Comment by adrian_b
5 years ago
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.
Your counter-argument does not work. It actually provides one more similarity between Communism and the various variants of Christianity and it makes stronger my analogy.
Yes the communists persecuted the other religions, inclusive by imprisoning and/or killing many Catholic priests and many Orthodox priests.
However, this is exactly what was previously done by some kinds of Christians against other kinds of Christians, e.g. during the many conflicts between Protestants and Catholics and between Catholics and Orthodox Christians.
Some people downvoted me, but this also just validates my affirmation that most Westerners are not aware of these facts and they do not understand Communism.
I have grown in a country occupied by communists, so I know from direct experience how Communism works, not from the fantastic depictions typical for the Western movies or novels.
When I was in school, there was nothing that I hated more than the mandatory classes of communist religion, the so-called Political teachings.
Also, due to the stupidity of one of my colleagues, a teacher discovered that I had a Bible and, because of that, I was almost expelled from High School a short time before the final exam, but I was very lucky due to some special circumstances and I could avoid the expulsion.
Many years later, after communism failed, I believed that the new generations of students will escape my fate and they will no longer waste time with the mandatory religion classes.
Unfortunately, my hope was wrong, because the mandatory Political teachings classes were not deleted from the curriculum, but they were replaced by mandatory Christian religion classes.
So nothing has changed, when the Communist religion was mandatory, I had almost lost my career because it was supposed that I might be Christian, but if I were a student today, I would have similar problems if I would attempt to criticize in school the Christian religion, for exactly the same reasons that were applicable to Communism.
But again the thing is, if you're going to take this line of thought, then secularism itself is really just a variation of Christianity. And at that point, of what use are the distinctions we are making? If Soviet communism is a kind of Christianity, it's certainly a kind significantly different enough to notice and bracket off. Certainly it has little use for say, The Bible, or priest-like figures, or various other things that do tie together the different branches of Christianity.
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