Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Minimalist · 07-20-2008, 04:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dimbulb

Quote:

Originally Posted by Noe Sandoval

That sounds much more likely than Stalin just executing clergy because he doesn't like them. I hadn't thought of that.

Stalin spent ~4 years as a student at the Theological Seminary in Tiflis and became a Marxist there. So what made him a monster? Marxism or Theology? Or did he hate his father? Video games?

ROTFLMAO!

Excellent point, sir.

TheRealityOfMan · 07-20-2008, 04:38 PM

It's important to remember the Marxist take on the role of religion. Marxists believed that religion would naturally die out in due course once material conditions were changed. Once the miserable prols sieze power and the workers revolution brings about a happy socialist state then the material basis for religion is gone and workers don't need the opium of religion anymore.

Today's Trotskyist Socialist Workers groups have the same belief. This is why they are happy to allign with all kinds of 'revolutionary' Islamist groups no matter how anti-Atheistic/secular they are because they naively believe they will abandon Islam once oil driven capitalism/globalism is driven out of Arab states etc.

So the Soviet Union politicians probably didn't worry too much about religious belief but rather any attempts of clerics to change the political process that was driving about a change in material condition.

Demon · 07-20-2008, 05:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by trendkill

Quote:

Originally Posted by Demon

Another obvious flaw in that argument that I don't see brought up very often is the fact that they're comparing a group of people armed with horses, spears, bows and arrows to another group that possessed bombs, tanks, machine guns, fighter jets, chemical weapons and advanced radio equipment...and THEN saying the latter caused more harm because they didn't believe in God!? :banghead:

I was going to mention that because it always comes to mind, and no one ever seems to bring it up. And not only were the weapons massively more efficient at killing in the time of Communism, but the world's population was greater as well, so there were more people available to kill. Just imagine the crusades with firearms and modern population levels.

Honestly, it's hard to imagine how anyone could truly be so stupid. Just what are these people thinking when they say this? So I guess Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have just as easily happened if the Americans had used sticks and forks instead.

patcleaver · 07-21-2008, 02:11 PM

In Russian occupied Poland, the Communists were so religiously liberal with the Christians that they allowed them to continue their 1800 year old tradition of murdering Jews.

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/bo...margolick.html

With the war over, and to tumultuous applause, a thousand delegates of the Polish Peasants Party actually passed a resolution thanking Hitler for annihilating Polish Jewry and urging that those he’d missed be expelled. Indeed, the mopping up soon began. Returning to their villages and towns, Jews were routinely greeted with remarks like “So, ____? You are still alive.” Their efforts to retrieve property were futile — and, sometimes, fatal. Some Jews met their end on trains — not cattle cars this time, but passenger trains, from which they were thrown off. If the trains weren’t moving fast enough, they were beaten to death.

This is a book filled with arresting, appalling images. There’s Treblinka, September 1945: a lunar landscape pockmarked with craters, where Poles had dug thousands of holes searching for gold fillings amid the bones and ashes. Or Polish synagogues disassembled for construction projects, and Jewish cemeteries used for landfill. Or Jewish schoolchildren being harassed and Jewish artisans and professionals denied work.

With the police and courts looking the other way, Jews were murdered randomly, or in pogroms. Behind these massacres, invariably, was the old canard of Jews killing Christian children for their blood, but with a new twist: Jews now craved gentile blood not just to make matzos, supposedly, but to fortify their own emaciated selves.

In the most notorious episode, 60 years ago this month, residents of Kielce, among them policemen, soldiers and boy scouts, murdered 80 Jews. “The immense courtyard was still littered with blood-stained iron pipes, stones and clubs, which had been used to crush the skulls of Jewish men and women,” the Polish-Jewish journalist Saul Shneiderman wrote the following day. It was the largest peacetime pogrom in 20th-century Europe, Gross says. But he maintains that Kielce was nothing special: during this era, it could have taken place anywhere in Poland. Polish intellectuals, Gross notes, were mortified by what was happening in their country. Only a psychopath, one wrote, could have imagined such cruelty.

