When Communism reigned with its iron fist in Russia, it was bent on destroying all religion.
The very essence of the Communist ideology, which developed from Marxist theory, was to uproot traditional faith in God and its worldview, claiming that a godless, classless society would emerge once Conservative religious values were exterminated.
Atheism destroys Hope: As the United States now openly embraces Marxism with its strong statism, fervent hatred of religion, traditional values and Conservatism, it looks as though Soviet totalitarianism is likely to get its replay in the former “land of the free,” writes historian of comparative religions, author and founder of The Herland Report, Hanne Nabintu Herland.
One of the most famous dissidents who experienced the depth of Soviet repression is Russia’s novelist and philosopher, Nobel Prize laureate 1970, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
In the Templeton Prize Lecture, 1983, he described how Communism brought with it an atheistic mentality and secularization which absolved the traditional sense of morality: “More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Atheism destroys Hope: “Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty 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 sixty 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.”
Another Soviet dissident, Chris Banescu writes about America: “As a survivor of the Communist Holocaust I am horrified to witness how my beloved America, my adopted country, is gradually being transformed into a secularist and atheistic utopia, where communist ideals are glorified and promoted, while Judeo-Christian values and morality are ridiculed and increasingly eradicated from the public and social consciousness of our nation.”
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Atheism destroys Hope: “Under the decades-long assault and militant radicalism of many so-called “liberal” and “progressive” elites, God has been progressively erased from our public and educational institutions, to be replaced with all manner of delusion, perversion, corruption, violence, decadence, and insanity.”
“It is no coincidence that as Marxist ideologies and secularist principles engulf the culture and pervert mainstream thinking, individual freedoms and liberties are rapidly disappearing. As a consequence, Americans feel increasingly more powerless and subjugated by some of the most radical and hypocritical, least democratic, and characterless individuals our society has ever produced.”
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn as the symbol of Russian Orthodox Revival
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn warned that Atheism creates Communist Holocaust: Communist states persecuted religion like it has never been persecuted before, writes the Russian Orthodox priest-monk, Seraphim Rose in his book God’s revelation to the Human Heart.
The suffering Orthodox Christianity saw its churches closed, its priests persecuted and tortured. Yet, precisely in this environment was born the contemporary Orthodox revival and newfound belief in the Conservative values that now characterize Russia.
Solzhenitsyn, who had a strong Christian faith, may be seen as the very symbol of this revival, having undergone such suffering in the Gulag prison camps, in detention, repression and finally exile – yet, he came out undefeated by it.
The despair and suffering that rose from realizing that Communism and its Marxist ideology did not produce the promised land of justice for all, was precisely the push that fueled the Russian Orthodox religious awakening.
The atheist Gulag repression thus became the very starting point for spiritual rebirth, as faith in God and the religious worldview outgrew the empty slogans and meaninglessness of atheist Communism.
How atheism destroys hope and the human soul
Atheism destroys Hope: Father Rose points this out and that The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn should be read by anyone who wishes to understand what atheism does to the human heart, and how it was practiced in Russia.
Solzhenitsyn saw atheism more as a universal category of the human soul. Like Dostoyevsky writes, everything becomes permissible – with no boundaries, when you accept the idea that there is no God. Then there is no judgement, no personal responsibility, no moral accountability, no need to “love one another like God loved us first”.
Life itself becomes a meaningless exercise to the atheist, the universe a mere physiological fact with no deeper dimensions; the materialistic realm becomes the only realm worth examining.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s project of showing what atheism does to the human soul, shows that where atheism become a dominant philosophy, intolerance – the lack of respect for other worldviews and fervent hatred towards these – will permeate society to such a degree that prison camps become a must.
Father Seraphim Rose puts it this way: “Man wants religion, and if it is forbidden, he must be somehow gotten rid of. Therefore, since atheism is based on the evil in man’s nature and his right to slip away from any moral boundaries, the Gulag prison system is the natural expression of the atheist experiment in Russia.”
Although the Soviet media was completely submerged in propaganda, publicizing only the atheist state’s political narrative, the religious revival in Russia grew with a steady pace.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich tells the horrifying story of the life of a dissident in the ruthlessly totalitarian Soviet system, where prison camps were the destiny of those who dared to pose critical questions.
Atheism denies man access to the deeper meaning of existence
Atheism destroys Hope: One may argue that where there is atheism, there is only materialism since nothing else exists to the atheist. The world becomes meaningless in such a worldview; the only worthwhile pursuit is that of selfish gain, hedonism, bodily pleasures and material wealth.
Only the carnal pleasures render human life some meaning before death, which is regarded not as a path to the next life, but as the final end of man’s existence.
Atheism effectively shuts the human off from any relationship with the unseen and non-tangible world, which it denies exists.
Scientific materialism asserts that whatever is not empirically provable by scientific standards, does not exist. As the metaphysical realm of God, angels and demons exist outside of the scope of the observable world, to deny it also means denying humans a deeper understanding of the deeper meaning of life.
This is the very subject of Orthodox Christianity, that mystically and intricately, the God realm is still intertwined into every aspect of human life as God is love and desires for humans to love one another.
Just as the metaphysical world of God carries eternal essence, the corrupted, temporary, constantly changing state of the physical world needs humans who stretch their being towards that which is holy. Only the enlightened will receive wisdom to rule with justice.
It may be argued that atheism creates in the individual a remarkable mental poverty that limits him to the physical world – as he lives in oblivion of the vast universe of the spiritual dimension.
It was this spiritual poverty that the Soviet nation became tired of, and slowly began to embrace its former Conservative fundament.
Russia’s turn from Communism to Orthodoxy
From this place of total repression was borne the returning belief in the Conservative values that were crushed by Lenin 1917 onward. In order to better understand this remarkable cultural process, read professor Glenn Diesen’s new book, Russian Conservatism.
Today, Russia is what we traditionally would call a Christian nation, as over 70 % of its population adhere to the Orthodox Christian faith. Russia is marked by a dramatically different degree of respect for religious freedom, such as for its around 15 % Muslim population who are free to worship and gather, reportedly without state interference. President Putin recently pushed for the incorporation of God and religious belief into the Russian constitution, stating that “the memory of our ancestors who transmitted ideals and faith in God”.
