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Marxist-Leninist Atheism

FreedomFromAll said:
lol Thanx for your strawman argument.

I would never support State Atheism anymore than I would support State Religions. And I am not a New Atheist I am a Strong Atheist, so go argue with whoever it is that you thought I was.

Try as you might you cannot relate Atheism with Communism at least not without a huge amount of intellectual dishonesty.
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The attempt to disassociate "new" atheism or "strong" atheism or whatever from Marxist-Leninist atheism is certainly dishonest.
 
RGacky3 said:
Nationalizing =/= socialist, if it did, then absolute monarchies are socialist.

nationalizing is ONLY socialist if it leads to democratization.
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The USSR was democratic. The only problem was the size of the franchise, which was limited to loyal party members. It was the only way to implement the full socialist program in the USSR and certain other leftist governments, so it's just another unintended feature of socialism. Oligarchy is to socialism what head injury is to American football -- neither intended nor desired but inevitable.
 
LowDown said:
The attempt to disassociate "new" atheism or "strong" atheism or whatever from Marxist-Leninist atheism is certainly dishonest.
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Well ok then Your religion is directly associated with Charles Manson, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Al-Qaeda, All religious extremism, Every person that believes in god that did anything wrong. And lets not foreget that Slavery was the direct result of religion since slave owners were by far Christians. ANd those pedophile Priests is a religious problem.

Satanists would not exist if it was not for the bible.


Your dogma is pointless Atheism wasnt what Lenin or Marx was promoting. Communism's main point is to destroy individualism and religions are collective systems that compete with the political collective. When you compare religions and Atheism with Communism the reality is that religions have a lot in common with Communism while Atheism does not.

Atheism is simply the individual observation that gods do not exist. That observation has nothing to do with Communism or people who write books about Atheism. Those so called "New Atheism" talking heads are not representative of all Atheists, they do not speak for me as a individual. So you can save your collective assumptions for collectives not individuals.
 
Cyrylek said:
Of course, of course. Nobody here is calling for censorship. But is it a right thing to do, to go on an "atheist crusade" beyond polite skepticism and above securing the place for atheists under the sun? What if I convince someone that there's no reason to believe in the Imaginary Friend, and that someone will interpret his newly-found freedom from superstition as a license to crack skulls - Hey, it's not like I will burn in hell? Will I be responsible?

I should be free to explain and promote my atheism, of course. But should I actually exercise this right in front of the broadest possible audience?
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If a person feels the need to talk publicly about Atheism why should I care, its not like that person has anything to do with me.

And if a adult needs religion to keep them from doing bad things and then has no religion and does bad things, they seriously need to be locked up in a mental institution. Something is seriously wrong with a person that cannot tell right from wrong. And most likely religion wasnt stopping them in the first place from doing bad things. Pedophile priests show that religion is of no help in stopping immoral acts towards children. Morality isnt found in a book its found within the mind. If a person cannot think for themselves and need a book to think for them then they have learned nothing about adult life they are still immature.
 
Cyrylek said:
(...)
But there's also no reason to think that any person whose morality was framed in religious terms will smoothly switch to the "God-free" version. Taboos were gone, and replaced not with nothing or some intuitive morality, but with the hideous morality of the "new communist man", at least in some minds - numerous enough to inflict a mass slaughter on unprecedented scale.

Well, I am not a religious person, but there's simply too much suggesting exactly that, in many instances, under many circumstances. It is not an iron-clad law, obviously. But we need to develop and affirm a consistent non-religious morality first, before going full speed with knocking down the flawed, authority-based, dysfunctional but still existing - warts and all - morality. Our fierce disagreement on such key issue as meaning and significance of coercion and freedom of choice, for example, illustrates rather well that we atheists are not quite done with that project yet. (...)
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Spot on!

