What is not taboo in pseudo-socialists circles is the New Atheist inspired endless mockery of both Christianity and Islam - the ugly tone of the Christopher Hitchens' book : " God Is Not Great - how religion poisons everything " .
For any honest socialist there is the long, depressing historical record of how religious institutions have entrenched themselves again and again with a corrupt and rotten ruling class. But no socialist movement will ever succeed as a MASS MOVEMENT by mocking the religious faith of millions. Here in Rhode Island thousands of Christians still go to church on Sunday but believe in God and an after life " in their own way "- not stupefied by unctuous and invariably pro-establishment clergy.
You could not get a dozen of these GOOD people to attend a lecture on dialectical materialism . But they clearly have social justice instincts consistent with the New Testament preaching.
Real socialists MUST build a bridge between SCIENCE and FAITH without compromising TRUTH.
Freed from wage slavery - and the terror of everyday life under capitalism- working people will be FREE to think for themselves about God or No-God - without the help of grotesque Stalin era " Museums of Atheism ".
Socialist propaganda absolutely must avoid the obnoxious, snobby tone of the New Atheism.
[ It does seems like a few good, high school courses in biology, chemistry, and physics can cure most of humanity of the ignorance Carl Sagan challenged in " The Demon Haunted World ".]
"Solzhenitsyn had easily won the right to be laid to rest at the Novodyevichy Cemetery, Russia's equivalent of Westminster Abbey.
But he himself asked to be buried at Donskoi, no doubt because of its associations with resistance to the Soviet regime. It was here that the Russian Orthodox Church's leader, Patriarch Tikon was imprisoned after the 1917 revolution as the Bolsheviks began their repression of religion. Under Stalin's orders part of the monastery became a museum of atheism and another part a children's penal colony. Thousands of victims of the NKVD, the Soviet secret service that later became known as the KGB, were incinerated in one of the monastery's churches that was converted into a crematorium. In the ultimate gesture of defiance, Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, was also secretly baptised there. "The decline of the New Atheism ?
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