Atheism is alone competent to bring true freedom to mankind, and it is therefore the first prerequisite of the social revolution. "If God exists, man is a slave; but man can and must be free, therefore God does not exist"—this ontological demonstration of atheism is vigorously presented by Bakunin. If the authority of God and the church be overthrown, there falls therewith the authority of the state, of which the church is a main prop. "As slaves of God, men must likewise become slaves of church and state, in so far as state is sanctified by church." All authority, therefore, is overthrown, all authority save only the authority of Bakunin. Just as Comte promoted himself to the rank of positivist pope, so did Bakunin look upon himself as anarchist pope.
Bakunin, like his teachers, conceives ecclesiastical religion as a superstition which originated in poverty and enslavement. The church is for him a kind of heavenly tavern (Bakunin naturally has in mind the Russian kabak); and conversely the tavern is the heavenly church on earth. In the church and in the tavern the mužik can for a moment forget his sorrows and his poverty, drowning them in the former in irrational faith, and in the latter in vodka—the same drunkenness in both cases.
Bakunin does not conceive religion merely as theism, but lays great stress in addition upon the doctrine of immortality. To him as to his predecessors atheism is at the same time materialism in the sense of antispiritualism. Bakunin appeals in especial to Comte for the reduction of psychology to a branch of biology, one of the natural sciences.
The assumption that there exists an undying and therefore infinite soul seems to him to conflict with the theological doctrine of God's absoluteness, but theology has found it possible to subordinate the infinite to a higher infinite. To mitigate the absurdity theologians have conceived the doctrine of the devil; the infinite is in revolt against the absolutism of the infinite; revolution is dominant even in the spirit world. Nay, the anchorites, revered as holy, were animated by this principle of revolt, which in their case took the form of a revolt against the infinite as typified in human society.
Religion, or superstition, will be overthrown and replaced by positive science and the disillusionment science brings. Bakunin, therefore, esteems logic highly. "You, my friends,
