On the Left and Religion

I find a disturbing similarity in the outlook of the political and institutional “lights” of our age, and a memorandum on how religion should be maligned written by Gorky to Stalin.

We need to know the "fathers of the church," the apologists of Christianity, especially indispensable to the study of the history of Catholicism, the most powerful and intellectual church organization whose political significance is quite clear. We need to know the history of church schisms, heresies, the Inquisition, the "religious" wars, etc. Every quotation by a believer is easily countered with dozens of theological quotations which contradict it.

We cannot do without an edition of the "Bible" with critical commentaries from the Tubingen school and books on criticism of biblical texts, which could bring a very useful "confusion into the minds" of believers.

It also brings to mind Howard Zinn’s efforts to rewrite history and work it into the curriculum of the American public school systems.

For this reason, there should be courses set up at the Communist Academy which would not only treat the history of religion, and mainly the history of the Christian church, i.e., the study of church history as politics.

Even the willfully constructed ‘soft touch’ when it comes to managing the news and the minds of youth:

By strongly emphasizing facts of a negative nature, we open ourselves up to our enemies, providing them an enormous amount of material, which they in turn very aptly use against us, compromising our party and our leadership in the eyes of Europe's proletariat, compromising the very principle of the dictatorship of the working class, because the proletariat of Europe and America feeds on the bourgeois newspapers for the most part—and for this reason it cannot grasp our country's cultural-
revolutionary progress, our successes and achievements in industrialization, the enthusiasm of our working masses, and of their influence on the impoverished peasantry.

The imperative to destroy faith by those who want control over a people is clear:

Our youth is very poorly informed on questions of this nature. The "tendency" toward a religious disposition is very noticeable--a natural result of developing individualism. At this time, as always, the young are in a hurry to find "the definitive answer."

Which is why those who like the idea of controlling a society feel such a strong need to manipulate education and the spinning of news. They know that a society left to make its’ own choices simply wouldn’t guarantee them the power over others that they seek.