Gorbachev Dispels 'Closet Christian' Rumors; Says He is Atheist

"Gorbachev, the last communist leader of the Soviet Union, confronted speculations that he had been a closeted Christian during an interview with the Russian news agency Interfax. "Over the last few days some media have been disseminating fantasies – I can't use any other word – about my secret Catholicism, citing my visit to the Sacro Convento friary, where the remains of St. Francis of Assisi lie," Gorbachev said, according to an Interfax article posted Friday. "To sum up and avoid any misunderstandings, let me say that I have been and remain an atheist,” he stated."

Christian Post/Interfax, Mar. 24 2008

Good for Gorbie!

Don't worry, plenty of other Communists were Christians.
Christian proletars of the world, unite with this shirt today!

IHEU: Petition for defence of individual rights at the UN Human Rights Council

"[…] The [Human Rights Council] has become an ideological war machine against its founding principles[The Universal Declaration of Human Rights]. Ignored by the mainstream media, day after day, session after session, resolution after resolution, a political rhetoric is forged to legitimize tomorrow’s violence. A "triple alliance" of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) represented so far by Pakistan, the Non-Aligned Movement where Cuba, Venezuela and Iran have a central role, and China -- with the cynical complacency of Russia – are working together to establish of a genuine revolution in the guise of "multiculturalism". Thus, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, Doudou Diène has said that criticism of the Burqa is a racist aggression, that secularism is rooted in a culture of slavery and colonialism and that the French law against the wearing of religious symbols in schools is part of anti-Muslim racism, renamed "Western Islamophobia ". The confusion of minds is at its peak when any criticism of religion is denounced as a racist attitude. This is a radical threat against freedom of thought which is being condoned by the United Nations. By equating with racism any criticism of the excesses of those who speak in the name of Islam, because supposedly such criticism belongs to neo-colonialist attitudes, the spokespersons of this new alliance tighten a little the noose they have put on the neck of their own peoples and undermine the foundations of a civility hard-won in Europe since the wars of religion."

[...]

If by misfortune, the United Nations should sanction the imposition of such criteria, if blasphemy should be equated with racism, the right to criticism of religion outlawed, religious law become the international norm, it would be a regression with disastrous consequences, and a radical perversion of our entire tradition of struggle against racism, which has developed and can only develop in the most absolute freedom of conscience.

[...]

To sign this petition, please send an email to licra@licra.org"

Please sign.
I've also made a new logo for the Human Rights Council:

30 per cent Australians practise no religion

"And, interestingly, two thirds of Australians still claim a religious affiliation. According to the yearbook 26 per cent of Australians are Catholic, 19 per cent Anglican and 19 per cent favour other Christian denominations. More than 30 per cent say they practise no religion, but followers of religions other than Christianity have shown the largest proportional increase."

Livenews.com.au, 12/02/2008

Btw. since I come across a bunch of articles that are good/interesting but which I don't make blog posts about, I've made a feed for them and you'll see it on the right. "Other news items..."
If you want to subscribe to it, then here's the link.

"One third of Russians believe in immortality – the poll
Almost one third of Russians (29%) believe in ‘eternal life’, Yury Levada’s analytical center told Interfax.
The theme of immortality is closer to women, people of 55 years old and upward, with low income level, those who live in towns and villages, the sociologists reported.
The number of Russians who believe in tokens has increased by 9%, and in prophetic dreams by 17%.
63% of participants say they believe in tokens while 59% believe in prophetic dreams. Respectively 31% and 33% stated the contrary.
One third of Russians (33%) are predisposed to listen to astrological predictions, the same percentage is sure that UFO-people visit Earth every now and then.

Interfax, February 11

In other words: Old wives' tales.

Atheists dominate in the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation

"The wooden doors of Castle Church were long ago replaced by ones made of bronze, but what comes as a far greater disappointment to Protestant pilgrims, especially those from America, is that only about 15 percent of Wittenberg's inhabitants identify themselves as Christian.
Most of the others proudly celebrate their atheism.
"We knew that Christianity had taken a hit during communist times, but to come here, to the land of Luther, and to find so many people outside the church, yes, it was a surprise," admitted Stephen Godsall-Myers, a Lutheran pastor from Pennsylvania.
The situation is even starker when the pilgrims make their way to the town of Eisleben, Luther's birthplace. There only 8 percent of the population calls itself Christian."

Chicago Tribune, 12/01/2007,

It's not all good news, because obviously Wittenberg attracts lots of pilgrims, but I've read about this earlier in a Norwegian article and what I find interesting is that East Germany never went back to Christianity like the other former communist countries. And one of the reasons is quite clear: the secularisation of Germany had already started before Hitler managed to screw up Germany. Quite unlike the situation in Poland and Russia. So while the communists elsewhere tried to put a lid on strong religious convictions with force, the German communists had a much easier job. At the same time, in West Germany, they used religion as a way to make up for the war.
There could be other reasons too, like the continued German efficiency, but I think the moral is that you can't force people with strong religious convictions to convert either way. After a couple of generations, OK, but 50 years won't do it. Also, have a look at a former post of mine about the current stats in Russia.

