Atheism and communism

[Satyesu]

Is this true:
"It is not the communism that caused the atheism. The atheism CAUSED the communism. It is a causal relationship. True atheism leads to secular humanism; this humanism leads to communism, and communism lead to the deaths of millions. Look at these humanist/atheists regimes: Joseph Stalin’s Sovet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Hitler's [I know he considered himself a Catholic] Third Reich. They caused the deaths of innocent people. Finally, secular humanism is actually the philosophy of the founder of planned parenthood, who was a eugenicist! ("...In 1911 [Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood] moved to New York City, where she fell in with the transatlantic bohemian avant-garde of the burgeoning fascist moment. 'Our living-room,' she wrote in her autobiography, 'became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.’s could meet.'

 

[Excaljnur]

I feel like you are making far-fetched connections: Humanism leads to communism? Social democracies (like Norway) are pretty atheist, thus secular humanist (small stretch), but are seriously far from communism. I'm curious, why do you think secular humanism leads to communism when secular humanism promotes freedom of thought (which includes the ideas of independence, equality, freedom, etc) which is anti-totalitarian in nature. Communist states are totalitarian, typically running on the purpose to "protect the people" even at the expense of other citizens (Hobbes' Leviathan). This is an old political idea. Most modern (secular, democratic and otherwise) governments purpose the government to protect the people's rights, even from the government (John Locke). I'm sorry, but you seem to be proposing a very narrow view of both secular humanism and causal relationships.

 

[Sha'irullah]

This makes no sense. Communism is a political philosophy and has elements of social ones. Some of the basics of Communism are found with Jesus in his assertion of the shedding of wealth.

By the way Communism as seen in China for example functions no differently than a religion and makes people pray to Chairman Mao of all things. I just don't catch your drift

 

[VitoOFMCap]

Hitler was a nationalist. Not a communist. The former deals with the strife of the German people (as an ethnic group) while the latter deals with the struggle of the working class versus the ruling class.

The rest of it are just angry keystrokes.

 

[Sha'irullah]

Hitler was a nationalist. Not a communist. The former deals with the strife of the German people (as an ethnic group) while the latter deals with the struggle of the working class versus the ruling class.

The rest of it are just angry keystrokes.

Didn't even pay any attention to the breaking of Godwin's Rule. Hitler was a bit more than a nationalist by the way. He is primarily regarded as an authoritarian on top of being a nationalist.

 

[VitoOFMCap]

Didn't even pay any attention to the breaking of Godwin's Rule. Hitler was a bit more than a nationalist by the way. He is primarily regarded as an authoritarian on top of being a nationalist.

I thought the list of totalitarian ideologues spoke for itself.

 

[Revoltingest]

Is this true:
"It is not the communism that caused the atheism. The atheism CAUSED the communism. It is a causal relationship. True atheism leads to secular humanism; this humanism leads to communism, and communism lead to the deaths of millions. Look at these humanist/atheists regimes: Joseph Stalin’s Sovet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Hitler's [I know he considered himself a Catholic] Third Reich. They caused the deaths of innocent people. Finally, secular humanism is actually the philosophy of the founder of planned parenthood, who was a eugenicist! ("...In 1911 [Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood] moved to New York City, where she fell in with the transatlantic bohemian avant-garde of the burgeoning fascist moment. 'Our living-room,' she wrote in her autobiography, 'became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.’s could meet.'

Odd. I find good ole unbridled capitalism with free markets far more compatible with atheism. Why would I believe in submission to some higher authority (government or the party)...to sacrifice my individuality to someone else's idea of the "greater good"?

Communist thought also afflicts believers in government too, as we see with those who would steer the country in its direction, ie, the hive mentality. And as we note, the great socialist, Hitler, was a Xian. (Mao was a deadly one, but I'm glad Schickelgruber wasn't one of us.) And then we have Stalin, who was educated at a seminary in Tiblisi.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

In response to the OP...no, I don't believe it is true.
Do you?

 

[Jumi]

Nope.

Is this true:
True atheism leads to secular humanism; this humanism leads to communism, and communism lead to the deaths of millions.

