n,
since, in all its degrees, it tends to destroy the originality of the
child, in that it places something above nature or behind it, which
may be affected by means of works or prayers" also "a properly
constituted socialist state will do away with all the paraphernalia of
spiritualistic magic, and all the actual forms of religion." Engels
proceeds--)

Religion will be forbidden. Now, religion is nothing but the fantastic
reflection in men's minds of the external forces which dominate their
every day existence, a reflection in which earthly forces take the
form of the super-natural. In the beginning of history it is the
forces of nature which first produce this reflection and in the course
of development of different peoples give rise to manifold and various
personification. This first process is capable of being traced, at
least as far as the Indo-European peoples are concerned, by
comparative mythology, to its source in the Indian Vedas and its
advance can be shown among the Indians, Greeks, Persian, Romans, and
Germans, and, as far as the material is available, also among the
Celts, Lithuanians, and Slavs. But, besides the forces of nature, the
social forces dominated men by their apparent necessity, for these
forces were, in reality, just as strange and unaccountable to men as
were the forces of nature. The imaginary forms in which, at first,
only the secret forces of nature were reflected, became possessed of
social attributes, became the representatives of historical forces. By
a still further development the natural and social attributes of a
number of gods were transformed to one all-powerful god, who is, on
his part, only the reflection of man in the abstract. So arose
monotheism, which was historically the latest product of the Greek
vulgar philosophy, and found its impersonation in the Hebrew
exclusively national god, Jahve. In this convenient, handy and
adaptible form religion can continue to exist as the direct, that is,
the emotional form of the relations of man to the dominating outside,
natural, and social forces, as long as man is under the power of these
forces. But we have seen over and over again in modern bourgeois
society that man is dominated by the conditions which he has himself
created and that he is controlled by the same means of production
which he himself has made. The fundamental facts which give rise to
the reflection by religion therefore still persist and with them the
reflection per