Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia said all attempts to build a world without God will fail.
"The atheistic model of people's development failed together with the ideologies of the 20th century," the Patriarch said at the fourth congress of the leaders of world and traditional religions held in Astana on Wednesday.
If attempts are made to put religion into a ghetto, separating it from social processes, they "will fail as did the attempts made by countries where the atheistic ideology was prevalent."
"Such attempts now appear to be hasty and unrealistic. They will fail in the same way as the grandiose state atheism project failed," Patriarch Kirill said.
The idea of supremacy of autonomous reason, maximal freedom, constantly expanding limits of secular life, and separation of people from God and traditions began to be promoted last century, he said.
"Millions of our contemporaries, mainly young people, have found themselves participating in a global experiment aimed at forcing a system of utilitarian values on us. Never in its history has mankind experienced such systemic forcing of global social, cultural, philosophical standards," Patriarch Kirill said.
In this system, sin becomes the norm and "there is no concept of morals, there is a concept of comfort," he said. To achieve comfort, young couples give up childbearing and kill babies they conceive, send their old parents to special hospitals and old people's homes, families are destroyed, women's right to motherhood is being taken away from them, modern women being made commercial incubators through the use of modern technologies, and euthanasia is used, he said.
"In this situation, faith can help people see the self-realization mechanism and shows the limit behind which the meaning of life and human dignity is lost," the Patriarch said.
"Some well-organized minorities are successfully forcing their will on the majority under the pretext of human rights observance," Patriarch Kirill said. This leads to increasing encroachments on the rights of believers, including Christians, human trafficking, poverty, hunger, and sexual exploitation of women and children, he said.
"If the human rights industry loses its spiritual and moral dimension and becomes a tool of political propaganda used for promoting specific philosophies to the detriment of others, its fruit will bring mankind a lot of injustice and make people slaves of sin, excessive consumption, and pride. Now we, religious leaders, are expected to speak clearly about the harm of attempts to build a world without God," Patriarch Kirill said.