However, the attempt to confer benignness onto Atheism is difficult if one actually reads the works of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The following excerpt is from Lenin specifically on the relationship between Atheism, Materialism and Marxist Communism (Note 1). To argue that there is no relationship is false. To argue that Lenin and Stalin, for example, were merely monsters who were uninfluenced by Atheism or Materialism is false. The development of the Russian catastrophe after the revolution is unmistakably stamped by Atheism and "Dialectical Materialism".
"It would be a profound mistake to think that the seeming “moderation” of Marxism in regard to religion is due to supposed “tactical” considerations, the desire “not to scare away” anybody, and so forth. On the contrary, in this question, too, the political line of Marxism is inseparably bound up with its philosophical principles.
"Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as was the materialism of the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists or the materialism of Feuerbach. This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels goes further than the Encyclopaedists and Feuerbach, for it applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of history, to the domain of the social sciences. We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion. Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the bourgeois progressist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so: “Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!” The Marxist says that this is not true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters. It does not explain the roots of religion profoundly enough; it explains them, not in a materialist but in an idealist way. In modern capitalist countries these roots are mainly social. The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by extra-ordinary events, such as wars, earthquakes, etc. “Fear made the gods.” Fear of the blind force of capital—blind because it cannot be foreseen by the masses of the people—a force which at every step in the life of the proletarian and small proprietor threatens to inflict, and does inflict “sudden”, “unexpected”, “accidental” ruin, destruction, pauperism, prostitution, death from starvation—such is the root of modern religion which the materialist must bear in mind first and foremost, if he does not want to remain an infant-school materialist. No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way."
The Toxic Petri Dish of Atheism:
Here is why Atheists deny the role of Atheism in mass murder:
Russia since 1917: 62 Million killed
China under Mao: 77 Million killed
Total, Big 2: 139 Million killed
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB1.1.GIF
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE2.HTM
Atheists such as Dawkins wish to declare that all evil is due to religion. Some even have declared that Marxist communism is “religious in nature”, and it is that characteristic which is evil. If “religious in nature” is evil, then so is the religiously pursued Atheism of the New Atheists, the internet Atheists, the American Atheist Organization, the Humanists, and the FFRC-type of Atheist fanaticism, all dedicated to the eradication of the Other (Note 2).
Atheists are free from absolute standards of “good and evil”, just as Nietzsche wrote; it is a direct consequence of rejecting absolute morality. So when they define good and evil, they are exercising their Atheist freedom from constraintin order to define it however is convenient to themselves. And what is convenient is to define themselves as “good without God”, and the Other as evil.
The Atheist claim that Atheism itself is a “lack of belief” is true. Atheism is a sterile Void within which any moral and intellectual perversion finds fertile agar medium for growth. There are no actual principles in the Atheist sterile Void which exist to combat the growth of self-derived intellectual inversion and moral perversion. So any and all types of worldviews are possible, emerging from the unconstrained psyche of the individual Atheist. It is the growth of innumerable irrational and amoral constructs emergent from Atheism which contains many which are toxic to everyone but the Atheist.
One cannot declare oneself to have no principles and therefore to be good according to those principles, if one is to also claim coherent rationality.
Note 1: From Encyclopedia.com:
” He [Marx] held that there is something dishonest and irresponsible in philosophies which deny that sense experience reveals the existence of an independent material world; hence his view of knowledge was realist, both on philosophical and moral grounds. In taking this view he was much influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach. Like Feuerbach, Marx rejected speculative philosophy, or metaphysics, as we should call it today, on the ground that the truth about the world and society can only be discovered by the use of empirical scientific methods. In a broad sense of the term, therefore, Marx was a positivist, in that he denied the possibility of any knowledge of the world that is not based on sense experience. Hence, Marx's view of the world was naturalistic and opposed to any form of religion or supernaturalism. Again under the influence of Feuerbach, Marx held that belief in God, in an afterlife, and in heaven and hell cannot be rationally justified, but may be explained (indeed, explained away) in terms of the unfulfilled needs and hopes of men whose lives are frustrated by an oppressive social order. Marx held, too, that men are not immaterial souls conjoined with material bodies. In his view, psychophysical dualism is a relic of supernaturalism and must be rejected with it. Marx did not systematically develop this view as part of a philosophical argument but took it as the basis of his view, expressed in The Holy Family and in The German Ideology (1845–1846), that repression of the instincts and natural desires is bad. Marx, therefore, thought that thinking is inseparable from acting and that scientific advance and practical improvement are in principle bound up with one another. Marx's materialism, therefore, is very wide in scope, combining empiricism, realism, belief in the use of scientific methods pragmatically conceived, rejection of supernaturalism, and rejection of mind-body dualism. Animating these aspects of his view is the conviction that they support and justify the socialist diagnosis of social ills and the prediction that a communist form of society must come.”
Note 2: Originally, Lenin's approach was conversional rather than eliminative. But that was before he gained power, when he declared the "Red Terror" to eliminate all opposition:
"At these times, there were numerous reports that Cheka interrogators utilized torture methods which were, according to Orlando Figes, "matched only by the Spanish Inquisition."[26] At Odessa the Cheka tied White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water; In Kharkiv, scalpings and hand-flayings were commonplace: the skin was peeled off victims' hands to produce "gloves"; The Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails; victims were crucified or stoned to death at Dnipropetrovsk; the Cheka at Kremenchuk impaled members of the clergy and buried alive rebelling peasants; in Orel, water was poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues; in Kiev, Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim's body in an effort to escape.[27]
Executions took place in prison cellars or courtyards, or occasionally on the outskirts of town, during the Red Terror and Russian civil war. After the condemned were stripped of their clothing and other belongings, which were shared among the Cheka executioners, they were either machine-gunned in batches or dispatched individually with a revolver. Those killed in prison were usually shot in the back of the neck as they entered the execution cellar, which became littered with corpses and soaked with blood. Victims killed outside the town were moved by truck, bound and gagged, to their place of execution, where they sometimes were made to dig their own graves.[28]
According to Edvard Radzinsky, "it became a common practice to take a husband hostage and wait for his wife to come and purchase his life with her body".[3] During Decossackization, there were massacres, according to historian Robert Gellately, "on an unheard of scale." The Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a "day of Red Terror" to execute 300 people in one day, and took quotas from each part of town. According to the Chekist Karl Lander, the Cheka in Kislovodsk, "for lack of a better idea," killed all the patients in the hospital. In October 1920 alone more than 6,000 people were executed. Gellately adds that Communist leaders "sought to justify their ethnic-based massacres by incorporating them into the rubric of the 'class struggle'".[29]
Members of the clergy were subjected to particularly brutal abuse. According to documents cited by the late Alexander Yakovlev, then head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, priests, monks and nuns were crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice.[30] An estimated 3,000 were put to death in 1918 alone.[30]
Estimates for the total number of people killed in the Red Terror range from 50,000[31] to over a million.[32][33] References available at Wiki.
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