On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 10:31 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote:
On 8/16/2015 11:13 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
and yes they were totalitarian and many atheists claim not to be. They
killed to support atheism, which is indisputable,
It's not only disputable, it's unevidenced. They didn't care what people
believed about the supernatural, just so they didn't oppose the regime.
Brent, I am not expert in these matters, but as everyone I heard frequent
allusions to the famous Marxist motto: religion is the opium of the
people.
The full quote is,*Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the
heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless
situation. It is the opium of the people.* He was not especially
interested in denying people the comfort of religion except that he saw it
as an instrument of pacifying the peasants and supporting oppressors.
I think he was right, and I also think that he would have been horrified by
Stalin. Also Christ, assuming he existed as described in the bible, would
have been horrified by the southern baptist church.
The inquisition didn't care about love thy neighbor, and the communist
movements that followed Marx also didn't care about the rest of that
sentence.
But I'll come clean: I don't think that communists are atheists, nor do I
think that most people who claim to be atheists are atheists. I suspect
many true atheists claim to be devoutly religious, because that is
strategically convenient. Why wouldn't they? Why would a true atheist care
about proselytizing?
Wikipedia seems to disagree with you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union
Soviet policy, based on the ideology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology of Marxism–Leninism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism%E2%80%93Leninism, made atheism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism the official doctrine of the
Soviet Union. Marxism-Leninism has consistently advocated the control,
suppression, and the elimination of religious beliefs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union#cite_note-country-data.com-1
Is this wrong? Can you point us to any credible historical sources that
contradict these claims?
The source you cite also says:
*Joseph Stalin revived the Russian Orthodox Church to intensify patriotic
support for the war effort and presented Russia as a defender of Christian
civilization, because he saw the church had an ability to arouse the people
in a way that the party could not and because he wanted western help.[5] On
September 4, 1943, Metropolitans Sergius (Stragorodsky), Alexius (Simansky)
and Nicholas (Yarushevich) were officially received by Soviet leader Joseph
Stalin who proposed to create the Moscow Patriarchate. They received
permission to convene a council on September 8, 1943, that elected Sergius
Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.[79] The church had a public presence
once again and passed measures reaffirming their hierarchical structure
that flatly contradicted the 1929 legislation and even Lenin's 1918 decree.
The official legislation was never withdrawn, however, which is suggestive
that the authorities did not consider that this tolerance would become
permanent.[80] This is considered by some a violation of the XXX Apostolic
canon, as no church hierarch could be consecrated by secular
authorities.[81] A new patriarch was elected, theological schools were
opened, and thousands of churches began to function. The Moscow Theological
Academy Seminary, which had been closed since 1918, was re-opened.*
So Stalin, who had studied to be a priest himself, saw religion as just
another tool of oppression. If they were on his side they were fine.
Stalin was insane and went through various psychosis. There have been
periods in history were people were killed in the name of atheism. Some of
them were during Stalin's reign and some were in other periods and in other
countries.
I'm not saying this to argue that people should not be atheists. I am not
religious myself. My point is that atrocities are committed in the name of
absolute belief. I don't think they are ever committed in the name of
doubt. Atheism is absolute belief.
and out of loyalty to Mao, Stalin, and your pal Bamers, Oops! Did I say
that?
You mean President Obama, the guy passed universal health insurance
Perhaps a step in the right direction. I agree that universal access to
health care should be a low bar requirement for civilized countries in
2015. I do have the impression that what he did was to make the slightly
less poor pay for the health care of the poor, while the interests of the
super-rich are left untouched. Why is medical care one order of magnitude
more expensive in the US than in most other advanced economies? That's the
root of the problem!
It's not an order of magnitude more expensive - except on
