I can’t remember if it was Marx himself who said this or not, but I think the point of Marxism isn’t to refute religion, but rather to liberate people from the conditions that lead to them needing religion in the first place.

I would suggest looking into Third International Theory.

It should be noted that unlike Saddam, Gaddafi never materially suppressed communists in his own nation, except perhaps when Libya outlawed all political parties. As far as I know, there were no laws on the books for executing atheists or anything of the like, which was obviously the case in a number of Middle Eastern countries.

Honestly not an expert, but here’s a relevant excerpt from Lenin’s The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion:

“Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as was the materialism of the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists or the materialism of Feuerbach. This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels goes further than the Encyclopaedists and Feuerbach, for it applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of history, to the domain of the social sciences. We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way.”

I personally agree with Lenin’s overall sentiments in the article, both that religion should be a private matter from the perspective of the state but not the party, and that Marxism itself is materialism that is atheistic and promotes atheism by default. I don’t know to what extent this agrees or disagrees with existing beliefs on Lemmygrad on the relationship between Marxism and religion, but I just wanted to vaguely put this out here.