In his critique of empiriocriticism, V. I. Lenin also considered it necessary to characterize its relationship to religion in order to show more fully the social significance of this school, which was fashionable in its time. In contrast to those who took at face value the pretensions of Machism to present the scientific thought of the nineteenth century and who hastened to put it in place of "obsolete" materialist dialectics, V. I. Lenin unmasked the "completely reactionary character" of this essentially (...) subjective-idealistic current, which played into the hands of fideism despite the fact that E. Mach considered himself an atheist. (shrink)

I should like to supplement somewhat the interpretation of the data presented by D.E. Furman. It seems to me that to understand current processes, we must have a clearer idea of the starting point of the present intellectual movement—the "mass atheism" of the preceding period. What was this mass atheism?