Question About Communism

Better to divide this into two questions: (1) Why do atheists care... (2) Why do communists care...

With regard to atheists, it is clear that they do care and one should reconsider whether it makes sense to attempt to understand their opinions and feelings on theological terms which they reject--better to pay attention to what they themselves say.

With regard to communists, and the disconnect between their purported compassion and their long record of cruelty and violence, the ideology seems best understood as a religion calculated to appeal to malevolent and damaged personalities.

For the benefit of those who may have missed it, you wrote:

Alternatively, we might suggest that relationships are always meant to work with people as they are, not as we would shape them to be. So the rocks are symbolic of both man and G-d – we must work with the individual quirks and qualities of each person as they are, not turning a unique stone into a standardized brick.

Under communism, we are all one and the same*. That is enforced by the power of the state, if necessary. It is a requirement of you being a properly functioning cog in the machine. State planning suffers if individuality is allowed to flourish.

* In theory. In practice, some animals are more equal than others. Of all the unintended jokes of communism, the classless society is the funniest. Or the sickest. One of those.

There is any number of philosophers that contributed to Marxist ideology, some that date back to ancient Greek philosophers and even ancient India. Far too many for a comment. You have Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao in the most recent group that have been in power. They modify and add their own theories of class struggles, and class struggles suggest that the class you are a part of is the only thing that matters, not the individual who disagrees with how to usher in the new socialist man and the new workers' paradise.

Trotsky succumbed to blows from an ice ax in Mexico delivered by a Stalinist agent. During the Spanish Civil War Stalin started hunting down Communist sympathizers who were fighting for a Communist government in Spain to include George Orwell of Animal Farm fame. English Stalinists did their best to try and destroy Orwell's reputation.

There is a quote attributed to Stalin; One man's death is a tragedy; millions of deaths are a statistic. Whether Stalin said that or not that has been the result of Communist governments in Europe, China, North Korea, Cuba, Central America, South America, and other countries in Asia.

Yuri Slezkine addressed this phenomenon in his work The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Among the many themes of the book he compares the messianic and apocalyptic impulses manifest in the early stages of the Communist revolution. Many of the early revolutionary intellectuals saw their work as the next step in the postmillennial tradition - specifically, Communism as a way of bringing paradise on Earth. Nearly all these intellectuals were killed off over the subsequent decades as Lenin and then Stalin consolidated power.

I always commend Witness to people as the best autobiography I have read.

Paul Stinchfield (View Comment):

With regard to atheists, it is clear that they do care and one should reconsider whether it makes sense to attempt to understand their opinions and feelings on theological terms which they reject–better to pay attention to what they themselves say.

I have not heard a good answer from atheists either. Why should other people have rights?