Unfortunately, the otherwise thorough Norwegian article (which most of you won't be able to read anyway) made the error that Communism and Nazism/Fascism actually agreed on religion: "they agree on the goal of a secular, atheist society". This is not true.
Nazism was certainly a threat to traditional religion, and they were for secularism, in the sense that religion should be a private matter insofar as the religion could not be changed to be more nazi-friendly. But they were not for Atheism. Spiritualism itself was more than welcome as long as it did not collide with nazi ideals and was useful to their ideology. Instead they scared people with Communist Atheism:

"Communism with the Mask Off
In Germany we have religious controversies which arise from profound questions of conscience but have nothing whatsoever to do with a denial of religion. These controversies are exploited sometimes by harmless and sometimes malicious critics and a parallel is drawn between them and the absolutely dogmatic atheism of the Bolshevic International."

Goebbels, speech 13 September 1935.

This is not to agree on religion. And for the inevitable religous comments about the connection between Atheism and Communism there's only one thing to say:

It's the economy, stupid!

For British historian Robert Service, communism is a religion.

"British historian Robert Service, in Comrades: a world history of communism, goes further [than Hitchens]. For Service, communism is a religion, a "secular credo" complete with millenarian overtones (apocalypse followed by paradise), an emphasis on scriptural exegesis (each communist party "was a synod of hair-splitting political discussion") and a theory of historical inevitability that looks suspiciously like a doctrine of predestination. Marx and Engels, Service suggests, enthusiastically encouraged devotion, with the consequence that they were "treated as prophets whose every word had to be treasured"."

The Sydney Morning Herald, August 25, 2007

Russians becoming less zealous believers - poll

"Fifty-six percent of Russians consider themselves to be Orthodox believers, according to a poll of 2,000 respondents conducted by the Yury Levada Analytical Center in July. One-third of respondents said they considered themselves atheists, and the remainder said they belonged to other religions. A total of 59% of respondents said they never attended church services, up 4% since 2005, and only 2% said they attended church every week and 4% every month, a 1-2% decrease over the same period."

Interfax, August 8. 2007

There's a lot of talk about the religious backlash in Russia, but if 33 per cent are still Atheists there, then that's a percentage which is quite high. And 2 per cent weekly church attendance is not exactly a backlash.
It's quite natural that the Orthodox church regains some territory. After all, the Communists did not really promote Atheism and reason. They were just content with banning religion, something that surely don't work in the short run.

Religion clashes with science in modern Russia

"Ten leading researchers have forwarded a letter to President Vladimir Putin, calling him to take urgent action against "the advance of clericalism." The signatories include Nobel laureates Zhores Alfyorov and Andrei Vorobyev, and fellows of the Russian Academy of Sciences Mikhail Sadovsky and Sergei Inge-Vechtomov, so the president can hardly shrug off their request.

What prompted them to sound the alarm was the recent 11th World Russian National Sobor (Assembly), held under the aegis of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose resolution calls on the government to add the ABCs of religion, under the name of Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture, to the list of compulsory school subjects. The Church thinks all children should be taught one Christian denomination - the one to which the majority of the population belongs.

[...]

Everywhere you go in Russia, you see a cassock. Priests bless warships and submarines, and sprinkle holy water over ballistic missiles. The Church has even published a Businessman's Manual of Morals. It fulminates against Western liberal values as erroneous and downright immoral.

The pendulum has swung to the side opposite militant atheism, and it is now likely to upset Russia's cultural balance."

RIA Novosti, 23/ 07/ 2007

Lenin warns against "bald Atheist propaganda"

In the struggle for World Atheism we are sometimes met with the age old communist strawman. Most likely it is a result from McCarthy-era propaganda that was produced with a largely Christian USA in mind. But it is looking more and more stupid in European countries where Atheism quickly is becoming the norm without there being any gulags. (It would be inappropriate to mention Guantanamo here, because they don't have to work.)

Anyway, strawman and McCarthyism aside, here's a very interesting comment by Lenin himself:

"It is the duty of a Marxist to place the success of the strike movement above everything else, vigorously to counteract the division of the workers in this struggle into atheists and Christians, vigorously to oppose any such division. Atheist propaganda in such circumstances may be both unnecessary and harmful—not from the philistine fear of scaring away the backward sections, of losing a seat in the elections, and so on, but out of consideration for the real progress of the class struggle, which in the conditions of modern capitalist society will convert Christian workers to Social-Democracy and to atheism a hundred times better than bald atheist propaganda."

V. I. Lenin, The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion, Proletary, No. 45, May 13 (26), 1900. (The text was provided by Marxists.org)

Is this news? Not to anyone with a minimum of knowledge about communism, but for people with less than minimum - people who swallow the bald evangelical propaganda that "Atheism equals Communism" - it is most likely big news. Lenin was still an Atheist (feel free to read the entire text), just that he was more into Communism:

"Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the bourgeois progressist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so: "Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!" The Marxist says that this is not true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters."

Not being a communist I shall continue to indulge myself in bald atheist propaganda - contrary to Lenin's advice! Atheists of the world unite!

Btw. if you want to search the archives at marxists.org (they have a lot) just use Google like this: site:marxists.org/archive/lenin/ bald