So we were watching "The Amazing Race" (does that make me a Republican?) and one of the factoids narrated while the teams were in Saint Petersburg was about Saint Issac's Cathedral. Apparently when the country went communist, they turned the church into a museum of atheism.
Under the Soviet government, the building was stripped of religious trappings, then turned into the Museum of Scientific Atheism. The dove sculpture was removed, and replaced by a Foucault pendulum. cite
So, yes the Church of Atheism did exist in some funny way. Gorby (I love the name Gorby... sounds like a frog) turned it back into a religious church.
I find this so intriguing. I mean, why don't we have an atheism museum to combat this creationism museum stuff here in America? Why does what makes sense not make money?
Stalin's enthusiasm for Scientific Atheism led to the regime treating faith and belief in God as a form of mental illness. Anyone who was openly Christian had their path to promotion at work blocked, and many professions closed to them.
Thousands of people who stubbornly persisted in the Christian faith were treated as delusional, and found themselves carted off to special hospitals for treatment and re-education. Many of these people ended up in the gulags, a system of concentration camps, many in northern Siberia, where millions of people met their deaths.
Scientific Atheism also promoted the idea that bringing up your kids in the Christian tradition was a form of child abuse. Inevitably, many children of militant Christians were taken into care by the State, to be brought up in vast orphanages
