Book Promoting Atheism Launched with Great Fanfare in China – Bitter Winter

by Peng Huiling

A new textbook promoting atheism is being promoted in colleges and to CCP cadres as part of the campaign implementing the decisions of the National Conference on Work Related to Religious Affairs of December 2021, where the book was first introduced. The textbook is promoted as an answer to Xi Jinpings instructions at that conference that Marxs views on religion should be more thoroughly studied within the CCP.

The book is called The Principles of Scientific Atheism. It is a massive text of some 400,000 words, published by Bashu Publishing House, and we are told it was six years in the making.

Its author is Li Shen, known for his History of Chinese Science, and History of Chinese Atheism, where he promoted Xi Jinpings theory that Chinese culture has always been intrinsically non-religious.

Li Shen was born in 1946. After earning his doctorate, he worked at the Institute of World Religions of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and was the director of its Confucianism Research Office. He then became a professor of the Department of Philosophy at Shanghai Normal University, and the vice-chairperson of the Chinese Atheism Society. He is also an academic committee member of the International Confucian Federation, and in this capacity he promotes the theory, also supported by the CCP, that Confucianism is essentially a form of atheism.

The book includes four chapters, What is God, Proof of the Non-Existence of God, The Gods and Their Effects, and The Communist Partys Religious Theory and Religious Policy. There is also an appendix on the Main Theological Knowledge and Criticism of Religion. Zhu Xiaoming, former secretary of the CCP Leadership Group of China Tibetology Research Center, wrote a preface.

The book argues that both the non-existence of God and the harmful effect of religion have been demonstrated scientifically, through a process at work both in Western and Chinese philosophy, which culminated in the definitive demonstrations by Karl Marx and by the CCP in China.

The promotion of Lis book confirms the turn in Chinese institutions dealing with religion and departments of religion in the universities from a somewhat more neutral study of religious issues to propaganda for Marxist atheism. This turn can be traced to speeches and instructions by Xi Jinping himself.

Go here to see the original:
Book Promoting Atheism Launched with Great Fanfare in China - Bitter Winter