Orcoa wrote:Shadowlandistan wrote:Religion is horrible, we should phase it out ASAP!
Oh you can try my friend, you can try and re-educate about the wonders of Atheism though government mandate and force....oh wait...that does not work.
You'd be thinking of the 20th century "Communist" countries?
I think it's more like they saw churches as rivals for power (rivaling the state I mean) and to some extent as a divisive force. Think of how Stalin deliberately relocated ethnic minorities to make the Union more homogenous. It's abusive of course to break up ethnic groupings by force and I'm not at all defending that, just saying that it wasn't all about religion.
And then there's the Chinese ... apart from the Cultural Revolution (which was pretty horrible in many other ways) they seem to actually use Confucian principles of respect for ancestors and respect for book learning when it suits them. There are still portraits of Mao hanging around on walls, because it feels wrong to stop respecting someone they respected before. There are little shrines scattered about, and the government tolerates low-key worship and some celebrations. What the government fears and cracks down on is any kind of "secret society" where people get together in private and discuss ideas contrary to the state ones. They don't like Christianity for obvious reasons, but they HATE Falun Gong because it co-opted some things the State already encouraged (like the qigong, but also the Confucian virtues) but seemed to be rapidly growing in other directions. You could see their oppression of Falun Gong as simple fear that it might grow into a
theocratic alternative to state government. Again, I'm not defending the state persecution of religions, but it's understandable.
Both Russia and China are doing pretty well just now. But what lifted both out of feudal poverty was Communism, not Atheism.
Perhaps a Menshevik Union (ie, Bolsheviks had not pulled a shut-out play) would have been capable of doing all that heavy lifting to defeat the Axis ... we simply would not have won WW2 without Russia ... but hell, maybe a Menshivik Union would have
taken the Axis side and that would majorly suck ... anyway for sure the stagnating old regime of Monarchy would not have been much help. And China! They got fucked over pretty bad by Japan, after getting fucked over pretty bad before by the European powers and the US. Without Communism (or some other revolution) I think Asia would be like the middle of Africa now, but twice the size and with four times the population. China would be in the news as that tragic country where a million people starved to death this week, not the country building high-speed rail and providing abortions to any woman who asks for one.
The Communist revolution came a lot later to China than to Russia, and the Chinese learned some things
not to do. Persecuting religions which don't pose a threat to the state would be one of them.
So yeah, I certainly wouldn't want any country to try to enforce Atheism with state power. But the ways it has been tried were more about a desperate attempt to make Communism work. In both major cases it was primarily about the economic structuring of society, and the Atheism was more about suppressing alternative leadership structures (which Churches are) which posed a threat to the autarchy.
tl; dnr: don't try to smear Atheists by pointing to State Communism. It's more complicated than that.