Onward, Atheists!

Even dedicated Communists have some bad habits, Nikita Khrushchev admitted last week. Example: saying "God's truth!" But, he added reassuringly, "we are atheists--we could just as easily say, 'I give you my word.' "

The Red Boss had been guilty of some similar slips in an interview with Publisher William Randolph Hearst Jr., and Khrushchev was hastening to dissociate himself from the Almighty. God is John Foster Dulles' friend, he said. "Relying on God and calling his name, Dulles sends emissaries to Turkey and Jordan to kill people. The colonialists with their armies came in and brought the church and God with them. They brought the cross and the Bible to colonial countries. They left the people the religion and took all the people had." Churches are tolerated in 'the Soviet Union, said Khrushchev, but only as long as they keep out of politics. "We are not going to fight for God's body. We don't fight so that coffins may cover other coffins. That's what the Crusades were fought for. How can we understand it when clergymen throw holy water on guns? They are Pharisees."

The current issue of the Soviet magazine Science & Life sounded a trumpet call for new zeal in the struggle against religion. "Apart from creating the material conditions necessary to have religion vanish," said Science & Life, "the Communist Party has worked tirelessly to employ skillfully these conditions to combat religious superstition." Not skillfully enough, perhaps; though the magazine proudly claims 50 million atheists for Russia back in 1935, it hazards no guess as to how many there are today in the 200 million population, reports merely that the number of believers "is continuing to dwindle." This does not mean, though, "that the ideological struggle . . . to rid all believers of religious superstition has receded into the background."

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