War Crimes of Atheism

@sonship said
Stalin, Mao, Hitler tally up between them about 100 million deaths.

There may have been as many as another 20,000,000 that you can add to your C20th total: the genocide in the Belgian Congo. You keep omitting it.

@fmf said
Did the Third Reich's exploitation of "religious-sounding language" work on German Christians?

Not really.

The Catholics were generally totally alienated.

There were murders that occurred in small villages after WWII where catholic citizens took vengeance on protestants that were Nazi members who had also made life for them miserable during the war and were most zealous.

@philokalia said
Not really.

The Catholics were generally totally alienated.

There were murders that occurred in small villages after WWII where catholic citizens took vengeance on protestants that were Nazi members who had also made life for them miserable during the war and were most zealous.

I think the Nazis were tapping into pretty mainstream Christian thinking and their disposition towards Jews stretching back to Martin Luther and beyond.

Beware of Atheists' revision of history.

Joseph Stalin's suppression and exploitation of Christian congregations:

Kirill’s religious praise of Soviet victory is nothing new. Under Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union tried tapping into the nation’s “enormous spiritual strength” by reviving the Orthodox Church in Russia, albeit in a limited capacity. Realizing the power the church had to unite Russia and its near abroad—and seeking to bring Nazi-controlled territory back under Soviet influence, Stalin reinstated an institution he had once tried to destroy.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Soviet policy had driven the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia to near extinction. The Church had faced systematic oppression since the rise of the Communist state in 1917. Anti-religious campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s eliminated tens of thousands of clergy and shuttered theological schools, monasteries and most churches. Aside from the state-sanctioned “living church”—founded as part of a rapprochement with the Soviet state in 1922—religious activity went underground.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/05/putins-taking-his-cues-on-religion-from-an-unlikely-source

@sonship said
Beware of Atheists' revision of history.

Joseph Stalin's suppression and exploitation of Christian congregations:

[quote]Kirill’s religious praise of Soviet victory is nothing new. Under Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union tried tapping into the nation’s “enormous spiritual strength” by reviving the Orthodox Church in Russia, albeit in a limited capacity. Realizing the powe ...[text shortened]... ww.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/05/putins-taking-his-cues-on-religion-from-an-unlikely-source

It is also worth noting that this resulted in the darkest times for Christianity because it created divisions within Russian & Ukrainian Orthodoxy that are even topics today.

Indeed, the recent mix up with Ukrainian autocephaly is directly related to this.

My own Church experienced a schism which I guess you could say is indirectly linked to this disaster.

@Philokalia

Someday well talk about the error of "national churches."

Right now I am emphasizing the atheistic nature of Soviet Communist Revolution launched by Lenin / Stalin against the dishonest revisionists. Knee jerk Atheist apologist always want to make historical dung look like icecream.

So, on September 4, 1943, Stalin summoned Orthodox authorities in the dead of night to re-institute the office of the Moscow Patriarchate, which had been vacant since Patriarch Tikhon’s death in 1925, and prior to that, since Peter the Great. Days later, thousands poured into a Moscow cathedral to see Metropolitan Sergey be named patriarch. The atheistic USSR now had a church that operated under the watchful eye of the state.

My bolding.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/05/putins-taking-his-cues-on-religion-from-an-unlikely-source

@sonship said
Right now I am emphasizing the atheistic nature of Soviet Communist Revolution launched by Lenin / Stalin against the dishonest revisionists. Knee jerk Atheist apologist always want to make historical dung look like icecream.

Who is trying to make the mass murders of Stalin "look like ice cream"? I must have overlooked the posts you are referring to. Where are they? Who wrote them?

I know of no evidence that Hitler's or Stalin's genocides, for instance, were motivated by atheism.

- Duchess64

there was a brief period in those decades in which the Communist authorities suspended their anti-religious campaign in order to gamble on a good relationship between church and state, and that was during the “Great Patriotic War.”

It may seem surprising that it was Stalin himself who adopted this policy, in that once he gained absolute power, he showed himself determined to continue Lenin’s religious policy, unleashing a ferocious anti-Christian persecution: During the 1930s, the number of priests plummeted to a few thousand, churches were destroyed, the Russian Orthodox weren’t permitted to have a Patriarch after 1926, and the population was forced to practice its faith in clandestine fashion.

In order to demonstrate that state-imposed atheism was a thing of the past, Soviet representatives were sent to the Allied powers to furnish assurances about the Communist change of direction, foreign religious leaders were invited to visit Moscow, and Stalin himself told the English ambassador that, in his own way, he believed in God.

My bolding.

Shrewd and ruthless Joseph Stalin's "state-imposed atheism" both destroyed and then exploited Christian churches.

https://cruxnow.com/church/2016/05/14/how-even-stalin-once-benefited-from-religious-freedom/

The post that was quoted here has been removed

Duchess, as per usual, is twisting the context. The topic is clearly "war crimes" and the general feeling is listing the repressive excesses and crimes of atheism. All of this occurred for Stalin to manipulate Christianity during a great time of war, and many will even say that Stalin's purges were the results of a large and basically unrecorded civil war within the Soviet Union...

Indeed, there's a thousand reasons as to why we should consider the misdeeds of Stalin in the context of this thread, and the only ways that it would not be considered is if you were trying to be overly picky & obtuse and quiet discussion through semantical jumps.

Duchess does what she does best and tries to deflect topics she doesn't like.

Maybe because she is a Communist sympathizer?

@Duchess64

Do you believe that none of the some 800,000 soldiers he had executed were of the Russian Orthodox Church?

Do you believe none of the some 1.7 million who died in gulags were of the Russian Orthodox Church?

The some 389,000 who perished during kulak resettlement, none of them were Russian Orthodox Christians?

Of the millions who died of starvation, none of them were Christians ?

During world war two, Russia was officially a Atheiest state, thus officially his victims believed in no religion. But his actions were mainly against the Russian Orthodox Church. Continuous persecution in the early 1930s resulted in its near-extinction: by 1939, active parishes numbered in the low hundreds (down from 54,000 in 1917), many churches had been levelled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted. During World War II, however, the Church was allowed a revival as a patriotic organization. A further round of suppression started again much later in Khrushchev's time.

Many religions popular in the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union including the Roman Catholic Church, Uniats, Baptists, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. underwent ordeals similar to the Orthodox churches in other parts: thousands of monks were persecuted, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments, monasteries and other religious buildings were razed.

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/[WORD TOO LONG]

No war crimes of Atheism under Joseph Stalin then ?

I think many Christians died thinking "I am counter revolutionary. I die here because I am a Christian - a poor peasant and a simple person of faith."

@philokalia said
Not really.

The Catholics were generally totally alienated.

There were murders that occurred in small villages after WWII where catholic citizens took vengeance on protestants that were Nazi members who had also made life for them miserable during the war and were most zealous.

Wasn't Adolf Hitlers' birthday celebrated from the pulpit of Catholic churches ?????
And didn't he have a deal going with the Pope ????