The article analyzes the views of the most prominent Soviet philosopher E. V. Ilyenkov on religion and points out some ambivalent points that characterize his attitude to religion, for example, the quasi-religious nature of some of his views and philosophical actions. Such, for example, were his classes with deafblind students of Moscow state University and his views on some philosophical and psychological aspects of the upbringing and training of deafblind children. Ilenkov's interpretation of these aspects and the history of teaching deafblind students at MSU, with whom he was friends, were called the Zagorsky experiment. It also asserts that the philosophy of Marxism belongs to the direction of the philosophy of life (understood very broadly) and points out the regime of hidden favoring suicide, which was contained in this atheistic philosophy. The article argues that this regime of hidden favorability was largely due to the fact that death for Marxism and Soviet philosophers is not the subject of consideration and analysis. The removal of the phenomenon of death and its related aspects from the brackets of philosophy as a subject of analysis and reflection was also the cause of various kinds of life tragedies, as in the case of Ilyenkov.