Balalaika [none/use name]

At one point in time, people generally understood how religious metaphors functioned - but then the protestants fucked everything up by printing the bible in the common languages, and suddenly every one of the faith's biggest grifters decided that they knew better than the priests who'd spent their entire life studying it all. The understanding of the bible as a metaphor is still alive in some circles, but in the modern culture you don't even need a grifter to tell you their interpretation anymore because the modern faithful almost all just come to whatever conclusions they like based on whatever fragments of religious education they get as kids. That's why you have self-professed Christians who believe in reincarnation and karma and crystals and shit - they're just grabbing whatever they've heard of that they like.

And it turns out that the people who are most likely to attend mass every week (which by the way is a relatively modern phenomenon - even medieval peasants generally only attended mass once a year) are also the ones most likely to assume that everything in the book was intended by its original authors to be taken literally even though those who've studied it have also read contemporaneous sources saying the opposite.

IMO this all stems from the material condition of the Church being pretty irrelevant politically. At one point in time there was a superstructure to force everyone's beliefs to conform more or less to a certain dogma, but capitalism has rended all of that apart.

I live in a pretty hot state, we can keep the house in the seventies even on 100+ days just by opening the windows at night to get the cool air and closing them before sunrise.

I think that "crushing" the Orthodox Church would have been the wrong move, but the Bolsheviks should have recognized its cultural sway and instead of clashing with it directly the way they did they should have sought to overwrite it. Imagine if all of the church leaders were communist party members, priests at seminary were required to read Marx alongside the Bible, and every other religion in the Soviet Union similarly integrated into the Party, rather than made into natural collaborators with the capitalists.

Prohibiting all alcohol is exactly the kind of fundamentalist cultural imperialism that Saudi Arabia was importing into Xinjiang until the government started pushing back against it in order to protect the Uyghur culture.