(May 15, 2013 at 3:14 pm)Chuck Wrote: He was certainly not a christian by the time he joined the bosheviks. If he used the name of Jesus in public speeches during his rule, it would have been big international news and would be unlikely to be relegated to some obscure unattributed assertion on a web forum.
But during WWII he did award the medal of "Hero of Socialist Labor", which he himself created as the highest civilian medal of the Soviet regime, to the patriarch of the orthodox church for cooperated with the Soviet war effort against the Nazis and preaching that holdouts against the communist athiestic ideology should nevertheless obey Stalin and joint the red army. Appearently so long as you die when Stalin tells you to die, it doesn't matter to Stalin if you think you are going to heaven, and so long as you died believing Jesus, it doesn't matter to the orthodox church that you died doing the earthly bidding of Stalin.
BTW, the prestigious "Hero of Socialist Labor" medal fell into disuse after the fall of the Soviet Union, but it was recently revived and restored to the head of the hierchy of civilian medals in Russia by Vladimir Putin. And he awarded another "Hero of Socialist Labor" to the orthodox church in 2012.
The irony.
He was religious at one time prior to rising to that level of power, so the idea of an immovable authority figure out of the bible certainly could be useful to someone wanting to be a dictator.
I hate it when people try to use Stalin and Hitler or Po Pot as examples of how atheists are evil. Dictators have the same thing in common with the god/s of Abraham, absolute authority and absolute power. What makes anyone think that most atheists value a dictatorship. That is like clamming all people who have mustaches love Hitler.
If an atheist doesn't like the idea of blind loyalty and blind worship, what makes any theist think a state should be treated like a god, especially when we don't believe in any god/s?
Stalin was a monster, not because he was an atheist, but because he wanted absolute power.
