(July 19, 2014 at 2:37 am)Polaris Wrote: Well you are right. It is hard to qualify whether the people doing the killing were believers or not since they did exist in societies that did not respect the right to worship, but you can't be certain they didn't retain their religious beliefs.
It's hard to quantify but not hard at all to make an educated guess. Countries like Russia and Germany and China and Cambodia were overwhelmingly populated by superstitious believers before these 20th century regimes took power. No doubt that some of them took their new leaders' cult worship to heart and gave up their religions, but the various sects of Christianity definitely didn't vanish, and neither did most of the believers. In the USSR and Nazi Germany, Christians suffered limited repression at best, and Christianity is alive and well in both modern descendant nations, as it always was.
Quote:But the people who had ordered them to kill were documented as being non-believers.
And the people who gleefully carried out those orders were, with no legitimate doubt, mostly religious believers in every single instance. People who are easily swayed by one sort of mind control can be easily swayed by any, and the personality cults of these regimes were basically religions of their own, with their own gods and dogmas and long lists of people who need murdering for a lack of purity.