Nope. Believing unprovable things and writing about them doesn't make them true.

Have you ever heard of the True Scotsman fallacy?

 

[fantome profane]

If you are going to have a totalitarian state the one thing you cannot have is competing power structures. So in terms of theology there are two ways you can go with this. You can either have a theocratic totalitarian state where all theological ideas other than the state theology are suppressed (that would include suppressing atheism and agnosticism). Or you can have an atheistic totalitarian state where all theological ideas are suppressed. The key is that they need to suppress all alternative power structures. But totalitarianism is equally comparable with theism or atheism.

Now you might notice that I switched out communism for totalitarianism, and you might think this is cheating (and maybe it is). So I will say that in theory there is reason a communistic state can't be open to all forms of religious expression and practice. But in theory there is also no reason a communistic state cannot also be a democratic state. But of course the kind of communistic states we have seen have not been that. (I would actually argue that we have never really had real communistic state, but that would be a debate for a different thread.)

 

[Cephus]

Absolutely not. If anything, communism leads to atheism, or at least non-theism, because communism demands complete loyalty. That's why people like Stalin outlawed religion, not because he was an atheist but because he wanted communism to be the focal point of the people's lives. Religion gets in the way of that. So did a lot of other things that he outlawed.

 

[Revoltingest]

Absolutely not. If anything, communism leads to atheism, or at least non-theism, because communism demands complete loyalty. That's why people like Stalin outlawed religion, not because he was an atheist but because he wanted communism to be the focal point of the people's lives. Religion gets in the way of that. So did a lot of other things that he outlawed.

We see the faithful displaying complete loyalty to countries, so why not to communism? And communism is about submission, something the faithful know so well.

 

[Jumi]

Stalin didn't outlaw religion, he used it for his own ends.

 

[metis]

Is this true:
"It is not the communism that caused the atheism. The atheism CAUSED the communism. It is a causal relationship. True atheism leads to secular humanism; this humanism leads to communism, and communism lead to the deaths of millions.

No, this simply is not true as there really is no connection between the two. How many people have been killed in the name of God, for example? Does that mean religious faith causes murder and genocide? Of course not, but neither does atheism.

 

[KnightOwl]

I'm with Revoltingest (post 7), more or less.

I don't reject all authority -- However, just because someone or some group claims authority, doesn't mean I am going to give it to them. That is why I am an atheistic agnostic libertarian. (without a theistic belief, believes it is impossible to know for sure if there is a god, and tends to favor very small, non-intrusive government)

That said, I have nothing against communism as long as it is completely voluntary. If someone wants to start a commune, I say, "Go right ahead." I even join a commune or co-op some day if the right one comes along.

I will say that in my travels amongst organized atheists -- those who belong to atheistic, secular or humanist organizations that is -- the demographics tilt decidedly toward socialism and idealogies that are somewhat akin to it. I think there is some connection here between the fact that these are organized atheists (as I'm using the term here) vs. those who don't feel the need to join such groups.

I have a theory about this. I belong (technically I don't because I haven't been a dues paying or attending member for a while, but that is a temporary thing) to a variety of groups -- my local American Humanist Assoc. chapter; a group founded to promote acceptance of atheists amongst the general population; Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU); a local atheist Meetup; and have been a committee member of one of the largest Freethought Day events in the country. As such I have found the tendency toward communism to be far stronger in the humanist group. I think the reason for this is, the guiding document of the AHA. Humanist Manifesto III . I find it to have a socialist/communist slant. And if you go back and read the original manifesto, it is even more slanted toward socialist/communist ideology. As such, I think the AHA probably attracts more people that agree with their guiding document than humanists like me who are libertarians, bordering on anarchism. I find the free market capitalism ideal embraced far more commonly in the atheist Meetup than the AHA chapter.

Oh, and even the outspoken, hardcore communist atheists I know, don't consider the Soviet or Chinese models to be desirable. What fantome profane said above (post 10) about power structures I think is really the key to understanding why those two examples exist.

 

[metis]

I'm with Revoltingest (post 7), more or less.

