Introduction

The ideology which brought the greatest harm to mankind in the violence and savagery-filled century we have just left behind, and the most widespread in the world, was without doubt Communism. Communism, which reached its historical peak with the two German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century, spilt so much blood in the world that it left even the Nazis and the imperialists behind. It led to the deaths of innocent people and spread violence, fear, and hopelessness among mankind. Even today when someone speaks of The Iron Curtain countries and Russia, images rise up of communities ruled by darkness, fog, and hopelessness, lifeless streets, trouble and fear. No matter how much Communism is thought of as having been torn down in 1991, the debris it left behind it still exists. No matter how "liberalised" one part of the "unrepentant" Communists and Marxists may be, materialist philosophy, the dark side of Communism and Marxism and which turned people away from religion and morality, still continues to influence these people.

This ideology which spread terror to every corner of the world actually represented an idea which goes back to ancient times. Dialectics was a belief that all development in the universe arose as the result of conflict. Based on this belief Marx and Engels set about analysing the history of the world. Marx claimed that the history of man was one of conflict, that the current conflict was one between workers and capitalists, and that the workers would soon rise up and build a Communist revolution.

The most striking feature of the two founders of Communism was that, like all materialists, they nurtured a great hatred of religion. Marx and Engels were both confirmed atheists and saw the doing away with religious beliefs as essential from the point of view of Communism.

But Marx and Engels lacked one important thing: in order to attract a wider public they needed to give their ideology a scientific appearance. And the dangerous alliance which gave rise to the pain, chaos, mass murders, turning of brother against brother, and separatism of the 20th century emerged at this point. Darwin proposed his theory of evolution in his book The Origin of Species. And how interesting it is that the basic claims he put forward were just the explanations Marx and Engels were looking for. Darwin claimed that living things emerged as a result of the "struggle for survival" or "dialectical conflict." Furthermore he denied creation and rejected religious beliefs. For Marx and Engels this was an opportunity not to be missed.