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fucktoyprincess -> RE: "Godless Communism"! (5/23/2012 9:10:19 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Marc2b
It is not so much the godlessness that bothers me as that fact that the godlessness is enforced. I am disdainful of religious fundamentalists of any stripe but as long as they mind their manners (that is, respect the rights of others) I am content to let them be. They can sit on their pews and rant about the evils of homosexuality or evolution all they want. I may not like it, but I respect their right to do so... as long as they respect the rights of others and don't try to impose their faith on others (in other words, keep your stupid creationism out of the science classrooms and lay of the gays who want to get married).
Communism, like almost any ideology, looks good on paper but it inevitably runs into that old bugaboo - human nature. In economic terms, communism is socialism taken to the extreme and you rarely find the answers to anything at the extremes. As others have noted, China has had to liberalize its economy to get it to work (likewise, a totally unregulated economy wouldn't work either... the trick, as all the endless arguments attest to, is in finding the right balance).
My biggest problem with communism, however, is that, despite proclamations to the contrary, it amounts to just another case of a few powerful individuals at the top exploiting those beneath them (the fact that they proclaim themselves a classless society is some of the rankest hypocrisy humans have ever come up with). Every nation that has ever been ruled by communists has been nothing more that another tyrannical oligarchy.
Whatever flaws representative democracy may has, it is still flexible enough to change with the times and to oust the worst of the bad apples at the top... or at least limit their duration. Ever since I can remember I've been hearing from the "patriotic opposition" that the current President is going to implement martial law and rule as a dictator. Nixon was going to do it, Carter was going to do it, and so were Reagan, Bush (the Elder), Clinton, Bush (the Younger) and now Obama is planning on doing it (Ford seems to be the one exception... too busy getting up from the tarmac I suppose). Despite these dire proclamations, it has never happened.
Which is not to say that it couldn't happen but so far, so good. Eternal vigilance is the price we pay. Freedom is a tenuous thing. Contrary to the dramatic screaming of many on the internet, the United States is NOT a police state... yet... communist governments are.
Yes, I think I mostly agree with the above. It is not the "godlessness" per se that is at issue. It is the fact that many Communist regimes in the past felt the only way they could maintain power was to eliminate religion. And as we just discussed in the atheist thread, if you believe that people need religion, trying to eliminate it is not going to work in your favor over time. People grow to resent it.
When I read the writings of some of the Communist thinkers from history, I do feel there is a tension that they have between the teachings of Christianity, in particular with some of the methods that they needed to use in order to gain power. You can't have a "Revolution" without killing a few people. But what they failed to realize is that historically, the world has been witness to revolutions of large scale - for example, the French Revolution, where, although France was Catholic, they had no difficulty squaring their faith with the guillotine. [:D]
What people fail to realize is that if you read religious scriptures carefully, and in the original language, the Old Testament does not actually prohibit killing. It prohibits "murder". In other words, the Christian Bible, as originally written, does not, for example, prohibit a soldier from killing someone during a war. The Bible is, in fact, full of descriptions of war/conflict between different peoples. So if you view a serious conflict between the haves and have-nots as a type of war, then I don't believe there is any major religion that prohibits killing during war.
There may be a few religions (Jainism? Buddhism?) that prohibit any killing, but these are few and far between. Most religions have a long history of being associated also with war.
While I am an atheist, and I do believe in having a society that protects the weak, I am by no stretch of the imagination a "socialist" as that term is typically understood. And while some socialists from history may have embraced atheism, there is nothing about atheism that "requires" anyone to be be socialist. I wonder if some of the hatred directed towards atheists has to do with people mistakenly conflating atheism with socialism? They are not the same. [sm=2cents.gif]
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