s Muslims”

From “China bans religion for communists,” The Times (20 July 2017):

China’s estimated 85 million members of the Communist Party have been warned that they are not allowed to have religious beliefs, and that those who do will be punished.

Wang Zuoan, director of the state administration for religious affairs, said that religion undermined communism. Party members must be “firm Marxist atheists, obey party rules and stick to the party’s faith”.

Mao Zedong, China’s first communist leader, tried to destroy religion and the party has long since promoted atheism.

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Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism.  (V. I. Lenin, Religion [2007])

Religion is the opium 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.  (V. I. Lenin, “About the attitude of the working party toward the religion,” Collected Works, v. 17, p.41)

Religion is the opium of the people,’ said Karl Marx. It is the task of the Communist Party to make this truth comprehensible to the widest possible circles of the labouring masses. It is the task of the party to impress firmly upon the minds of the workers, even upon the most backward, that religion has been in the past and still is today one of the most powerful means at the disposal of the oppressors for the maintenance of inequality, exploitation, and slavish obedience on the part of the toilers.

Many weak-kneed communists reason as follows: ‘Religion does not prevent my being a communist. I believe both in God and in communism. My faith in God does not hinder me from fighting for the cause of the proletarian revolution.’

This train of thought is radically false. Religion and communism are incompatible, both theoretically and practically.  (N. I. Bukharin and E. Preobrazhensky: The ABC of Communism)