"If religion has no intrinsic content and value, and is only a fraud, then its interest to scholarship should be marginal. Yet research institutes publishing houses, journals and thousands of PhDs and other scholars are engagd in nothing other than a systematic lifetime study of religion and its refutation. But if millions of roubles and man-hours of Soviet scholars are spent on the study of religion, then the subject is worthy of scholarly pursuit, and must be in itself a scholarly discipline, not simply a fraud or opiate. In other words, its study required an objective, open-ended approach. Yet Soviet scholars are oblidged to approach the suject with a predetermined conclusion: whatever they discover about religion and the believers, their conclusion must be negative, it must lead to only one single definition of religion, namely that it is a fraud and a delusion. In these circumstances all Soviet atheistic scholarship becomes nothing but support for the main thesis. This obligatory thesis, the condemnation of religion as fraud and believers as vicctims of fraud perpetuated by a clergy who are either clever swindlers or fools, has to be made in such a way as to appear as fresh and new as possible."