God Building was a Russian Marxist school of thought that advocated the construction and organization of a religion of socialist humanity rather than the abolition of religion, as defended by a strictly materialist interpretation of Marxism. Its main proponents among the RSDLP were Anatoly Lunacharsky and Vladimir Bazarov , as well as the writers Maxim Gorky and Alexander Bogdanov .
The idea of a religion of humanity was developed by Ludwig Feuerbach . The idea of a Promethean construction of an individual replacing God is present in Nietzsche .
The superimposition of the plane of ideas and experiences, of idealism and materialism, was one of the fundamental theses of the empiriocriticism of Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach, greatly admired by these Russian thinkers.
The French Revolution and its Cult of Reason and of the Supreme Being provided the example of a religion organized by the State according to the ideals that the latter had set for itself.
Finally, faced with a deeply religious Russian people, the preservation of religion seemed a guarantee of success for a revolution and a new societal project.
In the issue ofMarch 1907In the Mercure de France review , Maxim Gorky defends the position of the God Builders against the atheism of Georgy Plekhanov for whom religions are destined to disappear with the advent of communism.
Anatoly Lunacharsky developed these ideas: already in his first essay, *The Atheist* (1908), he showed that pure materialism inspired a pessimism and passivity that prevented any socialist construction. It was therefore necessary to rouse the people's enthusiasm by emphasizing values of well-being and joy ( naslazhdenie ) and to propose a religion of humanity centered on humankind and progress.
The two volumes of his essay Religion and Socialism (1908) definitively established his doctrine. Religious emotion is paramount and must be redirected to build socialism. People must forge a psychological unity among all individuals, recognizing the sole value of facts and bodies (thus proposing a commandment to love them) and the value of human action. Lunacharsky perceived the religious dimension of the belief in the inevitable advent of the revolution and defined the 1905 revolution itself as the action of the people's religious forces. Christ was not recognized as God, but revered as the foremost of the Communists.
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