Days before the pogrom, the Polish primate, Cardinal August Hlold, had spurned Jewish entreaties to condemn Roman Catholic anti-Semitism. Afterward, he charged that by leading the effort to impose Communism on Poland — Jews were in fact prominent in the party, though hardly in control — the Jews had only themselves to blame. The point was seconded by the bishop of Kielce, who suggested that Jews had actually orchestrated the unrest to persuade Britain to hand over Palestine. It was a neat trick: being Communists and Zionists simultaneously. Only the bishop of Czestochowa condemned the killings, and was promptly reprimanded by his colleagues. One wonders how Karol Wojtyla, then a young seminarian, later Pope John Paul II, viewed this cesspool of ignorance and intolerance.

Martian Astronomer · 07-21-2008, 03:59 PM

My understanding is that in order to get up to the 100 million statistic that I've seen batted around, theists will add up not only people killed in the revolutionary communist uprisings and purges, but also the massive number of deaths by starvation due to collectivization and general mismanagement. See, for instance, the

Great Chinese Famine and the article on

Collectivization in the Soviet Union. While I would certainly say that the communists regimes that precipitated these disasters were at fault, I think that trying to blame mass starvation like this on "atheism" is grasping at straws.

dr lazer blast · 07-21-2008, 05:01 PM

If there were only 100,000 people that died because of starvation before stalin, and 5 million died because of starvation during stalin, then its quite obvious who we can blame that on. (the numbers were an example)

GenesisNemesis · 07-21-2008, 05:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dr lazer blast

If there were only 100,000 people that died because of starvation before stalin, and 5 million died because of starvation during stalin, then its quite obvious who we can blame that on. (the numbers were an example)

Who?

Demon · 07-21-2008, 05:37 PM

{edit}

dr lazer blast · 07-21-2008, 05:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GenesisNemesis

Quote:

Originally Posted by dr lazer blast

If there were only 100,000 people that died because of starvation before stalin, and 5 million died because of starvation during stalin, then its quite obvious who we can blame that on. (the numbers were an example)

Who?

the 'who' would be stalin. Guess it wasn't obvoius!!

Heurismus · 07-21-2008, 05:45 PM

Who gives a fuck about those who cannot develop to survive?

Hmm...I just noticed another circularity in religious logic: did you?

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07-20-2008, 04:38 PM	#12
TheRealityOfMan Veteran Member Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: Osaka / London Posts: 1,993	It's important to remember the Marxist take on the role of religion. Marxists believed that religion would naturally die out in due course once material conditions were changed. Once the miserable prols sieze power and the workers revolution brings about a happy socialist state then the material basis for religion is gone and workers don't need the opium of religion anymore. Today's Trotskyist Socialist Workers groups have the same belief. This is why they are happy to allign with all kinds of 'revolutionary' Islamist groups no matter how anti-Atheistic/secular they are because they naively believe they will abandon Islam once oil driven capitalism/globalism is driven out of Arab states etc. So the Soviet Union politicians probably didn't worry too much about religious belief but rather any attempts of clerics to change the political process that was driving about a change in material condition.

07-21-2008, 03:59 PM	#15
Martian Astronomer Senior Member Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Eastern U.S. Posts: 780	My understanding is that in order to get up to the 100 million statistic that I've seen batted around, theists will add up not only people killed in the revolutionary communist uprisings and purges, but also the massive number of deaths by starvation due to collectivization and general mismanagement. See, for instance, the Great Chinese Famine and the article on Collectivization in the Soviet Union. While I would certainly say that the communists regimes that precipitated these disasters were at fault, I think that trying to blame mass starvation like this on "atheism" is grasping at straws.

07-21-2008, 05:01 PM	#16
dr lazer blast Veteran Member Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: charleston sc Posts: 1,622	If there were only 100,000 people that died because of starvation before stalin, and 5 million died because of starvation during stalin, then its quite obvious who we can blame that on. (the numbers were an example)

07-21-2008, 05:37 PM	#18
Demon Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: the World Posts: 520	{edit}

07-21-2008, 05:45 PM	#20
Heurismus Veteran Member Join Date: Jan 2004 Location: West London Posts: 2,337	Who gives a fuck about those who cannot develop to survive? Hmm...I just noticed another circularity in religious logic: did you?

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