Anarchism and atheism have much in common, please read some of these quotes and respond:
"Every power is animated by the wish to be the only power, because in the nature of its being it deems itself absolute and consequently opposes any bar which reminds it of the limits of its influence. Power is active consciousness of authority. Like God, it cannot endure any other God beside it. This is the reason why a struggle for hegemony immediately breaks out as soon as different power groups appear together or have to keep inside of territories adjacent to one another. Once a state has attained the strength which permits it to make decisive use of its power it will not rest satisfied until it has achieved dominance over all neighbouring states and has subjected them to its will. While not yet strong enough for this it is willing to compromise, but as soon as it feels itself powerful it will not hesitate to use any means to extend its rule, for the will to power follows its own laws, which it may mask but can never deny."
Rudolf Rocker, NATIONALISM AND CULTURE, Book 1, part III.
The Middle Ages: Church and State
Nationalism and Culture
If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1882), in seeming response to Voltaire's "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."
The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1871), quoted from The Columbia Dictionary Of Quotations
People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief
Religion is a collective insanity.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, from Rufus K Noyes, Views of Religion, quoted from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief
The idea of god implies the abdication of human reason & justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty & necessarily ends in the enslavement of manking both in theory & practice.
He who desires to worship god must harbor no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty & humanity.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, his classic statement on the matter
All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties.
-- Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1871), quoted from Emma Goldman, "The Philosophy of Atheism" (1916)
Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.
-- Emma Goldman, words for which she was sent to prison, according to Margaret Anderson, editor of The Little Review, quoted from Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 382
Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us to-day.... The rulers of the earth have realized long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun.
-- Emma Goldman, "The Failure of Christianity," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, April, 1913
Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods; nothing but pain and persecution have been man's lot since gods began. There is but one way out of this blunder: Man must break his fetters which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new world upon earth.
-- Emma Goldman, "The Philosophy of Atheism," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, February, 1916
Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it.
The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven.
-- Emma Goldman, "The Failure of Christianity," in Goldman's Mother Earth journal, April, 1913