We are what We Think: The Case of Communism/Atheism

If we are what we think, then our mental diet is critical. Increasingly, we are finding that a steady porn-diet exerts a powerful influence. One commentator writes:

• Among males, exposure to pornography is associated with addictive behaviors traced to the release of chemicals in the brain, stimulating arousal and excitement. In the larger context, pornography is also associated with an exaggerated masculinity, negative attitudes toward women, and relational breakdowns due to unrealistic sexual expectations.

Serial killers have had notoriously poor mental diets. Ted Bundy’s diet was fed by massive doses of hard-porn. Before his execution, he commented about the effects of his “education”:

• Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self. (Christian Research Journal, Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32)

In contrast to this, Western culture has become broadly anti-intellectual. Feelings and experiences, not thinking, are given the place of honor in social gatherings. However, what we believe determines what we do. Even our experiences, as important as they might be, require some form of mental interpretation before they are able to provide guidance.

Once we fail to appreciate the power of ideas and convictions, we fail to understand the flow of human history. According to Wikipedia, University of Oklahoma political scientist Allen D. Hertzke writes that:

• “The collapse of the religious impulse among the educated classes in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, he [historian Paul Johnson] argues, left a vacuum that was filled by politicians wielding power under the banner of totalitarian ideologies – whether 'blood and soil' Fascism or atheistic Communism. Thus the attempt to live without God made idols of politics and produced the century's 'gangster statesmen' – Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot – whose 'unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind' unleashed unimaginable horrors.”

The influence of our beliefs is incontestable:

• Daniel Goldhagen argues that 20th century Communist regimes "have killed more people than any other regime type." Other scholars in the fields of Communist studies and genocide studies, such as Steven Rosefielde, Benjamin Valentino, and R.J. Rummel, have come to similar conclusions. Rosefielde states that it is possible the "Red Holocaust" killed more non-combatants than "Ha Shoah" and "Japan's Asian holocaust" combined, and "was at least as heinous, given the singularity of Hitler's genocide.

Estimates of how many Communism has exterminated usually center around 100 – 150 million non-combatants. How could something that had such an idealistic façade, something that had attracted so many intelligent and idealistic people, have produced such horrors? The Russian writer and Nobel laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, offered the following explanation:

• “Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.' Since then I have spend well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.'” (Conservapedia)

Without the belief in God, restraint is removed in favor of promoting our agendas. Can we equate communism with atheism? Vox Day claims that this equation is undeniable:

• “Apparently it was just an amazing coincidence that every Communist of historical note publicly declared his atheism … .there have been twenty-eight countries in world history that can be confirmed to have been ruled by regimes with avowed atheists at the helm … These twenty-eight historical regimes have been ruled by eighty-nine atheists, of whom more than half have engaged in democidal acts of the sort committed by Stalin and Mao …

• The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists, three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war, and individual crime in the entire twentieth century combined.

• The historical record of collective atheism is thus 182,716 times worse on an annual basis than Christianity’s worst and most infamous misdeed, the Spanish Inquisition. It is not only Stalin and Mao who were so murderously inclined, they were merely the worst of the whole Hell-bound lot.

• Is a 58 percent chance that an atheist leader will murder a noticeable percentage of the population over which he rules sufficient evidence that atheism does, in fact, provide a systematic influence to do bad things? If that is not deemed to be conclusive, how about the fact that the average atheist crime against humanity is 18.3 million percent worse than the very worst depredation committed by Christians, even though atheists have had less than one-twentieth the number of opportunities with which to commit them. If one considers the statistically significant size of the historical atheist set and contrasts it with the fact that not one in a thousand religious leaders have committed similarly large-scale atrocities, it is impossible to conclude otherwise, even if we do not yet understand exactly why this should be the case. Once might be an accident, even twice could be coincidence, but fifty-two incidents in ninety years reeks of causation!” (Conservapedia)

Is it really so difficult to explain? Employing Machiavellian logic – the ends justify whatever means - the atheists believed that any form of terror was permissible if it advanced their communist revolution:

• "Violence in itself is not evil. It depends on what its purpose is. In the hands of Socialists, it is a progressive force." Boris N. Ponomarev - Communist Party Secretary.

• "The energy and mass nature of terror must be encouraged." V.I. Lenin.

• "The capitalists will supply us with the materials and the technology which we lack. They will restore our defense industry, which we need for our future victorious attacks upon our suppliers." V.I.Lenin. 

• "The struggle between world proletariat and bourgeoisie will continue until the final victory of Communism on a world scale." F. Rhyzhenko "peaceful Coexistence and the Class Struggle", Pravda, 22 August, 1973.

• "Marxist-Leninists decisively reject the assertions of certain bourgeois theoreticians who consider nuclear missile war unjust from any point of view." General Major A.S. Milovidov and Dr Ye A. Zhdanov, in 'Questions of Philosophy', a Soviet Journal, 1980.

• "... on the Communist side, nuclear war will be lawful and just ... the natural right and sacred duty of progressive mankind to destroy imperialism . . . It will resolve not just specific limited interests but a crucial historical problem, one that affects the fate of all mankind." Colonel B.A. Byely in Marxism-Leninism on War and Army.

These troubling statements are perfectly understandable from the perspective of The Heart, Mind and Soul of COMMUNISM by Dr. Schwarz:

• “The Communists have always been perfectly frank on this subject. Beginning with the Communist Manifesto, which says, ‘We openly declare that our ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions,’ the identical sentiment has been repeated ad-nauseam in all the writings of the Communist hierarchy and in official pronouncements of the Comintern and the Cominform. They categorically reject any suggestion that the transition from Capitalism to Socialism can be by the peaceful pathway of reform. One of the principal epithets of abuse in a somewhat extensive vocabulary is the word "reformist," a term of ridicule and contempt. Scientific law [in the socialist concept of science] has written that the change-over must be both revolutionary and violent. This is determined both from their philosophy of dialectical materialism and from a fake evaluation of the economic forces in society. To use a Marxian analogy: ‘Force is the midwife to deliver the socialist order from the womb of a decadent Capitalism’ ... Lenin, the founder of Bolshevism, and thus of Fascism, substituted the idea that the revolution was to result from the scientific planning and execution of the party, which was the class-conscious vanguard of the Proletariat. He replaced the idea of spontaneity with the idea of planned conspiracy. Every party member became a disciplined conspirator dedicated to the goal of the overthrow of the government by force and violence.”

Our beliefs are like a horse’s bridle, guiding us to the left of the right. Why was the Apostle Paul a man of peace? Why didn’t he rail against his oppressors and seek revenge? He didn’t have to resort to unethical means, because he knew his Savior:

• That [serving Christ] is why I am suffering [persecution] as I am. Yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day. (2 Tim. 1:12)

He knew that if he was to be deprived of everything, even life, he was deprived of absolutely nothing. Instead, he remained confident:

• We also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in his presence. (2 Cor. 4:13-14)

Without such knowledge, we would become desperate and resort to any means to provide for and avenge ourselves. However, our Lord has assured us:

• "But a time is coming, and has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me. I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." (John 16:32-33)

Jesus taught us that, in order to have peace, we need to know and believe certain truths. Without such knowledge, we will not be able to continue in peace.