He is likely talking about the religion of Atheism, since I recall speaking with several heathens who have claimed Atheists are the only group that never waged war. Of course this is a lie. Atheists have caused more murder and misery than any religious group in the history of the earth, murdering literally tens upon tens of millions of people; and they have not helped humanity to anywhere near the same degree as Christianity:
"Atheism is the core of the whole Soviet system" —Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf
"...A fundamental conceit of the Communists had been their moral certainty that their new faith in "scientific atheism" would supplant what they believed to be mystical religious "mythologies," relics inherited from a bygone era of superstitions before Darwin, Marx, and electrification.
...Once they had gained power, the Bolsheviks sought to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church—and to crush all religion throughout the empire—by a mix of means: outright suppression; the closing of monasteries, church schools, and seminaries; public mockery of clergy and church relics; propaganda; materialist education of the young; and the encouragement of nationalist-separatist and schismatic movements within the church itself.[55] Bolshevik religious repression came in waves, the three most destructive being at the end of the civil war, in 1922; during the collectivization of the farms between 1928 and 1932; and at the time of Stalin's Great Terror, 1936-39. During the first wave, the Bolsheviks sought to blame the post-civil war famine on the church, which they accused unjustly of hoarding its wealth during a time of mass starvation. [e] In fact, the famine had resulted in part from the destruction wrought by the civil war but at least in equal measure from the Bolsheviks' own ruinous grain seizure policies. Recently released documents show that Lenin himself decided to make the church a scapegoat for the famine, thereby dealing with two problems at once. In March 1922 Lenin wrote to Molotov and other members of the politbiuro: "It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy." Lenin was quite clear that he wanted mass executions of clergy, where the victims would be accused of hoarding church wealth as the people starved: "The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. We must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades."[56] Consequently, in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, the Bolsheviks rigged show trials of church hierarchs, condemning many to death, and thousands more to internal exile or imprisonment. Lenin seems also to have considered a proposal to pay Ukrainian anarchists a bounty of 100,000 rubles per head to murder priests, calling it 'an excellent plan.'"[57]
uncpress.unc.edu
"Atheism officially replaced doctrinal religion. All opposition was ruthlessly suppressed by the Cheka, or political police, under Dzerzhinsky."
columbia.edu
"Soviet atheism was derived in part from Marxist theory, but for Marx atheism was primarily a philosophical tenet, an inference drawn from his theory of historical materialism, whereas for Lenin and his Russian followers atheism was a militant faith, a revolt against God, with deep roots in Russian anarchism. Lenin could have repeated what the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary Bakunin had said: “If God really existed, he would have to be destroyed.” Leninist atheism was not only something to be believed but also something to be believed in, something to be practiced in one’s daily life. It rested on the passionate conviction–of which Lenin, not Marx, was the great apostle, and which was more Russian than Western–that humanity is master of its own destiny and by its own power can construct a paradise on earth. For the Russian Communist Party, which Lenin created, atheism represented man’s power to do by himself, by his own intellect and will, through collective action, what Russian Christianity had taught that only God can do, namely, create a universal peace in human hearts.
"For seventy years, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the closing years of the Gorbachev regime, militant atheism was the official religion, one might say, of the Soviet Union, and the Communist Party was, in effect, the established church. It was an avowed task of the Soviet state, led by the Communist Party, to root out from the minds and hearts of the Soviet people all belief systems other than Marxism-Leninism. This was surely the most massive and the most powerful assault on traditional religious faith that was ever launched in the history of mankind.[6]
"The policy of the Soviet government toward religion was laid down in the first law on the subject in January 1918, called “On the Separation of the Church from the State and of the School from the Church.” To American ears, the title sounds harmless enough, but when the Soviets said “separation” they really meant it! In principle, the state would not give the slightest support whatsoever to the Church, and the Church was forbidden to engage in activities which were within the sphere of responsibilities of the state. This had a special meaning in a socialist system of the Soviet type, in which State and Party swallowed up civil society. Churches, mosques, and synagogues were deprived of almost all activities except the conduct of worship services. Moreover, schools were not merely to avoid the teaching of religion; they were actively to promote the teaching of atheism."
law.emory.edu
Of course, if Atheists are who he had in mind, he will claim the communists didn't war against humanity in the name of Atheism - as if that really says anything. In truth, Atheism was every bit as much a faith as was Christianity or any other religion. And the Atheists warred against their ideological enemies with more zeal and cruelty than any other group of religionists in history, save for the muslims. |
