Keith&Co.

The Soviet Union chose atheism so that no church would have influence insid e their own social experiment. Communism is not inherently atheist.

A Christain commune would work just as well as an atheist one. Share and share alike, from each according to abilities, to each according to need, no greed, we're all in this together...

Angrillori

Heck, it's pretty clear the early church was communist. I don't know how anyone can read Acts and not believe that Jesus and the disciples' plan for christianity was communist. I don't know what you've been reading, but that's as good an example of communism as you'll ever find!

post tenebras lux

Whilst Marx himself was an ignostic.

Sarpedon

Umm, fascism was almost entirely a Catholic phenomenon. Just yesterday a piece appeared on the BBC website of an influential catholic legislator standing up and praising General Franco for defeating the elected socialistic government of Spain and establishing one based on good catholic values.

Hitler, Mussolini, Franco were all catholics. Mussolini made the Vatican state, and relaid out several city streets in Rome to glorify it and its buildings.

Communism was atheistic, it is true. Most people don't understand how oppressive the religious organizations had been in the countries who went communist. Its no coincidence that countries where religion had a minor role or had a separation between church and state tended not to go communist. The church in Russia, for example owned huge tracts of land, and prior to the abolition of serfdom, thousands and thousands of serfs. Thats right, the church owned people. In China, the situation was similar, the Lamaist buddhist monks had vast holdings and wealth. It was a foreign religion, supporting a foreign government. No wonder chinese revolutionaries would have agreed that religion is the tool of oppression!

They didnt realize however, that communism has all the characteristics of a cult: An almighty leader who is looked upon as possessing more than human wisdom, (what Kruschev later denounced as Stalin's "Cult of Personality") Sacred texts to be repeatedly studied without criticism, and assumed to be true without real evidence, words that change meanings whenever necessary, a reliance on 'revolutionary spirit' rather than facts, for example (i.e. faith) etc etc.

A government made my skeptical and scientific atheists, rather than literary intellectuals, peasants, workers, and soldiers, would probably resemble the government of the United States, France, or Germany, with lots and lots of checks and balances, probably more transparency than any of the above three, and a reliance on facts for decision making. I consider Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy to be a brilliant skeptical treatise on government, which is all about checks and balances, and keeping any particular group or class from gaining too much power. I highly recommend it.

btw, as this has wandered entirely into the realm of religion and politics, I'll move it to GRD, because its too good of a discussion to throw into PD.

Jimmy Higgins

The argument of fine tuning is absurd. It'd be like rolling a die ten times, while recording the values and then saying that there was 1.65*10^-8 chance that the result would be the result that came up.

With regards to communism and atheism... was communism more like "anti-religion" than "a-theism" (anti in the sense of against, not disbelief). I know it seems like a semantics thing, but atheism isn't anti-religion. Communism was hostile and oppressive to religion, while atheism just doesn't believe in it. Is this a justified differentiation?

RyMantys

I agree with you, because although communism was dead-set against religion, there is no real impediment to be religious and communist at the same time, and the goal is the same (roughly): a better world through social justice.
The anti-religious thing stems more from the iniquities of the church than a real interest in the existence of god.

Clete

Say what? I think a lot of hippies were atheists. John Lennon springs instantly to mind.

Sarpedon

This is a link to the BBC article I referenced in my last post.

Johnny Skeptic

Atheism is far from collapsing. Consider the following:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/atheist1.htm

Atheists have always constituted a very small percentage of the population. The number of people who identify themselves as Atheists has grown rapidly, particularly over the last few decades. This increase may have been partly caused by the decline of attendance at Sunday schools, and churches. It probably also reflects the general increase in secularism within society. Many Atheists who feel a need for spiritual discussion, fellowship in a religious community, and ritual join a congregation of the Unitarian-Universalist Association.

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York conducted a massive interview of over 50,000 adults. They estimate that 902,000 (0.4%) of Americans identify themselves as Atheists. The number of Atheists exceeds the number of followers of all of the organized religions in the U.S., except for Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. If one were to count the number of Agnostics among the Humanists, Unitarian Universalists, and those who refused to answer the pollster, they would probably outnumber all of the organized religions in the country, except for Christianity and perhaps Judaism.

A Canadian Angus-Reid poll taken in the mid-1990's found that about 14% of Canadians are Atheists; that would total over 4 million Atheists, circa 2002. The pollsters found out, apparently to their embarrassment, that Atheists formed the largest single religious category of Canadians. So they split the group into two sub-classifications: real Atheists, and Atheists who attend religious services. This made certain that a Christian classification became the largest.

http://atheism.about.com/b/a/129492.htm

Barna [Research Group] has this to say:

85% of Americans self-identify as Christians. (2002)

7% of US adults classify as evangelicals (2004) (see Evangelical category for more information)

38% of US adults classify as born again, but not evangelical. (2004)

37% are self-described Christians but are neither evangelical nor born again

Atheists and agnostics comprise 12% of adults nationwide. (2004)
11% of the US population identify with a faith other than Christianity (2004)

Johnny: What about agnostics? Consider the following:

http://www.adherents.com/rel_USA.html

1990 - 1,186,000

2001 - 991,000

2004 - 1,398,592

Johnny: Atheism and agnosticism continue to enjoy significant gains. However, as a Christian once correctly told me, there is not a necessary correlation between the truth and how many people believe it.

Seeker2000

I don't think this comparison is correct, as a random sequence of dice values is nothing special, but our universe is special in the regard that it allows life to develop. Many other thinkable universes with different values of the physical constants apparently wouldn't allow life as we know it.

Well, IMHO at the moment we still have many open questions about the beginning of our universe and about our very existence. A creator like a god is one possible explanation, but maybe there's a different one. Perhaps a theory of everything in physics might explain the apparent fine tuning or maybe something like a supposed multiverse exists. At the moment we cannot answer these fundamental questions about the universe with certainty.

I think you've got a point here. Communism, at least the versions of it that have existed, has been very oppressive to religion, while atheism is not necessary oppressive, but rather a statement of disbelieve.

Open-minded people, regardless of their beliefs, should always be able to live peacefully together with other people, regardless of their beliefs.