Mao was communist, communists think religion is harmful. Mao killed like 40-100 million people. In communism you can do literally anything if the end is good. It would be perfectly fine to starve millions of people so people don’t revolt against the state. They have little value for individual lives.
But if there is no threat of punishment won’t there be a greater threat of anarchy? If you receive no punishment, what’s stopping people from killing each other, stealing, etc.?
Hitler hated Christians but most of Europe was Christian he couldn’t wipe them out easily.
What is the motive for loving others without religion? It’s a very natural reaction to hate your enemies and seek revenge. Do you honestly love everyone unconditionally for no reason?
I remember this one comment made by someone on the internet: “No country in the world today can truly be considered ‘communist’.” I believe that’s true: the ideology of the so-called ‘communist’ countries (Leninism, Maoism, Marxism, North Korean Juche) are actually not communism per se - at least communism as Marx or Engels envisioned it. IMO no one had successfully implemented yet because it’s difficult if not impossible to pull out in actual practice. Communism may sound good on paper, but that’s exactly the problem with communism I think: it’s
too good,
too idealistic that it will not work as intended in real life. At best you’ll just end up with some bastardized version of it.
I’ll admit, I believe the observation made by some people is (partly) correct: beliefs of some kind - whether it be some established religion or some ideology such as ‘communism’ or Nazism - did and do play a role in historical atrocities. What I disagree with is the diagnosis - that belief or religion is in itself a bad thing which should be exterminated.
I view religion as being like a gun or a knife: they can be used to kill people, but can also be used for ‘good’, non-lethal purposes. It’s not really a gun’s fault that it was used to kill people; it is the
person wielding it who is at fault. Or for another analogy, religion is like a medicine: it heals, but it can also kill (say, by overdose or by misdiagnosis). I like the medicine analogy better because of another point: just as overdosing on a drug is harmful and fatal, so is
excessive belief in something to the point of fanaticism and zealotry harmful. And that, I believe is the cause of the problem.
I actually won’t say guys like Hitler or Stalin did not have any ‘belief’, as some people say: they did have beliefs and ideologies of their own, only they were
so devoted to it with a blind fanaticism that they perpetrated horrible things, just as
extreme devotion to their faith causes Muslim terrorists to oppose non-Muslims and commit suicide bombings. But just as it’s not really the medicine’s fault that it can kill people who overdose with it, I don’t think just that because people had done horrible things in the name of whatever religion or ideology they espoused means that ‘belief’ of any form whatsoever is automatically bad.
“In [Jorge’s] face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood.”
Faith is a good thing, and zeal for one’s beliefs is also good, but when you are so
excessively passionate about your beliefs that you begin to cause harm to others, that’s when the trouble starts. But is your turning into a blind zealot religion’s fault? I think that that is just scapegoating. It’s like attributing the murders of a homicide to the gun he used.
