I’m sure we have all learned in one school or another, even if it were the school of hard knocks, that communism is a political ideology advocating a classless society, the abolition of private ownership and all sources of wealth and production being collectively owned and controlled, while atheism is the belief that there is no god. One is an ideology, while the other is a theological claim. It seems plausible that, following the fall of the Soviet Union there were far fewer communists, while the number of “people of faith” - be they theists or atheists – need not have changed significantly one way or another.

As I recall (from Sunday School perhaps?), the early Christian church, a faith filled and religious group if ever there was one, was a communist society. Acts 2, 44 – 45.

Faith need not mark out people that we would term “religious”. An example is that to be an atheist requires a great leap of faith, that is, to assent to the unprovable statement, the uprovable premise that no God exists. So, in fact, an atheist and a theist are both people of faith, they are both believers. It just happens that the formers belief is negative, while the latter is affirmative. Additionally, being an atheist need not be the same as anti-religious.

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Eudaimonia