Publication Details

Abstract

The author’s essay on the bourgeois theories of the origin and nature of religion has two parts: in the first one he is analyzing the essential feature of the bourgeois ’’science of religion” (the sociology of religion) and is showing its specific traits; in the second part he is critisizing the different pseudo-scientific theories of the origin of religion (the primal monotheistic, preanimistic, animistic, biological and psychologic theories). On the ground of a vast study of literature the author demonstrates that the bourgeois theories of the origin of religion are nothing but an apology of the capitalist social order. They are a stiffened form of dead traditions, a complex of long disappeared social systems in their idealistic reflection adjusted to positivistic and objectivistic tendencies. In the introduction he also assumes that in examining religious phenomena we may consider as scientific only those cognitions which by explaining the origin and nature of religion by means of the dialectic-materialistic method of investigation help to crush the dangerous illusion that a social, moral and philosophical progress is to be achieved without class fight, a free development of the forces of production and without rasing the level of technics, science and thinking. When critically appreciating the views of to-day’s representatives of the ’’science” of religion and the different theories on the origin of religion we find that they are reactionary, unscientific and harmful, because they make it impossible to understand the religion as an earthly, sociological and historical phenomenon, and continue to promo-te old myths and legends, trying to preserve the false glory of religion and to prolong by shrewd methods the existence of an obscure realm.