• axont [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    cw: kidnapping, religion

    some context I guess

    These guys founded in 1925, so most of the adults would have gone to school at a church or otherwise had a religious education, because that was the main form of education in pre-revolution Soviet countries. It was incredibly common for young women to be sent off to a seminary to become a nun instead of learning math or history.

    I try to bring this up when defending the USSR's policies regarding religion, or at least I hope to put this into context for more people. Religion in tsarist Russia wasn't simply some affiliation people had or a feeling in their heart. It wasn't simply reading the Bible before dinner with your family. It was an entire structure of bureaucracy onto itself.

    In a typical peasant village, the local priest could be the school teacher, the village accountant, he could organize local events, he could be a local government representative. The church was sometimes the only media the peasants consumed, the priest was the one to tell you about national events or news. Priests and clergy had a functional, structural role in maintaining society. Disentangling the church from matters of everyday life became a serious concern for the socialists, as it should have been.

    I know it sounds goofy now to consider what a "militant atheist" is, but that's because we never experienced the feeling of seeing someone's daughter dragged away to become a nun, or a village of peasants kept illiterate on purpose.

  • happybadger [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I love that one poster of a cosmonaut looking around space with "There is no god" underneath him: https://www.etsy.com/listing/750775444/theres-no-god-boga-net-1960s-ussr-anti

    • kristina [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      "Struggle against religion is struggle for communism"

      if this were the average atheist redditor thatd be cool, unfortunately this is the average anti-atheist redditor lol

      • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        :stalin-feels-good:

        america would be 10% less bad if the the cadre of religious freaks who can't shut up were legally barred from political power.

      • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        lol in high school I had a religious weirdo classmate complain to me about how mean China is to foreign Christian missionaries

        Me: hell yeah dude sounds sick :party-sicko: :party-blob: :party-parrot:

      • Dolores [love/loves]
        ·
        2 years ago

        'support' means the CPC control important affairs, the christians follow church hierarchs approved by the party. of course the buddhists in tibet & elsewhere also have party-approved leaders. any liberal and probably some christian socialists would find this unacceptable breach of freedom of religion. I like it because i don't like freedom of religion as such but lets not pretend the CPC is actually soft and significantly diverging from the soviet line---they're not.

    • CanYouFeelItMrKrabs [any, he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      It would've been good if India was harder on religion and superstition but it was already partitioned along religious lines. So no one ones to touch religion at all. That's why India has a wacky situation where different religions (Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Parsis) have different marriage laws. Regarding how old you have to be, is polygamy allowed, etc

  • Ligma_Male [comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The league embraced workers, peasants, students, and intelligentsia. It had its first affiliates at factories, plants, collective farms (kolkhozy), and educational institutions. By the beginning of 1941 it had about 3.5 million members from 100 ethnicities.

    sounds like these guys were way better than redditors and new atheists

  • UlyssesT [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Sounds like they had positive sociopolitical goals beyond "be smug and condescending to the normies and radiate a sense of superiority." That's definitely a better plan than :reddit-logo: New Atheism had.

  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    There are still reminants of this school of thought here in South Africa, mainly POC communists that are atheist for anti colonial and ideological reasons.

    Very rare though, most people are religious and not communist