Sometimes, the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century were labelled "post-religious religions". They did not replace religious worldview with open-minded rationalism, but with an ideological substitute for religion, replacing God for science, claiming science is on the side of these ideologies (be that Marxist-Leninist historic dialectics of a history of class wars, or the Nazi pseudo-biologism of the struggle for survival and Social Darwinism), and replaced "heaven" with utopias.

Maybe this development was an inevitable bad side effect of enlightenment: Once rationalism had shattered the old myths, there were enough people with a need for myth who embraced new, modern myths. Which turned out to be much more oppressive and murderous than the old myths.

What do you think? Is an open-minded rationalism even possible on the large scale? Or is it part of human nature to cling to myths, to ask for closed systems providing the answers about dark spots in our capacity to explain? Do we really have the choice between religious superstition on one side and enlightened rationalism on the other -- or is the real choice between less and more harmful myths?

Oh, and an unrelated question: Have you read Hannah Arendt, and if yes, what do you think of her thoughts about totalitarianism?
 
German guy said:
What do you think? Is an open-minded rationalism even possible on the large scale? Or is it part of human nature to cling to myths, to ask for closed systems providing the answers about dark spots in our capacity to explain? Do we really have the choice between religious superstition on one side and enlightened rationalism on the other -- or is the real choice between less and more harmful myths?
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I do not doubt that we are hard-wired to believe and mythologize. It is a part of human nature. But so what? - we are also hard-wired to kill, rape, steal, etc. Suppressing parts of our nature is the essence of civilization, and civilization is obviously possible, if never lacking in defects and examples of atavistic barbarism.

The question is: how hard should we push in pursuit of that open-minded rationalism? Clearly, a society that levels brutal punishments on someone who had killed in self-defense, unwittingly had sex with a willing partner two hours short of the age of consent, or stole bread to feed her children is not a virtuous (or rational) society. Likewise, an individual who makes the rigorous pursuit of rationalism into an absolute virtue may be on a wrong track.

At the risk of sounding extra banal, humanity is like a much-abused child who needs her imaginary friends and her fairy tales, to stay sane, to have a chance at further development. Not just a painkiller ("opium", as Marx said - at the time when opium was not perceived as an evil narcotic, but as a medicine), but a support structure. Do I think that children should grow up and become adults? Of course. Do I think that a caretaker must convince a traumatized 5-year old there's nobody out there to talk to, and she is absolutely and forever alone? Of course not.

Time, patience, and the protection of liberal (in the Euro sense), secular state - for believers and non-believers alike.

German guy said:
Have you read Hannah Arendt, and if yes, what do you think of her thoughts about totalitarianism?
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Long time ago, and only Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft. The rest of Arendt is, like, on my reading list, for years. One day...

I think she is near-perfect in her description of totalitarianism - and in making the decisive distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian "fascisms". But her analysis of the origins of the phenomenon is a muddle. It is hard to understand why the disintegration of "classes" into the blob of "masses" led to such catastrophic events in Russia and Germany, but not in America, for example. And all the talk about racism as ideology of "imperialism" sounds hopelessly naïve. A hard-to-wash-out residue of Marxist thinking, even in a brain as brilliant as hers.

That's how I remember it, anyway. I feel that I should re-read it, before claiming a good degree of understanding.
 
RGacky3 said:
Nationalizing =/= socialist, if it did, then absolute monarchies are socialist.

nationalizing is ONLY socialist if it leads to democratization.
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So, for example...the USSR with its Stalin-times collective farms mimicking the absolutist "serfdom" - slavery, plain and simple - was not "socialism"? They thought it was, and their sophisticated sympathizers in the West thought it was, and their followers in China, Africa and Latin America thought it was - but it just wasn't.

OK, if you say so.

Now, if ONLY it would lead to "democratization"....Care to explain, how robbing people of their hard-earned possessions and herding them, like cattle, into state-owned facilities is supposed to lead there - ?

Because that's what "nationalization" is, basically. Which is ridiculously obvious to anyone still capable of navigating reality.

