All right, hey, everybody. This is James Lindsay, and you're listening to the New Discourses podcast,

and we have a question to investigate today. And that question is, were the communists, atheists?

The answer is yes and no. Not to be that guy, but it kind of depends on what you mean by atheist.

And not like in some kind of pedantic way.

Certainly the communists were atheist in the sense that they did not explicitly believe in God.

But they did have a belief in something that's transcendent to themselves, which is in

history itself as a transcendent object with a purpose and an end point that is in fact

eschatological. And they kind of see man, not as in an individual,

you or me, or this man, or that man, but man overall as his own God.

And that kind of counts, frankly.

Communism is a religion.

Now, why am I going to talk about this? I'm going to take

us through at least little pieces, in some cases very little pieces of four sources from Karl Marx.

And today, and we're going to talk about, you know, the relationship that Marx had to religion

and belief and to God a little bit. And the reason is, because

what I've perceived is that a lot of conservatives, and particularly conservative Christians,

have a pretty poor understanding of what's going on with regard to Marx and religion. They don't understand

what Marx was doing with the atheism. Of course, they also don't know Marx's history with

religion. And therefore, it's very common to incorrectly, kind of incorrectly, believe that the reason that the

communists are communist is because they're atheist, as though atheism is causal to communism.

Now, there are lots of atheists who are libertarians and, in fact, rampant individualists,

like Einrand, for example, who are pretty anti-communist.

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