Rhea

Assuming the Bible is not historical, right?

Rousseau_CHN

Power Corrups, Absolute power corrupts absolutely

It is true whether they'd be theist or not

AspenMama

"Some are more equal than others."

from Animal Farm, George Orwell

P.S. What does "Corrups" mean?

MacPrince

Isn't that the company that makes all of those coffee makers?

Rusting Car Bumper

Those Stalinist communists who were atheists that killed Chrsitians did so so for political purposes and not for religious purposes. Remember, that they also killed other atheist political opponents as well.

Had it been the case that the church endorsed a form of Marxism then its quite possible things might have been radically different.

No atheists have ever gone araond saying "I kill you in the name of no gods!" However, some misguided theists have done the opposite.

DC

lpetrich

LP:
Judaism has had a relatively clean record mainly because of lack of opportunity.

Rhea:
Assuming the Bible is not historical, right?

Some of the Bible certainly is; The Bible Unearthed is a good guide to that. Basically, the Bible starts getting seriously historical at the time of the Dual Monarchy; Kings David and Solomon are semi-legendary, and the stuff before that is mostly mythology with occasional surviving bits of history.

And Judaism only gradually developed. YHWH had originally been worshipped alongside of several other deities, as some monarchy-era inscriptions attest -- YHWH alongside of the goddess Asherah, for instance.

But a YHWH-only faction emerged during the monarchy, and it explained the nation's setbacks as YHWH punishing them for not worshipping him properly -- for worshipping other deities and stuff like that. It had varying degrees of success in getting official favor; the writers of the Books of Kings noted which kings did good and which did evil in the sight of YHWH. One sign of "goodness" was suppressing the worship of other deities, of destroying their altars and stuff like that.

A notable episode came during the reign of King Josiah, when the high priest Hilkiah "discovered" in the Temple the "book of the Law", whose contents have a suspicious resemblance to the Book of Deuteronomy, specifying centralization of religion in the Jerusalem Temple and so forth.

YHWH-only worship only got strengthened by the Babylonian Exile, when Sabbath observance became very important. Much of the "priestly" part of the early OT got composed after the Exile, notably Genesis 1 and Leviticus (Genesis 2 dates back to the monarchy).

The exile ended by decree of the conquering Persian kings, who allowed a small proto-Jewish quasi-theocracy to exist in their domain -- Jerusalem and a few cities near it in the province of Yehud or Judea.

After Alexander the Great conquered the area, Judea became ruled first by the Egyptian Ptolemies, then by the Syrian Seleucids.

It became independent around 150 BCE under the Maccabee dynasty, which conquered much of the area around it, persecuting all the non-Jewish people. Elie Wiesel and Isaac Asimov once had an exchange about this:

Wiesel: "It was the only time"
Asimov: "It was the only chance"

Which is what I meant by "lack of opportunity"

However, the Maccabees' successors fell under the influence of the Roman Empire, and Judea was eventually incorporated into it. Its inhabitants tried to revolt against the Empire in ~70 CE and ~130 CE, but both revolts were crushed, and the surviving Jews resigned themselves to continuing to live in small communities amidst all the Gentiles. Where it would have been difficult to persecute anyone.

lpetrich

One curious question is why the Soviet Communists were not simply content to dethrone the Russian Orthodox Church and have something like a French-style accommodation with it -- let all the religion addicts get their fixes, while keeping the Church out of political power.

The ROC had had a close relationship with the Tsarist regime; was it essentially the regime's professional ideologists?

Starboy

lpetrich, Soviet Communists did not expunge the Orthodox Church from Russia. You can go there today and see religious enclaves that existed throughout the soviet period. I think the west was far too gullible. They believed everything the Russians said. They did not understand that often the Russian method of dealing with a problem was to simply say it didn't exist. Like they used to say, 'There are no prostitutes in Moscow.'

Starboy

lpetrich

Starboy:
lpetrich, Soviet Communists did not expunge the Orthodox Church from Russia. You can go there today and see religious enclaves that existed throughout the soviet period.

True, the Soviet Government was not completely successful in suppressing the Church. In fact, Stalin brought back the Church in WWII -- which helped keep it going.

I think the west was far too gullible. They believed everything the Russians said. They did not understand that often the Russian method of dealing with a problem was to simply say it didn't exist. Like they used to say, 'There are no prostitutes in Moscow.'

Such credulity was not universal, though it was most common among the Left, which had admired it in past decades, and the Right, which enjoyed having it as a villain.

Yes, left-wingers and left-leaning people used to admire the Soviet Union, especially early in its history. But event after event caused more and more of them to become disenchanted.

Its beginnings (Bertrand Russell).
Stalin's purges, show trials, and demonization of Trotsky
The Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact -- betrayal of the anti-fascist cause
The Soviet Eastern European empire
Crushing of Hungary's rebellion in 1956
Crushing of Czechoslovakia's independent path in 1968

On the Right, there are some daffy libertarians who swallow whole the Soviet Government's official position that the Soviet people owned all the means of production, that it was a state of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers.

And some people who moaned and groaned about the lack of religion, when the Soviet Government had official cults of personality. In the 1970's, Hedrick Smith reported that the Soviet authorities got very upset when a visiting Italian journalist compared the statues of Lenin with statues of Mussolini during Italy's Fascist years.

Starboy

In any case lpetrich, the reports of the death of religion at the hands of the Soviet Communists are greatly exaggerated.

Starboy