When I was in the second grade, at a Moscow school, one sunny noon I had opened my ranetz - a backpack for books and stuff- and found that my apple and hard-boiled egg are gone, replaced with a note: " Your lunch had been nationalized. This is for your own good. Love. Your friends forever".

Sometimes I wonder, why the American intellectuals with any number of respectable degrees under their belt have a hard time rising to the level of comprehension that came naturally to any blue-collar-neighborhood 9-year-old in some Slavic perpetual-disaster area?
 
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FreedomFromAll said:
Well ok then Your religion is directly associated with Charles Manson, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Al-Qaeda, All religious extremism, Every person that believes in god that did anything wrong. And lets not foreget that Slavery was the direct result of religion since slave owners were by far Christians. ANd those pedophile Priests is a religious problem.

Satanists would not exist if it was not for the bible.


Your dogma is pointless Atheism wasnt what Lenin or Marx was promoting. Communism's main point is to destroy individualism and religions are collective systems that compete with the political collective. When you compare religions and Atheism with Communism the reality is that religions have a lot in common with Communism while Atheism does not.

Atheism is simply the individual observation that gods do not exist. That observation has nothing to do with Communism or people who write books about Atheism. Those so called "New Atheism" talking heads are not representative of all Atheists, they do not speak for me as a individual. So you can save your collective assumptions for collectives not individuals.
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There are many examples of organized religions and states with official religions that manage to behave in a beneficent fashion despite examples of those that don't. In fact, beneficent religious organizations are the rule even if you want to go back hundreds of years to the bad old days of the Spanish Inquisition and so on. But if there is even a single example of an officially atheistic (as opposed to secular) state that has not enforced its policies in part by murdering large numbers of its own citizens in modern times then I don't know what it is.

The observation that most atheists are left leaning still holds for the most part. If leftist atheists intend to ascend to power somewhere I think that the people need to be on their guard.

"Slave owners were by far Christians, etc." has got to be the dumbest piece of ahistorical claptrap ever uttered. Slavery has been common to all cultures whatever their religion all throughout history. What is different about Western Christian cultures is that they are the only ones in all of human history that have ever thought that slavery should be abolished, and this is an idea that arose directly out of Christian doctrine.
 
LowDown said:
There are many examples of organized religions and states with official religions that manage to behave in a beneficent fashion despite examples of those that don't. In fact, beneficent religious organizations are the rule even if you want to go back hundreds of years to the bad old days of the Spanish Inquisition and so on. But if there is even a single example of an officially atheistic (as opposed to secular) state that has not enforced its policies in part by murdering large numbers of its own citizens in modern times then I don't know what it is.

The observation that most atheists are left leaning still holds for the most part. If leftist atheists intend to ascend to power somewhere I think that the people need to be on their guard.

"Slave owners were by far Christians, etc." has got to be the dumbest piece of ahistorical claptrap ever uttered. Slavery has been common to all cultures whatever their religion all throughout history. What is different about Western Christian cultures is that they are the only ones in all of human history that have ever thought that slavery should be abolished, and this is an idea that arose directly out of Christian doctrine.
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The difference here is that the majority of Atheists do not want to force anyone to be Atheists. While religion has a extremely bad record of forcing itself on unwilling victims.

By Left do you mean left of the extreme Right? Atheism isnt a ideology. Your entire premise that Atheism is a attribute of Communism is fallacious and ignore reality.


My comment about slave owners being Christian was to laminate how ridiculous that you sound. It was an example of the same exact absurdity and fallacious attack that you are using here..
 
FreedomFromAll said:
The difference here is that the majority of Atheists do not want to force anyone to be Atheists. While religion has a extremely bad record of forcing itself on unwilling victims.

By Left do you mean left of the extreme Right? Atheism isnt a ideology. Your entire premise that Atheism is a attribute of Communism is fallacious and ignore reality.


