User talk:EM Jayne

I WANT TO INSERT RELATIVELY HEAVY IMPROVEMENTS IN THE TOP TWO PARAGRAPHS OF THE ARTICLE, "MARXIST-LENINIST" ATHEISM.  AS THE AUTHOR OF A LONG CHAPTER IN MY CURRENT MANUSCRIPT RELEVANT TO MARX & ENGELS, I SUSPECT I KNOW MORE ABOUT THE SUBJECT THAN THE AUTHOR OF THE ARTICLE DOES.  I THINK THE CHANGES WOULD BE USEFUL, ALSO THAT MY PERSPECTIVE BENEFITS FROM BEING SLIGHTLY LESS HOSTILE.   EM JAYNE

HERE IS THE TEXT WITH MY INSERTIONS INCLUDED:

Marxist-Leninist atheism is part of the wider Marxist-Leninist philosophy (the version of Marxist philosophy in the Soviet Union) that rejects religion [1][2] and depends on a materialist understanding of nature. [3] Marxism-Leninism promotes atheism and holds that religion is the opium of the people and should be abolished. [4][5] Its primary roots are in the philosophy of Georg Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and V.I. Lenin. [6]

INFLUENCE OF FEUERBACH AND LEFT HEGELIANS

Marx (1818-1883) was heavily involved in debate on the philosophy of religion in early 19th century Germany. When he was six years old, his father converted the entire family from Judaism to the Lutheran faith, and Marx's complete abandonment of religion during his college years seems evident in his final dissertation comparing Democritus and Epicurus' theories of atomism. His attitude toward toward religion was also influenced by the bitter controversies about Hegel's philosophical legacy subsequent to his death in 1831. Hegel had encouraged widespread intellectual interest in Christianity's ontological assumptions, and his philosophy provided contemporary theology a metaphysical basis that necessitated systematization and argumentative justification. [8][9] Conservative Hegelians led by Schelling wanted to perpetuate this emphasis, but the so-called Young Hegelians led by Bruno Bauer and inspired by Feuerbach sought to retain Hegel's dialectics while rejecting his religion. On their part, Marx and Engels rejected both Hegel's religion and Bauer's relatively apolitical version of atheistic Hegelianism in their first collaborative book THE HOLY FAMILY, published in 1845. Instead, they identified themselves as materialist Hegelians with a radical political agenda. They remained supportive of Feuerbach's effort to separate philosophy from religion, but he politely resisted associating with them, and there seems to have been no effort on their part to contact other intellectuals opposed to orthodox religion at the time, including the science historian Ludwig Büchner, the theologian David Friedrich Strauss, and the two essentially conservative philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.