(10-18-2021, 03:18 PM)jimhabegger Wrote: (10-18-2021, 02:57 PM)FrodoA2 Wrote: Basically if Atheism ruled the world it would be authoritarian socialism
What has happened under allegedly communist governments proves that atheism, by itself, will not solve all the world's problems. And ...?
Atheism had nothing [or very little] to do with it. You do realize that variations of Marxism were religions? If not then this - lengthy - quote from Klaus-Georg Riedel "Marxism as Political Religion" should illuminate you:
[...]As has become evident from the discussion to this point, the political religions
that have been investigated here involve virtuoso religions that were developed
by intellectuals as comprehensive systems by which both to explain the
world and to change it through revolution. In all these virtuoso religions,
the intellectuals represent a messianic mission. The revolutionary virtuosos
emerge as representatives of human masses that are not yet mentally
independent; and they promise to save these masses from their suffering.
Both the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia of tsarist Russia and its Marxist
successor had performed this messianic mission with enough decisiveness to
attain in the world, through particular forms of social organisation, that
which they understood as the saving truths. We are not dealing, therefore,
with virtuosos fleeing from the world and cultivating their sociologies in
monastic communities that are secluded from the world.
The virtuoso religions of both the tsarist and the Marxist intelligentsia
pressed for a revolutionary transformation of the world. Certainly, they
differ in terms of content and of the organisational forms of their world toppling
ideas of salvation. In his conscious confrontation with the pneumatically
inspired communities of conviction of the narodnicestvo, with the
revolutionary secret alliances and with the open social democracy of
Menshevism, Lenin developed a model of discipline and military-like training
of revolutionary virtuosos that was to transform revolutionary enthusiasm
into an effectively functioning disciplined machine. (To be sure, the reality
was a far cry from the functional efficiency that had been envisaged.) This
course that Lenin took with his model of the disciplined cadre party also
paved the way for Stalin’s institutional course – which was to develop
further in the direction of a bureaucratised and hierarchised soteriological
institution. With Maoism, a new current of faith had been articulated, one
that definitely represented the most historically significant result of the
world mission that had been set into motion by the Moscow universal
church. This current did not develop as a faithful copy of the Stalinist
institutional church, however. Much more did Mao Zedong try to realise a
utopia of the new human being in several attempts to bring about a cultural
revolution. These attempts not only took into account the special Chinese
conditions and context in which it took up Communism, but even led to a
desacralisation of the Party – one that was consciously accepted as necessary.
During the Cultural Revolution, the Maoist ‘Thought Reform’ seized
hold of the entire society and destroyed its moral foundations through its
chaos of both subtle and violent tests of conviction and its epidemics of
denunciation. The thought of Mao Zedong is treated today as a relic of a
gerontocracy that may have been aware that its rule had come to an end.
The efforts of the Party bureaucracy to bring the interests of its estate into
harmony with the required processes of modernisation might well betray its
pronounced will to survive, but not the heroic readiness for sacrifice of the
New Human Being that Mao had envisaged.
In all the virtuoso religions within the sphere of Marxism-Leninism that
have been described, a selective enlistment of Christian symbols and faith practices
can clearly be recognised. The chiliastic hopes for salvation of the
‘Order of the Revolutionary Intelligentsia’ (F. Stepun), its public confessions
and preparedness for heroic self-sacrifice as atonement for unearned
privileges, its forms of self-organisation as pneumatically inspired conviction
communities: these all draw upon the monastic communities that had
formed either in reliance upon or in decisive rejection of the Russian
Orthodox Church. Even the Leninist discipline machine recalls the type of
the ‘revolutionary monk’ (S. Frank). The rites of purgation and purification,
the catechisms and holy dogmas, the strict orders of command and exercises
of ritual obedience that were practised within its ranks, occurred according
to the model of ‘cloister rules’ (S. Frank). The Lenin cult that was then
staged by Stalin and his rivals in the faith created a sacral faith tradition,
complete with a canon of sacral scriptures, that could be selectively used to
support one’s own claim to rule. The Stalinist cult of personality was also
oriented towards an institutional church that knew how to assert the
hierocratic power of its office by means of inquisition tribunals. The Maoist
vision of salvation intentionally unleashed the cultural revolutionary turbulence
of the organised class struggle in order to shatter the stability of the
Confucian state philosophy, to detach the people from the ordered authority
of family, clan and religion and to form them, via the torturous purification
process of the ‘Reform of Ideas’, into the New Human Beings.
The Marxist-Leninist currents of faith represented religions of innerworldy
salvation. They took from the sacral Marxist stock the certainty that
their revolutionary efforts were in harmony with the scientific regularities
that Marx had supposedly discovered. The scientific certainty that the laws
98 Presentations and discussion papers
of historical development were being actively promoted connected up with
the salvation doctrine that was also present in Marx’s work: the doctrine of
liberating a humanity that suffers under capitalistic alienation and of leading
it into a communistic paradise on earth through revolutionary deeds.
Scientific certainty and mandate for salvation were executed by the
successful organisation of a ‘monks’ army’ (S. Frank) of career revolutionaries.
The amalgamation of scientific certainty, mandate for salvation and
revolutionary virtuosity produced an inner-worldly political religion.
The different variants of this political religion of Marxism-Leninism
fought, with all the instruments of revolutionary terror that stood at their
disposal, all alternative Weltanschauungen or Christian religious communities
that dared to formulate their experiences of transcendence in either
open or secret resistance to the promise of inner-worldly happiness. The
Marxist-Leninist religions entail closed faith-communities that fought inner
dissension, the free exchange of opinion and scientific critique as heretical
challenges. With Stalinism, the permanent suppression of internal processes
of differentiation produced the chaos of the Great Purges; whereas the
population attempted to escape the terror of the faith through various
survival strategies, large numbers of convinced Communists fell victim here
to the Stalinist compulsion for obedience. The hoped-for community of
heroic faith that was prepared to sacrifice its life for the construction
of socialism in its country did not issue from the Great Purges. The attempt
to transform the Leninist virtuoso religion into an institutional church that
would have been capable of translating the revolutionary putsch of October
1917 into a secure legitimacy failed. At base, neither Leninism nor Stalinism
was able to free itself from the permanent state of siege in which they had
placed themselves and their faith empires. The self-dissolution of the former
Soviet Union occurred with both speed and ease. And behind the imperial
facades, only spiritual emptiness, rather than belief in the Marxist-Leninist
mission, remained. These phenomena indicate that virtuoso religions fail
when they seek to change the world in a revolutionary way rather than
restricting themselves to self-divinisation within their own ranks. [Klaus-Georg Riedel, Marxism as Political Religion, p.97-98 [in]: Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Volume 2]
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