My comment about slave owners being Christian was to laminate how ridiculous that you sound. It was an example of the same exact absurdity and fallacious attack that you are using here..
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You are claiming a symmetry here that doesn't exist. There are plenty of examples of officially religious states that are benign. There are no examples of benign atheistic states and several examples of states whose leaders made the claim that atheism was central to communism (Lenin made that claim explicitly, i.e., that a communist must be atheistic.) I will stipulate that not all atheists are communists, but so what? Is there an example of a leftist government that's not atheistic? Of course there are many such examples. Perhaps it's not entirely coincidental, though, that those states don't go in for mass murder of their own citizens, they are more pluralistic, and they hold to the rule of law. I would entertain exceptions to this general rule, but I can't think of any just off hand. Are there examples of religious leaders who go in for citizen-cide? Of course, but they are the exception.
 
The only ideology that truly matters is those who believe in freedom of religion. I stand with Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists and other atheists who respect the right of a person to hold a belief without state persecution. I condemn anyone of any belief or philosophy who does not.
 
FreedomFromAll said:
if an adult needs religion to keep him from doing bad things and then has no religion and does bad things, they seriously need to be locked up in a mental institution.
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Perhaps. Are you volunteering to pay for this mega-hospital, to guard it, to be the nurse, the orderly, the guy who ties the "inmates" to their beds and administers the "sedative"?

I didn't think so.
 
rathi said:
The only ideology that truly matters is those who believe in freedom of religion. I stand with Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Buddhists and other atheists who respect the right of a person to hold a belief without state persecution. I condemn anyone of any belief or philosophy who does not.
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I agree the point should be freedom of religion. personally the only time that I care what someone else believes is when that belief is stepping on other peoples rights.
 
I'd just like to point out that there are brands of people/parties that call themselves "socialist", which are not revolutionary, totalitarian or dictatorial, and have proven that in history too.

In Germany, there was the split between anti-revolutionary Social Democrats and revolutionary Communists at the end of WW1. The Social Democrats, although explicitly Marxist and generally "socialist", became the main creators and strongest defenders of the republican system. They consequently opposed and attacked anti-republicans from both left and right (commies, monarchists, Nazis) and were the only party to vote against Hitler's Enabling Act in 1933.

The French Socialists are anti-revolutionary too and embrace the republican system. For reformists such as them, respecting the rules of constitutional state and law is more important that political projects to further socialist goals -- and when the system does not allow to realize a certain goal, they drop it instead of violating the rules.

Don't really know much about the Russian Mensheviki, but I guess they were similar.

So "socialism" does not necessarily equal dictatorship, authoritarianism or even totalitarianism.
 
Cyrylek said:
Perhaps. Are you volunteering to pay for this mega-hospital, to guard it, to be the nurse, the orderly, the guy who ties the "inmates" to their beds and administers the "sedative"?

I didn't think so.
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Wow that was a stretch dont you think?
 
FreedomFromAll said:
Wow that was a stretch dont you think?
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And saying that the majority of people on this planet who derive their moral systems from their religious beliefs belong in a loony bin - that wasn't a stretch?
 
LowDown said:
You are claiming a symmetry here that doesn't exist. There are plenty of examples of officially religious states that are benign. There are no examples of benign atheistic states and several examples of states whose leaders made the claim that atheism was central to communism (Lenin made that claim explicitly, i.e., that a communist must be atheistic.) I will stipulate that not all atheists are communists, but so what? Is there an example of a leftist government that's not atheistic? Of course there are many such examples. Perhaps it's not entirely coincidental, though, that those states don't go in for mass murder of their own citizens, they are more pluralistic, and they hold to the rule of law. I would entertain exceptions to this general rule, but I can't think of any just off hand. Are there examples of religious leaders who go in for citizen-cide? Of course, but they are the exception.
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Atheists are not prone to forcing their beliefs like religious people are. That is why you cant find a legitimate government that has State Atheism. Communist countries actually replaced religion with the State. Lenin was treated like a god and look at North Korea and their Juche religion.

