When I was a young man, my mother said to me, 'You can't be a communist without being a militant atheist.' So I had to be a militant atheist because I wanted to be a communist.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
My dad was a militant atheist, or is a militant atheist. My mum was sort of bought up in a religious family because she was a Protestant from Ireland but wasn't especially religious.
I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it.
I'm an atheist - a good old North Korean-style atheist.
I've never said I'm a communist.
Communism was meant to be an alternative religion.
I became a Communist because I fell in love with a man who was a Red and entered the Army to take care of the Fascists, and I knew it would please him if I became one.
My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.
When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine. I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn't work, but I've never pretended it didn't happen to me.
You might say I was a passive atheist through my teenage years.
I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.