There were atheists in every age. I think its pointless to blame dead people for dead people stuff but I don't think the prevailing belief system exonerates them either.
Well, I frankly think that it’s pretty minor compared to what happened when atheists got the 20th century. Communism was their moment to shine, was the de facto system advocated by atheists during that time period, and to put it mildly, they blew it and any moral credibility to criticize religion with it.
I’ll gladly take 32,000 for the entire Inquisition over another Russian, Chinese, Cambodian, or Vietnamese revolution. Atheists need to own their history too.
I'm not defending anything that has been done in the name of atheism, simply pointing out that at no time in history has their been total cultural hegemony to the extent that the behavior of people could be entirely excused by their cultural position.
Like I said, I genuinely believe its pointless to assign blame to the dead for things in the past. But if we are speaking of moral judgements in the abstract one's cultural context is only mitigating. It isn't a get out of jail free card.
Atheists not exposed to what Communism really is might have thought that Communists are atheists, but they were extremely wrong.
Communists have changed completely the meaning of many words, in order to obfuscate the true essence of Communism.
Communism was not atheism, on the contrary it was a kind of monotheistic religion practically indistinguishable from a Christian sect, but where everything was renamed and whose priests succeeded to obtain the supreme power in the state, unlike in the Western countries where religion is more or less separated from the state.
There is a huge list of exact correspondences between Christian concepts and Communist concepts. Communists had prophets (Marx, Engels and Lenin), holy books (i.e. the books written by the prophets), saints, martyrs (illegalist Communists), priests (the members of the Communist Party with party functions), a Pope (the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), Inquisitions, heretics (e.g. Trotsky or Tito), and so on.
All the religious institutions have been replaced by the Communists with exact counterparts having different names, e.g. the chaplains of the military units have been replaced by political officers through which the Communist Party controlled the military institutions, the religious education in schools has been replaced by a so-called political education which taught the Communist religion, and so on.
While Christians were manipulated to behave as their leaders desired with the promise that obeying the rules will ensure them a happy after-life, even if their present life sucks, the people in Communists countries were manipulated to behave as their leaders desired with the promise that obeying the rules will ensure a happy life for their grandchildren who will live in a true Communist society, even if their present life sucks because the present society is not truly communist.
There has never been any relationship between Atheism and Communism, except that the Communists have hijacked the word atheist, by claiming that the Communist religion is Atheism.
> There is a huge list of exact correspondences between Christian concepts and Communist concepts.
Those concepts are not particularly _christian_ in themselves, they're more constituents of an institutionalised belief system implementing hierarchical control points. It's proven efficient, and you find it in the Roman antique society, you find its equivalent in complex societies, even today in republics, in companies, etc.
Founders, constitutions or associates pacts, policies, fellows/staff members, executive managers, CEO or chairman, internal inspection, HR, etc.
The early communists did not hide this connection. Guess what one of the first agencies in the new USSR was called? The League of Militant Atheists. Ironically, the league was responsible for more deaths by itself than the Inquisition.
As for why atheism often leads to communism, the reason is fairly simple. Atheists like to pretend that they are only responsible for one tenant of belief: “I don’t believe in a God.”
This is not actually true. Imagine if a country puts in a law banning adultery, with heavy fines for doing so. The atheist would likely be angry, even if everyone else in the country agreed with the law. Why should they? There’s no God saying that’s wrong; it’s just a personal opinion like preferring a red car over a blue car. It turns out there’s actually a second tenant:
“Any law or penalty or qualm of conscience, imposed solely by religion, without a justifiable ground outside of religion, shall be considered an unjust oppression, which must be destroyed.”
An oppression, not live and let live, not merely an inconvenience, even if the majority is fine with it. That’s where violence begins, and the preference for an inherently Godless (and inherently anti-religious) society originates.
The two then are as impossible to reconcile as oil and water; one must be comfortably under the thumb of the other if any tolerance is to be had. If one ever loses the upper hand, or the two become an equilibrium, violence will immediately start - an Inquisition on one hand, a League of Militant Atheists on the other.
All the communists, early or late, have been just liars who have used an obfuscated language, where all important words have meant other things than what the Communists claimed.
One cannot judge what Communism is by interpreting literally any text written by a Communist, because all such texts have been just propaganda designed to fool the weaker minds. In order to understand Communism, one must examine what Communists have done, not what they have said. By comparing facts with words, one can deduce the meanings of the Communist words.
Whoever is not aware about the differences between the Communist language and the traditional language, does not understand what Communism is. I was born and I have grown in a country occupied by Communist invaders, so I know very well what Communism really is, and it has no relationship with atheism, in the traditional sense of the word.
No Communist has ever been atheist, despite their claims, with the possible exception of Karl Marx, who might have been sincere in what he has written. However any later Communist has used the books of Karl Marx only as a propagandistic tool, without caring about whether Karl Marx believed anything of what he has said.
Communism is indistinguishable from a monotheistic religion and almost every Communist word and every Communist institution has an exact equivalence in Christian words and institutions.
The fact that the Communists have persecuted or killed the priests or the believers belonging to other churches has nothing to do with their claimed atheism, but it has the same nature as the fights between Protestants and Catholics.
One can consider Communism as the worst Christian sect, which has done things identical with other past religious excesses, but at a much greater scale.
Associating communists with atheists is a huge confusion (which was the purpose of the obfuscated Communist language).
This seems more like an insistence on equating bad things with Christianity. If you take them at their word, Communists were anti-Christian and worked to eradicate Christianity. Yes they believed in something else, but that thing was maybe the state, or the cause of their class.
Most Christian variants have worked to eradicate all the other Christian variants.
Communists have just acted vs. Christians in the same way as Christians vs. different kinds of Christians, and for the same reasons, i.e. in order to suppress anyone who swears allegiance to different authorities.
When discussing communists you cannot "take them at their word", because Communists have always used a special language where a very large number of words have very different meanings than their traditional meanings, for propagandistic purposes. Moreover, even when some phrases should mean the same thing as in normal language, it is more likely than not that they are just lies.
Reading any ancient publication from the former communists states requires experience with communist propaganda to understand which sentences are true and which are false.
This does seem like some large category errors, though. Humans have tried to eradicate other human groups. The Romans fed Christians to the lions; does that make the Romans basically Christians as well? Or the Skeleton Army[0] in 19th Century Britain? Did they turn out to be Christians as well? As I say, you're just forcing one thing, when all sorts of people have tried to kill Christians through the ages.
