Correlation isn ' t the same as causation . No but a lack of correlation demonstrates no causation . Correlation implies . If wealth was the primary driving force then the poor educated and rich uneducated should have voted in line with wealth rather than education . Instead uneducated rich people voted with uneducated poor people . The lack of causation demonstrates that the premise that this was a vote on wealth is wrong . <| sep |> Still remember the yogscast video on wows , and holy crap it was so bad . This guy though . he did alright . <| sep |> They come up on every so often for way cheaper i got some rain trousers for 44 , if you can afford to wait , i would wait . <| sep |> While state Communism suppressed competing religious ideologies , it was really only coincidentally atheist , as atheism is not an ideology or philosophy . Am I right or wrong in this assessment ? Wrong . At the time period and place , many people treated communism like the secular alternative to being religious . A good book to read to see the attitudes involved in it is the brothers karmazov written in russia before the revolution . Communism was explicitly atheist . Karl marx ' theory of economic relations was very precise and specific about ideas stemming from material economic relations in a way that didn ' t leave much room for the divine . And his explanation of religion ' s role in society was like a kind of painkiller for lower classes to use to not realize they were oppressed . With the narrative ending with religion ceasing to exist once communism was obtained . In practice , you had to compare marx ' s narrative of history with the religious one . To many christians , socialism seemed unrealistic , since it was claiming to build the utopia that they thought only God could deliver , but by the hands of man . Since the christian eschatology made no mention of this , it seemed anti christian by nature . And on the flipside , for the reasons above , devout orthodox marxists were almost by definition atheist . Since there was a very specific part of marxism explaining what religion was , where it came from , and how you must see it as part of the overall historical materialist system . Marx really did make a specific metaphysical system that atheism was pretty core to . So the atheistic elements of communist parties was not incidental by any means . It was a core part of their doctrine . as atheism is not an ideology or philosophy . This specific part is a weird meaningless word game . Atheism is a philosophy . Its not an ideology , but not all philosophies are ideologies . Presenting it like its not anything is meaningless , especially historically , since what matters isn ' t a dictionary definition , but how real people related to the idea . Your idea that atheism is irrelevant comes from you looking at the wrong aspect . Atheism isn ' t the opposite of religion , but of generic theism . Religions are specific theistic ideologies , like orthodox marxism was an atheist one . Not all theists are christian . Not all atheists are orthodox marxists . And neither generic atheism nor generic theism means much by itself til expanded . But its historically ignorant to think atheism as a concept was not deeply entrenched in and a core part of the worldviews that shaped these ideas . For the ones that were or might be atheist , It was not their lack of belief in a god which drove them and motivated them , it was political , racial and nationalistic reasonsThis is true , but the problem is that the same thing is true of religions . Acting like belief in god the crusades with no intermediary is dishonest . The reason everyone says the crusades and inquisition is because no one can actually think of very many religious wars aside from them . And in the inquisition , something like 3000 people died over 100 years . If that ' s one of the two examples , especially for the time period its highly sketchy to say anyone has much evidence of religion ' s uniquely violent aspect . Even the crusades had many secular reasons aside from religion . They began when someone was being attacked for nonreligious reasons , and asked the pope to help defend them . They spiraled out of control from there . For one thing , Communism is a political ideology , atheism is not political . Its simply the disbelief in gods or goddesses . And here is the thing . Theism isn ' t political either . Its just belief in gods . But the truth is that both these things are large keys in bigger worldviews with associated assumptions that came from them . Insisting that atheism itself the generic statement means little makes no sense , since no one said atheism alone is the entire aspect of this , but that its a core element . Likewise christianity is much more than theism , but christianity would presumably not exist without theism as its core piece . Don ' t be dishonest by comparing one abstract thing with one more fully developed one . By nature the abstract one will look unable to be accountable for anything . But that ' s because you are comparing the wrong things . Likewise it would be dishonest to imply that there ' s no potential implications that directly stem from atheism . Obviously to people who lived at those times there seemed to be . And that ' s what mattered . And in practice atheism does correlate strongly to other views that seem to follow from it . Ones which slowly lead to a kind of slant of a more comprehensive atheist worldview . Sure , there isn ' t only one thing atheists can believe any more than there is only one religion . But saying that its just a position on one thing doesn ' t change that it can be and is entrenched in bigger systems of positions about more things . In practice though , if someone blames random atheists alive now for communism , no logic is going to work on them , so it barely matters .