God-Building - Lenin, what are you so afraid of?

[Astarte]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God-Building

[Garret]

This article relies largely or entirely upon a single source. Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations to additional sources. (October 2009)

Yeah, probably should get better proof for this.

[Astarte]

Yeah, probably should get better proof for this.

Are you joking me? Anyone who has ever studied early Soviet theories outside of Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin should know that God-Building was a real ideology and expounded by the likes of Lunacharsky - first commissar of education and Maxim Gorky.

[Astarte]

"Lunacharsky wrote, 'For the sake of the great struggle for life... it is necessary for humanity to almost organically merge into an integral unity. Not a mechanical or chemical... but a psychic, consciously emotional linking-together... is in fact a religious emotion.'[2] He argued that atheism in itself is pessimistic, because life becomes meaningless, and that in order to solve this one needed to turn to the pleasure of a religion to give meaning. Atheism didn't provide people with the meaning in their lives that religion did and once religion was taken away, people would feel empty unless something was put in its place. In its place, Lunacharsky proposed they should place humanity as a transcendent entity.
Lunacharsky wished to change the commandment to love God above everything into, 'You must love and deify matter above everything else, [love and deify] the corporal nature or the life of your body as the primary cause of things, as existence without a beginning or end, which has been and forever will be.'[3] He wrote, 'God is humanity in its highest potential. But there is no humanity in the highest potential... Let us then love the potentials of mankind, our potentials, and represent them in a garland of glory in order to love them ever more.[3]
Lunacharsky saw Marxism as having religious components, including its faith in the inevitable victory of socialism, as well as its belief in science and material existence as producing all human relations. These elements could assist in the God-Building. Lunacharsky interpreted the events of the 1905 revolution as an expression of religious forces in the nation.[3] The religion to be created would worship the social ideal of socialism in its deification of humanity.
Lunacharsky and his supporters rejected the divinity of Christ, but they deeply respect him and re-interpreted him as a revolutionary leader and the world's first Communist. The new religion would have prayer that would be addressed to progress, humanity, the nation and human genius. Collective, rather than individual, prayer was stressed due to the wish to use the cult to support a common revolutionary action. This new religion would have temples and rituals, and theatre with symbolic plays to induce religious feelings.[4]"