God-Building
God-Building is an idea proposed by some prominent early Marxists in the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.Although he would later rejoin the Bolsheviks and indeed become People's Commissariat for Education after October 1917, he was originally closely associated with Vladimir Lenin's rival, his brother-in-law Alexander Bogdanov.[2]He proposed a new religious sentiment which would be accommodating to the world-view of communism by creating a new religion that was compatible with science and not based on any supernatural beliefs.Lunacharsky claimed that, while traditional religion was false and was used for the purposes of exploitation, it still cultivated emotion, moral values, desires, and other aspects of life that were important to human society.Regarding the social value of religion, Lunacharsky wrote:[1] From the socialist point of view, the attitude of the proletarian movement toward religious organizations is built on the basis of their positions in the class struggle.[citation needed] Along with Feuerbach, they also received inspiration from Richard Avenarius' Naturfilisof, Ernst Mach's Empirio-criticism, as well as from Friedrich Nietzsche.Lunacharsky believed that theatre and symbolism were important tools of psychological and sociological transformation, and the "struggle of the human soul" against oppression.Vladimir Lenin was infuriated by this concept, and considered Lunacharsky's position to be extremely harmful, by supposedly transforming Marxism into a mild liberal reformism.But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven.[citation needed] Lunacharsky advocated criticizing clergymen for failing to keep biblical teaching and other strategies that relied on understanding religion in greater depth.One Communist rural teacher who supported him claimed that he would not preach atheism to peasants because when one makes them atheists, one deprives them of all rituals along with the religion and gives nothing to replace them with.A Komsomol activist who supported him presented a case of a person whose wife had died, was buried through means of an emotionally cold and indifferent secular-communist ceremony, and the man, greatly depressed by it, consumed a full bottle of vodka while crying in tears.Laskovaia, a Soviet author, pointed to a similarity in Lunacharsky's ideas with the Death of God concept of western theologians, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John A.T.[3]: 96 In Ukraine it was called the 'Holiday of the Hammer and Sickle', which is described: Special rites and ceremonies were devised in the 1960s to celebrate the granting of passports on the sixteenth birthday.