Do I really need to point that out? Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
If one wants to play "edgy contrarian" and argue that the United States was somehow worse than either of those, well...the U.S. is technically secular too.
Believing that the communist countries were not religious countries is a common fallacy of the Westerners.
In reality communism was a religion and more precisely a variant of the Christian religion, but this fact was disguised by changing the names of all things related to the Christian religion.
Just a few of the correspondences between Christianity and Communism (shown as traditional word => communist word for the same concept):
Christian => atheist
Pagan => Christian
Prophets => Marx, Engels & Lenin
Holy Scriptures => the published works of Marx, Engels & Lenin
Christian martyrs => communist illegalists
Pope => general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Cardinals/patriarchs => general secretaries of communist parties
Priests => members of the communist parties having functions in the party hierarchy
Religious teaching in schools => Political teaching in schools
Priest of a military unit => Political second-in-command of a military unit
Heretics => oppositionists to the party leadership
Happy life in the afterlife => happy life in the future truly communist society
Holy Inquisition => Committee for State Security
... and so on.
Writing a complete dictionary about all the words used by Christianity with their replacements in Communism would take a very long time.
While the communist vocabulary looks very different, the meanings are exactly the same as in Christianity.
All the communist countries were not countries free of religion, but on the contrary, they were countries were a monotheistic-like religion was intermingled with all the administrative & government institutions and where all the other religions were aggressively persecuted, including the true atheists or agnostics (i.e. not the communist atheists, which was the code name for the believers in the communist religion).
The claim that the communist countries were not religious was just propaganda, they were countries where there was no separation between the religion and the state.
Likewise false was the claim that the communist countries had a different economic system, in reality their economic system was an extreme form of capitalism, where everything was dominated by monopolies.
It's not that you are wrong, per se, because communism is indeed descended from a Christian culture and full of many Christian ideas. Overall, it functioned as a quasi-religious system.
However, the Soviets actively rooted every religion during their rule, especially Orthodox Christianity. So if we are to consider Soviet communism a form of Christianity, it's unclear how useful this actually is.
Do I really need to point that out? Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
If one wants to play "edgy contrarian" and argue that the United States was somehow worse than either of those, well...the U.S. is technically secular too.
Believing that the communist countries were not religious countries is a common fallacy of the Westerners.
In reality communism was a religion and more precisely a variant of the Christian religion, but this fact was disguised by changing the names of all things related to the Christian religion.
Just a few of the correspondences between Christianity and Communism (shown as traditional word => communist word for the same concept):
Christian => atheist
Pagan => Christian
Prophets => Marx, Engels & Lenin
Holy Scriptures => the published works of Marx, Engels & Lenin
Christian martyrs => communist illegalists
Pope => general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Cardinals/patriarchs => general secretaries of communist parties
Priests => members of the communist parties having functions in the party hierarchy
Religious teaching in schools => Political teaching in schools
Priest of a military unit => Political second-in-command of a military unit
Heretics => oppositionists to the party leadership
Happy life in the afterlife => happy life in the future truly communist society
Holy Inquisition => Committee for State Security
... and so on.
Writing a complete dictionary about all the words used by Christianity with their replacements in Communism would take a very long time.
While the communist vocabulary looks very different, the meanings are exactly the same as in Christianity.
All the communist countries were not countries free of religion, but on the contrary, they were countries were a monotheistic-like religion was intermingled with all the administrative & government institutions and where all the other religions were aggressively persecuted, including the true atheists or agnostics (i.e. not the communist atheists, which was the code name for the believers in the communist religion).
The claim that the communist countries were not religious was just propaganda, they were countries where there was no separation between the religion and the state.
Likewise false was the claim that the communist countries had a different economic system, in reality their economic system was an extreme form of capitalism, where everything was dominated by monopolies.
It's not that you are wrong, per se, because communism is indeed descended from a Christian culture and full of many Christian ideas. Overall, it functioned as a quasi-religious system.
However, the Soviets actively rooted every religion during their rule, especially Orthodox Christianity. So if we are to consider Soviet communism a form of Christianity, it's unclear how useful this actually is.
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