And dont forget that there are plenty of modern theocracies that kill their own citizens. The mid east is full of them.
 
Cyrylek said:
And saying that the majority of people on this planet who derive their moral systems from their religious beliefs belong in a loony bin - that wasn't a stretch?
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No I didnt say that. Thats just how you took it. What I was saying is that IF a person needs a book to tell them not to kill other people or not to lie or cheat and if you take that book away and they start killing at will and all that, then they need to be locked up as loons.
 
LowDown said:
Marxist-Leninist atheism is part of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy. It rejects religion and relies on a materialist understanding of nature. Marxist-Leninism promotes atheism and argues that religion should be abolished. It has its roots in the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, George Wihelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and V.I. Lenin. (Wikipedia)

Feuerbach was mainly motivated by a desire to remove certain limitations on human behavior that traditionally were imposed by religious belief. The trick was to remove the restrictions that one doesn't like while retaining those one does. How to get rid of a restriction about sex without also destroying the prohibition against violations of human rights and dignity since those prohibitions are there traditionally because God says so? He attempted to address fundamental concerns of human rights and dignity, morality, and the purpose of existence by reformulating them in a way that was not supernatural. His solution was to create a belief centered on worship of humanity. Marx was attracted by Feuerbach’s way of thinking and incorporated it into much of his own writing.

Marx tended to see religion in terms of either a means of controlling the people for the benefit of the ruling classes and at the same time a means for the poor and dispossessed to find comfort and consolation. Marx disapproved of religion in both senses because it turned the poor away from the idea that they could improve their lot through revolution. Marx thought that with revolution and the realization of the communist utopia that religion would disappear altogether there being no more reason for it to exist. Marx clearly saw elimination or undermining of religion as a means of deliberately provoking violent revolution against the established order.

Lenin rejected the idea that religion could be replaced with a Feuerbach type worship of humanity and insisted on a purely materialistic philosophy, going further than Marx and many other Marxists were willing to go. According to Lenin a true communist could only be atheistic.

Official policy in the USSR under Lenin and later Soviet rulers was that religion was tolerated, but the state was to do whatever was deemed necessary in order to eliminate it. Anti-religion efforts thus became a central part of the attempt to produce the “New Soviet Man.”

The thought initially was that religion would die away spontaneously with the coming of the socialist system. When this didn’t happen anti-religious campaigns were begun. Huge amounts of money and resources were spent, legislation was passed, arrests were made, and violence was used to suppress religion, but the whole effort failed.

Refusing to accept the idea that it might be the oppression of the Soviet state that caused people to hold on to their religious beliefs, Soviet leaders re-adapted their thinking about religion such that religion became the cause of harsh conditions in the Soviet Union rather than a result of those conditions. Religion was thus blamed for at least part of the Soviet Union’s failures.

Marx’s understanding of religion underlines his basic lack of understanding of human nature. He thought that people would give up religion when the political conditions supporting it ceased to exist. He was wrong about this because he was wrong about why people believe in the first place. By the same token he was wrong in his idea that the state would cease to exist when the socialist idea was realized. In truth the Soviet state became an entrenched class interest in itself that appropriated resources for itself to the detriment of everyone else. A basic understanding of human nature would have allowed Marx to foresee this. He thought that it would be possible to mold men in the image of the ideal socialist – that it would be possible to create the New Soviet Man. This also was a miserable failure resulting only in a selfish, self centered and nihilistic generation of apparatachiks that plague the Russian Republic even to this day. He thought that if the people held property in common they would work as hard to improve it as they would if they owned it themselves. The squalor, want and waste of captial that characterized the Soviet Union puts the lie to that idea.
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Religion is a threat to totalitarian ideals, such as communism, because it offers another source of authority which is not the State. It's not hinged in atheism for anything; but rather adopts the anti-theistic policies in order to promote itself, its own State, as the supreme and unchallenged power. It's nothing more than that. This is, BTW, why SECULAR government is the best.
 