I don't reject all authority -- However, just because someone or some group claims authority, doesn't mean I am going to give it to them. That is why I am an atheistic agnostic libertarian. (without a theistic belief, believes it is impossible to know for sure if there is a god, and tends to favor very small, non-intrusive government)

That said, I have nothing against communism as long as it is completely voluntary. If someone wants to start a commune, I say, "Go right ahead." I even join a commune or co-op some day if the right one comes along.

I will say that in my travels amongst organized atheists -- those who belong to atheistic, secular or humanist organizations that is -- the demographics tilt decidedly toward socialism and idealogies that are somewhat akin to it. I think there is some connection here between the fact that these are organized atheists (as I'm using the term here) vs. those who don't feel the need to join such groups.

I have a theory about this. I belong (technically I don't because I haven't been a dues paying or attending member for a while, but that is a temporary thing) to a variety of groups -- my local American Humanist Assoc. chapter; a group founded to promote acceptance of atheists amongst the general population; Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU); a local atheist Meetup; and have been a committee member of one of the largest Freethought Day events in the country. As such I have found the tendency toward communism to be far stronger in the humanist group. I think the reason for this is, the guiding document of the AHA. Humanist Manifesto III . I find it to have a socialist/communist slant. And if you go back and read the original manifesto, it is even more slanted toward socialist/communist ideology. As such, I think the AHA probably attracts more people that agree with their guiding document than humanists like me who are libertarians, bordering on anarchism. I find the free market capitalism ideal embraced far more commonly in the atheist Meetup than the AHA chapter.

Oh, and even the outspoken, hardcore communist atheists I know, don't consider the Soviet or Chinese models to be desirable. What fantome profane said above (post 10) about power structures I think is really the key to understanding why those two examples exist.

Nice post, and you're entirely correct that there are not only different forms of socialism and also different forms of Marxism. I'm just finishing off a book by a modern-day Marxist economist named Richard Wolff in his recently updated book "Capitalism Hits the Fan", and he's spot on in so many areas. I'm think of starting a thread on this maybe next week.

 

[Yerda]

Communism as an ideology grew out of the radical republicanism of enlightenment Europe (based upon Plato's The Republic) and flourished primarily as a criticism of private property and the massive problems it causes for almost everyone.

Many of the ideas that contributed to what was the spectre were sheltered by the Catholic church throughout the dark ages and contributed to by religious thinkers from More to Hegel to Rousseau and many more. Atheism didn't cause communism. Before Marx almost everyone who advanced communism was religious (Christians and many religious Jews). Think The Diggers, The Chartists, Quakers etc.

 

[Sapiens]

Is this true:
"It is not the communism that caused the atheism. The atheism CAUSED the communism. It is a causal relationship. True atheism leads to secular humanism; this humanism leads to communism, and communism lead to the deaths of millions. Look at these humanist/atheists regimes: Joseph Stalin’s Sovet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Hitler's [I know he considered himself a Catholic] Third Reich. They caused the deaths of innocent people. Finally, secular humanism is actually the philosophy of the founder of planned parenthood, who was a eugenicist! ("...In 1911 [Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood] moved to New York City, where she fell in with the transatlantic bohemian avant-garde of the burgeoning fascist moment. 'Our living-room,' she wrote in her autobiography, 'became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.’s could meet.'

Wiki:

The founder and primary theorist of Marxism, the nineteenth-century German thinker Karl Marx, had an ambivalent and complex attitude to religion,[1] viewing it primarily as "the opium of the people" that had been used by the ruling classes to give the working classes false hope for millennia, while at the same time recognizing it as a form of protest by the working classes against their poor economic conditions.[2]

In the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of Marxist theory, developed primarily by Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, religion is seen as retarding human development, and socialist states that follow a Marxist-Leninist variant are inherently atheistic. Due to this, a number of Marxist-Leninst governments in the twentieth century, such as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, implemented rules introducing state atheism. However, several religious communist groups exist, and Christian communism was important in the early development of communism.

