Marxism/Leninism
Faith in god is an aberrant belief arising out of the pressures of the class struggle.
A well-developed atheistic
worldview is that of Marxism/Leninism. Marxism sees religion and God as manmade
institutions invented to ease emotional pain and explain life and death.
Karl Marx called religion the...
"opiate of the masses,"
in that it deadened the desire for social change in the present with a hope of heaven.
With ties by marriage to Nathan Mayer Rothschild, one of the
founders of the international Rothschild family banking dynasty, it was the
Rothschild family that financed in part the writing of the Communist Manifesto
and the Bolshevik Revolution.
Karl Marx described in his 1848 Communist
Manifesto the ten steps or 10 Planks of
Communism, necessary to destroy a free enterprise system and replace it
with a system of omnipotent government power, so as to effect a communist
socialist state. Sadly, today most Americans practice these 10 Planks of
Communism instead of their own Constitution or the 10 Commandment
model outlined in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.
Many Christian
groups have combined their Christianity with Marxism, sometimes referred to as
the "Christian Left." The World Council of Churches has been described as "an
instrument of Soviet policy since 1966." In America, the Maryknoll priests, the
liberation theologians, Episcopal and Methodist groups and Jesuits have been
active on the side of communist insurrection. [David A. Noebel,
Understanding the Times, 1991.]
Marx argued that capitalism,
like previous socioeconomic systems, will inevitably produce internal tensions
which will lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, he
believed socialism will, in its turn, replace capitalism, and lead to a
stateless, classless society called pure communism. This would emerge after a
transitional period called the "dictatorship of the proletariat": a period
sometimes referred to as the "workers state" or "workers' democracy". Marx's
thought demonstrates a strong influence from:
Hegel's dialectical
method and historical orientation.
World War I led to the Russian
Revolution of 1917, in the later stages of which the Bolsheviks, led by
Vladimir Lenin, took power. Marx served as a starting point for Lenin, who,
together with Trotsky, always believed that the Russian revolution must become
a "signal for a proletarian revolution in the West". Supporters of Trotsky
argue that the failure of revolution in the West (along the lines envisaged by
Marx) to come to the aid of the Russian revolution after 1917 led to the rise
of Stalinism and set the cast of human history for seventy years. The Russian
Revolution dynamized workers around the world into setting up their own section
of the Bolsheviks' "Third International". Lenin presented himself as both the
philosophical and the political heir to Marx, and developed a political
program, called "Leninism" or "Bolshevism", which called for revolution
organized and led by a centrally organized vanguard "Communist
Party".
Under Lenin, and particularly under Joseph Stalin, Soviet
suppression of the rights of individuals in the name of the struggle against
capitalism, as well as Stalinist purges themselves, came (in the minds of
many[weasel words]) to characterise Marxism.
In China Mao Zedong also
portrayed himself as an heir to Marx, but argued that peasants — not just
workers — could play leading roles in a Communist revolution, even in
third-world countries marked by peasant feudalism in the absence of industrial
workers. Mao termed this the New Democratic Revolution. Marxism-Leninism as
espoused by Mao came to be internationally known as Maoism.
"Lenin was right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." - John Maynard Keynes
A Marxist/Leninist cultural revolution is taking place today in
American universities where Marxism is alive and well. U.S. News and World
Report reported that there are ten thousand Marxist professors on America's
campuses. Georgie Anne Geyer says that "the percentage of Marxist faculty
numbers can range from an estimated 90 percent in some midwestern
universities." ["Marxism Thrives on Campus," The Denver
Post, Aug. 29, 1989]
The field of American history has come
to be dominated by Marxists and feminists according to Dr. Arnold Beichman and
Professor John P. Diggens. [Accuracy in Academia Campus
Report, July/August 1987] Self-declared Marxist historians, Eugene
Genovese and William A. Williams were elected president of the Organization of
American Historians in successive elections, and Louis Kampf, a radical with
Marxist predilections, was elected president of the Modern Language
Association. [Herbert London, "Marxism Thriving on American
Cmpuses," The World and I, January 1987]
Time
magazine's Man of the Decade for the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev, remains a
staunch Marxist/Leninist: "The works of Lenin, and his ideals of socialism
remain for us an inexhaustible source of dialectical creative thought,
theoretical wealth and political sacacity," Gorbechev said. [Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the
World, 1987] "Those in the West who expect us to give up socialism will
be disappointed.... I ... hold a firm trust in socialist democracy and
socialist humanism." ["In His
Words," U.S. News and World Report, Nov. 9, 1987.]
The Major World Views
- Agnosticism
Holds that truth is "unknowable."
- Rationalism
Sees all of nature as rational and the making of proper deductions is essential to achieving knowledge.
- Pragmatism
Is more concerned with what 'works' than with what's true.
- Monism
Everything is an undifferentiated oneness or unity.
- Henotheism
One supreme god, not necessarily to the exclusion of other lesser gods.
- Liberalism/Modernism
We must rethink and adapt our concept of God and truth to fit with modern culture and modes of thinking.
- Pantheism/Naturalism
Everything is god.
- Polytheism
There are many gods.
- Atheism
There is no God.
- Monotheism
There is only one God.
Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus
and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.
For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I
even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you
worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. - Acts 17:22-23
