Jack is quoting Marx to discredit atheism via Stalin despite there being nothing but the most tenuous connection between the three.

Atheism is, at its root, anti-authoritarian because authoritarianism leads directly to the fallacy of believing in god as this divine creature that knows all and controls all. Therefore a state cannot be atheistic if it is totalitarian. Period. When a religious tenet holds that everything belongs to god, that is no different than the totalitarian tenet that everything belongs to the dictator, it is the same belief. There are no gods--religious or secular. Therefore, one cannot serve as a replacement for the other and be acceptable to the atheist. One person cannot play this god and hold the power of life and death over everyone else.

Someone ridiculed me for saying that an atheist state would represent the purest form of democracy but there is no argument. I specifically said "The purest form of democracy" and not simply the so-called democracy practiced in the United States. I am referring to "pure democracy" not some diluted, hack-up republicanism contaminated inextricably with capitalism.

From Meriam-Websters:

Main Entry:pure democracy
Function:noun
Date:1656

: democracy in which the power is exercised directly by the people rather than through representatives

Representatives generally become authority political figures and leads to a tangle of bureaucracy that eventually finds itself in the hopeless condition of eating itself to maintain itself. Just as in atheism where each person must think for himself and not rely on religious figures, officers or scriptures for truth, the people must govern themselves and not rely on others to govern them. To do so is to allow themselves to be controlled and that is the ultimate goal of atheism--to fight outside control. If that is not the goal of atheism then it has no real purpose.