www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall Communist Persecution of the Russian Orthodox

Hi all,

For a debate I'm having with atheists who insist that killing was done primarily on the part of religious folks, I need to prove that the Communists killed 20 million religious Russians. Does anyone have documentation of this, though? Sources are needed.

Thanks and God bless,

Jennifer

I need to know, too, if these deaths were due to religious persecution.

Thanks,

Jennifer

I don't have my copy with me, but you may want to check out "A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy" by Nathaniel Davis.

Why does it matter if the communists killed them for their faith, because they were members of the wrong ethnic group, or for some other randomly selected psychopathic reason?

Hi Cizinec,

Thanks for responding to my post.

I'll have to check it out. Sadly, my conversations with the atheists didn't go too well, and I no longer speak with them. Still, your book recommendation looks like it'd make for some interesting reading. I'll have to check it out.

I, personally, don't think that it makes much of a difference. The atheists I was dialoguing with seemed to imply that religion is a bad thing because people go to war over religion. I wanted to point out that even atheists are capable of cruelty and war -- and that they, too, have persecuted others because of their religion.

Again, thanks for your response.

God bless,

Jennifer

Dear Jennifer,

Just this one more last post . . .

There is another issue at work with our non-believing brethren than just the war thing.

The fact is that the very fact that religious people WILL kill and be killed for their faith offends the atheistic assumptions about religion.

And the atheists have always believed that science will eventually overcome religion altogether - that religion is just an uneducated and unscientific way of explaining the world etc.

If anything, people are turning their backs on science now more than ever before.

Science has brought us weapons of mass destruction and all sorts of things that cause cancer etc.

People today tend to want holistic medicine over traditional medicine, they are suspicious of packaged, processed foods etc.

And they find the scientific world-view where spirituality has no place to be entirely unsatisfying.

The fact that people will kill and be killed for religion, even people who are extremely well-educated (like the terrorists) doesn't sit well with them at all.

Atheistic communism should probably get the Nobel Prize for Atrocities (if such is to be had) along with Nazism that promoted worship of the state.

Alex