Science-based Atheistic Education in Theory and Practice

The article proceeds from the task and place of science-based atheistic education >vithin the framework of world-outlook education and in the process of communist education under the conditions of constructing advanced socialism. The difference of the Marxist-Leninist approach to dealing with religion from non-Marxist conceptions makes itself also felt in the close links between the science-based atheistic education and the social practice, in subordinating the anti-religious campaign to the tasks of the working-class struggle. A brief analysis is made of the individual principles of science-based atheistic education, the principles of partisanship, scientific truth, concrete historical approach, dialectical unity of the positive and the critical in the science-based atheistic education and comprehensiveness, and mention is made of the realization of the principles by means of methods, forms and media of scientific-atheistic education. The practice of sciencebased atheistic education raises some problems resulting from the hitherto insufficient application of a differentiated form of approach, from underestimating the limits and boundaries of atheistic education and the relations between social and individual consciousness and from different levels of our knowledge of the world-outlook structure and value orientation of individual social groups. There appears to be a necessity of increasing our knowledge of the actual level and structure of the world outlook of the indifferent persons and the atheists, who, besides the believers, must also be made to underjgo science-based atheistic education, in the interest of the production and reproduction of scientific atheism as a constituent part of the scientific world outlook. Increased efforts to overcome the shortcomings in science-based atheistic education and to bring world-oudook education closer to social practice result also from resolutions of tne 16th Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.