The plot to kill God

from free sample chapter -- loaded from http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520255296 chapter 1 Dreams of Secularization We have not the right to close the doors of [the Socialist Party] to a man who is infected with religious belief; but we are obliged to do all that depends on us in order to destroy that faith in him. — George Plekhanov, “Notes to Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbach,” 1892 22 Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Marxists imagined a world with- out religion. What they pictured was a society free from the negative influ- ences of religious institutions that had become the…