Comments Elsewhere

Ghertner:

… I have no doubt that the consequences would have been the same if not worse if communism in practice had incorporated elements of Christian socialism.

Actually, I’m not sure that this last is true. Christian socialism, in Russia (e.g., Tolstoy) and elsewhere has traditionally been either (a) some mild form of social democracy, or (b) utopian, anarchistic, and pacifist. There are plenty of reasons to think that widespread adoption of a Christian socialist programme would have caused plenty of problems, but little reason to think that it would have collapsed into the sort of bloodbath that centralist and bloodlusting Marxist-Leninism did.

Of course, this isn’t any kind of argument against atheism, or any kind of argument that the Bolsheviks slaughtered as many as they did because they were doctrinaire atheists.

P.S.: the word is a-t-h-e-i-s-m, folks. As in the opposite of theism, derived from the(os) + ism.