Comment by ceilingcorner
5 years ago
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.
No, there are tremendous differences between secularism and Christianity, while Christianity and Communism have identical consequences for the life of a typical citizen.
Communism, Christianity, and also the other monotheist religions, are extremely intolerant against the believers of any other religion.
Secularism is the opposite, at most you could say that secularism is like many polytheistic religions, where it was considered normal that everyone believes in their own gods and for the other people it does not matter which are those gods.
The life of a normal citizen of a communist country was very similar, for example, to the life in Italy or Spain 600 years ago, when the Church was more powerful. It might have actually been worse, because the Communist Party might have been more powerful than the Catholic Church ever was.
Permanently you had to be very careful with everything you said, because if you ever contradicted some dogma written in the Holy Communist Scriptures or some interpretation given by a High Communist Priest, you could be singled out as an heretic and be excommunicated, with very bad consequences.
Regarding the Communist dogmas, everything was based on "have faith and do not doubt". It was absolutely impossible to have any discussion about communism based on rational arguments or on experiment results.
Like Christianity, Communism blocked any kind of scientific research that could contradict in any way its Holy Scriptures. To make progress in any career, you had to either be or simulate that you are a true believer and you had to display frequently your faith in the Communist religion.
It does not matter what words are used by Christianity or Communism, wherever any of them succeeded to control the state institutions, the consequences were the same for the citizens, no freedom of speech and severe discrimination between believers and non-believers.
Secularism was precisely the reaction against this, having the purpose of allowing the freedom of speech and religion.