NSA Security Posters form the 1950's & 60's

We are doing all we can to liberate those people who are still under the spell of this religious opiate. - Nikita Krushchev

GOVERNMENTATTIC.ORG has a PDF file of NSA Security Posters form the 1950's & 60's. I looked through them and I picked out a few that piqued my interest. Several of them conflate Christianity and Freedom, which I thought was kind of interesting being as our government is supposed to be free of religious influence (3rd amendment in the Bill of Rights). Then there were my parents who were pretty much avowed atheists. My mother's favorite argument was that religion caused more wars and killed more people than any other cause. Could this have been before Stalin's killing of zillions came to light? Let's pretend it was, she was my mother after all. And here we have Krushchev echoing the Communist party line regarding religion.

If you are going to have a functioning society, you need a basic set of beliefs that everyone can agree on. Communists had communism. The West has Christianity, which somehow includes Judaism. The Mid-East has Mohammedanism. And it's not religion that leads to war, it's just the nature of people. We have been fighting wars for tens if not hundreds of millennia. Belief systems just give leaders a way to get everyone motivated to move in the same direction, which is kind of crucial when you go to war.

Via Schneier on Security