LowDown said:
Here we go with this pathetic attempt on the part of atheists to put distance between themselves and one of the few big experiments with official state atheism. The USSR even followed the recommended course of the New Atheists and attempted to abolish religion. The results speak for themselves.
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There's just not a face palm big enough.
 
LowDown said:
The USSR was democratic. The only problem was the size of the franchise, which was limited to loyal party members. It was the only way to implement the full socialist program in the USSR and certain other leftist governments, so it's just another unintended feature of socialism. Oligarchy is to socialism what head injury is to American football -- neither intended nor desired but inevitable.
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It wasn't democratic at all, it had a system called democratic centrism, which essencially left the democratic process to nothing more than red stamping.
 
Cyrylek said:
So, for example...the USSR with its Stalin-times collective farms mimicking the absolutist "serfdom" - slavery, plain and simple - was not "socialism"? They thought it was, and their sophisticated sympathizers in the West thought it was, and their followers in China, Africa and Latin America thought it was - but it just wasn't.

OK, if you say so.

Now, if ONLY it would lead to "democratization"....Care to explain, how robbing people of their hard-earned possessions and herding them, like cattle, into state-owned facilities is supposed to lead there - ?

Because that's what "nationalization" is, basically. Which is ridiculously obvious to anyone still capable of navigating reality.

When I was in the second grade, at a Moscow school, one sunny noon I had opened my ranetz - a backpack for books and stuff- and found that my apple and hard-boiled egg are gone, replaced with a note: " Your lunch had been nationalized. This is for your own good. Love. Your friends forever".

Sometimes I wonder, why the American intellectuals with any number of respectable degrees under their belt have a hard time rising to the level of comprehension that came naturally to any blue-collar-neighborhood 9-year-old in some Slavic perpetual-disaster area?
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It wasn't socialism, the peasants didn't control the land they tilled ....

It doesn't need to LEAD to democratization, it IS democratization.

Natinoalization makes sense sometimes and not other times, when an industry is such that it effects the entire nation, and peoples lives are effected or depend on it that have no say over it, then natinoalization doesn't make sense, not so with restaurants or barbershops and so on.

You havn't really made any arguments here, btw the earliest opposers and most consistant opposers of the USSR were actual socialists.
 
German guy said:
I'd just like to point out that there are brands of people/parties that call themselves "socialist", which are not revolutionary, totalitarian or dictatorial, and have proven that in history too.

[...]Don't really know much about the Russian Mensheviki, but I guess they were similar.

So "socialism" does not necessarily equal dictatorship, authoritarianism or even totalitarianism.
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That is correct. It doesn't mean, of course, that totalitarian versions are not socialism.

The Mensheviki were the moderate fraction of the same party of the Leninists (Bolsheviki) and probably do qualify as democratic socialists. More prominently, the agrarian Socialist Revolutionaries were a part of the Provisional Government the Bolsheviks liquidated (Prime Minster Kerensky was one of them), and then a major force in resistance.

(Right after the putsch, the Bolsheviks did allow long-planned elections for the Russian Constituent Assembly to proceed, albeit many parties were excluded from participation, and some groups of population - from voting, the press was heavily censored, and balloting in Bolshevik-controlled areas obviously fixed. Still, the SRs won easily, getting 410 seats (against 170 for Lenin and Co). The Assembly met for one day, and was shut down by the Bolsheviks, crowds attempting to defend it shot and dispersed.)
 
RGacky3 said:
You havn't really made any arguments here, btw the earliest opposers and most consistant opposers of the USSR were actual socialists.
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You haven't made any arguments at all, except for indulging in the True Scotsman fallacy.

Of course, there are moderate socialists and anti-totalitarian socialists. It doesn't make the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics non-socialist.

My grandma used to say: "Mensheviks and SRs believe that most people are masochists, and will submit to abuse voluntarily; Bolsheviks and Nazis believe that most people are sadists, like themselves".
 
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