well, i think first of all “state atheism” as presented in capitalist media is in many ways a strawman. 60 percent of cuba is catholic, for example, and only 24 percent atheist.
while attempts by previous socialist governments to address reactionary sentiment in religious spaces have been at times excessive, they’ve been exaggerated by propaganda to an absurd degree (no, clearly you won’t be dragged into the street and shot for mentioning jesus in cuba when 60 percent of the population is catholic) and the issue of reactionary forces in religious spaces is a real one that should be addressed.
however rather than encouraging atheism, a better tactic would be to encourage a kind of secular agnosticism- we ultimately can’t really know if there’s some kind of cosmic consciousness or what, if anything, happens after we die, so let’s focus on what we can know and just try to get along.
i generally take a lot of inspiration from anatoly lunacharsky in my views toward religion, though less so than i used to. he laid out six core principles:
1. Socialism is fighting against religious superstitions and prejudices based on empirical knowledge of objective and subjective science.
2. Socialism is fighting against the religious intellectuals serving the bourgeoisie, just as with the secular intellectuals supporting the bourgeoisie.
3. Socialism is alien to militant atheism, based on opposing prejudice and violence against people.
4. Socialist freedom also implies freedom of religion and an independent search for the truth for every person.
5. Socialism cannot dogmatically hold any one position on the statements “God is” or “There is no God”, and takes a position of agnosticism or “open possibilities”.
6. Socialism unites secular and religious ideological groups in the struggle for the proletariat. Any action aiming to merge socialism with religious fanaticism, or militant atheism, are actions aimed at splitting the proletarian class and have the formula of “divide and rule”, which plays into the hands of bourgeois dictatorship.
overall, i think there’s a lot of truth to these points, though which of these points seems most important to me is a function of material conditions- when i was becoming fed up with the nu-atheist community and it’s problems with islamophobia, points 3 and 6 seemed very important to me, and now while i’m distancing myself from the occult community after getting fed up over the astrology housing discrimination incident, suddenly point 1 seems to be very important to me.