According to Howard Zinn, "He [Marx] saw religion, not just negatively as 'the opium of the people,' but positively as the 'sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions.' This helps us understand the mass appeal of the religious charlatans of the television screen, as well as the work of Liberation Theology in joining the soulfulness of religion to the energy of revolutionary movements in miserably poor countries.".[4] Some recent scholarship has suggested that 'opium of the people' is itself a dialectical metaphor, a 'protest' and an 'expression' of suffering[5][6]

. ..while Lenin was critical of religion, he also specifically made a point to not include it in Our Programme or his ideological goals, saying
But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an “intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods. It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.[9]

 

[Laika]

Is this true:
"It is not the communism that caused the atheism. The atheism CAUSED the communism. It is a causal relationship. True atheism leads to secular humanism; this humanism leads to communism, and communism lead to the deaths of millions. Look at these humanist/atheists regimes: Joseph Stalin’s Sovet Union, Mao Zedong’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Hitler's [I know he considered himself a Catholic] Third Reich. They caused the deaths of innocent people. Finally, secular humanism is actually the philosophy of the founder of planned parenthood, who was a eugenicist! ("...In 1911 [Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood] moved to New York City, where she fell in with the transatlantic bohemian avant-garde of the burgeoning fascist moment. 'Our living-room,' she wrote in her autobiography, 'became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.’s could meet.'

No. This is not true. Only a very specific form of 'atheism' leads to 'communism' (in the modern sense). This is the result of a philosophy known as 'dialectical materialism', which asserts that consciousness is the product of matter, and that matter does not require a 'motive force' to change that it can change on it's own internal contradictions. Without the need for an 'original cause' there is no need for god or any conception of creation in this philosophy. nature changes itself and society revolutionizes itself through class struggle.

However, Not all Marxists were atheists. I think in Poland when it was Communist, many members of the Communist party were Catholics because they didn't 'believe' in Marxism, they were members because that's how they would advance their careers under a communist system. This was a 'compromise' the government had to make.

In 1920's Russia there was an atmosphere of Utopianism which meant people experimented with irreligious beliefs. 'Atheism' didn't come in one form.

There were the 'god builders' who wanted Socialism to be a religion by replacing 'god' with man. So many religious rituals were replaced with Marxist ones; babies were not 'baptised' but were 'Octobered' (because the Russian revolution happened in October 1917); there were 'red weddings' that took place under a portrait of lenin and where they sang the 'internationale', or peasants used tractors draped in red flags as a wedding carriage. [The book I'm quoting this from is 'Revolutionary dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution' by Richard Stites; a truly insane book for an insane period of history when nothing was off limits to the 'revolution'].

Others consciously employed Christian teachings as a way to convince people to be Marxists. There is Islamic Marxism which tried to synthesize elements of Marxism with an Islamic Socialism which originated in central Asia in the 1920's, but was a very minor under-current; I think this is why Islamic Fundamentalists use the term 'imperialist west'. They got it from an Islamic flirtation with Marxism that survived in some form.

There were also Marxists who tried to destroy religion in the 1920's. The League of the Militant Godless are an example. The Communist Youth (Komosol) was notorious for staging extremely derogatory rituals which mocked religious faith, which upset the locals to the point where communist party officials were sending messages to Moscow demanded they stop because they were frightened people might riot. Alot of the religious impulses were instead invested in Science, Technology and Humanism.

When Stalin came round to establishing the 'orthodoxy' of what communists had to believe in the 1930's, these pseudo-religious beliefs were suppressed and by basically the 'state' became god, where by it was personified in the form of Lenin or Stalin. Even in the middle of the 1930's at the height of the purges, a census was taking and it was found over half of the inhabitants of the USSR identified as 'theists' of sorts, so they failed quite miserably to eliminate religious belief.

However, I would point out that when Atheists try to make sense of death, they may be drawn towards a form of collectivist humanism as a way to find some sense of immortality, where immortality is achieved by the contribution made by devotion to the benefit of mankind, rather than to god. Death kind of really doesn't help the ego or the sense of individuality. But that in itself is not automatically 'communist' in the 'scary' sense.
Communism does originate from a form of humanism but it is nowhere near as automatic or simple as the statement would have it on it's own. There are other processes at work in order get you to from atheism to humanism and then to communism.

 

[LuisDantas]

Is this true:

No.