Commie says hi!

[Dystopia]

Theists and religious people can be communists, but they can't be Marxists as Marxism is inherently atheist (when it's logically consistent at least). There are exceptions as there always is, which is Islamic Marxism which started in central asia in the 1920's and 30's and spread amongst academic circles for a bit. the latter had a vague influence over Islamism/political Islam, and they borrowed the Leninist theory of the vanguard and state. I don't know too many details other than there was actually an influence.
There were also the "god builders" in the early bolshevik party and in Russia in the 20's who wanted to turn communism into a religion; it was a fascinating idea and for a breif period there were some odd experiments (e.g. babies weren't baptized but were "octobered"). I have had some sympathy with them but it was not overall consistent with Marxist ideology at a philosophical level as Lenin pointed out. it's rests on the same ideas as saying atheism or science is a faith.

Just as I thought - There is also this doctrine named Christian Communism that says Jesus Christ was the first communist ever and they believe Christianity is compatible with communist ideology - They just ignore the materialist atheistic part. Would you say that someone like a pantheist or deist (some of those folks are technically atheists) can be a Marxist?

I've been a communist sympathizer for nearly ten years, and it is only recently that I've started to "understand" it. I think Marxism is widely misunderstood and misrepresented, but that is a reflection of the complexity of "dialectical" thinking. I think Stalin won over his opponents, notably Trotsky, as he took the more pragmatic root; Socialism in one country was the best they could do at the time although it did strongly diverge from the original internationalist goals of communism as a movement.

Can I ask where are you from? I'm always curious to know because there's some countries where you can find a higher number of communist sympathizers. I am Portuguese and my country lived in an authoritarian fascist leaning (not as fascist as Mussolini) regime for 60 years so communists were hated. After the revolution in 1974 some militant communists who back then had finally freedom of expression to speak their minds tried to forcibly take the country down the path to socialism - It worked poorly and moderate, centrist, liberal-capitalist left-wing leaning parties won the elections and then Portugal signed up for the EU, so the opportunity for communism was lost. However, there's still a lot of members in the communist party and it gets about 10% votes every election depending if it's local or national.
I agree with you that's widely misrepresented - The typical strawman argument of "everybody gets the same shit", when realistically speaking if you wanted more you only needed to work more - The difference is that you would get the fruits of your labour directly. 
Socialism in one country seems to me a more plausible and realistic, perhaps even pragmatic option - If I was ever to become a communist I would probably be a Stalinist with some Leninist influences, but I would never worship Joseph Stalin or think everything he did was right.

I wouldn't chuck liberalism out just yet as there is a long way to go before communism- or indeed any alternative system- becomes credible. Stalinism (or Marxism-Leninism) was what worked and it is where any future communist ideas are going to have to drawn from. I nevertheless hope that any future communist system would be less bloodthirsty. From an intellectual point of view, that Marxist-Leninist also worked out the ideology more and so I'm drawing from them a lot.

Certainly - Theoretically the one party system violated Marx's proposal because the dictatorship of the proletariat wasn't supposed to be a dictatorship in the literal sense of the word. Apologies if I'm about to make a mistake, but since communists are anti-capitalism they are also, by definition, anti-liberalism (liberalism is the root of capitalism), right? I think people mistake being anti-liberalism as being anti-rights and anti-compassion - We could organize society without liberalism and capitalism and still keep the people's rights - It wouldn't make sense otherwise.

Despite being a Trotskyist in my very early days,  getting closer and closer to being a Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist by default. I think you're friend made a wise choice as being a Stalinist has the advantage of sticking with more orthodox ideas and learning the history and also having be honest enough about the mistakes that were made. the latter is hard and being an out and out supporter of Stalin, etc is political suicide, but there are good reasons to be skeptical about how far the history can be evaluated according to western-liberal moral standards particularly when you consider the influence of Judea-Christian morality which would be incompatible with atheism and materialism.

Of course it is, many people think being a Stalinist means you support murdering people arbitrarily or a totalitarian State - She does not worship Stalin or think he was a good moral person, she just believes his writings on the "socialism in one nation" idea and some pragmatic approaches are better than the internationalist harder to achieve proposal. She also says that we need to place ourselves abstractly back in the way in Soviet Russia to understand that much of the killings were not Gulags or deliberate executions but simply side effects of policies that still weren't perfect like people starving, etc.
Two other replies to further points you made to other members:
- I think that for the most part human nature is ambiguous and the reason we think capitalism is human nature is because we are used to it. I'm tired of telling people that no one before liberalism ever thought such system would ever exist or be invented by some lone writer in a cubicle - Just like no one thought the classical period would ever end and Rome would fall to the barbarians. People are severely limited by the ideas and mentality of the time they are born in, so it's productive to be impartial and consider that we don't know everything. Quite honestly, we have seen people commit acts of greed and cruelty but there's also many historic and contemporary figures who did acts of good, charity, compassion and cared for other human beings. To say that a 300 years old system is going to stay forever is childish and naive. From where I'm standing, we are largely a product of nurturing and if we grow up in a society that values success, competition and greed we will become greedy and egotistical. 
- Yes, I post in a forum for politics discussion and I see fascists getting along with Marxists/communists because they share extreme ideologies and that means other members are not nice to both groups. I think fascism isn't racist in it's original conception (Mussolini said 95% of race is a myth) - Hitler liked the idea, but contemporary neo-nazis are not fascists because they don't support imperialism. Portugal had a kinda fascist political period and our leader allowed interracial mixing in the colonies and gave Portuguese citizenship to mixed race children of interracial couples (I guess we aren't very racist, historians say without any intent of joke that Portuguese created mullatoes). My biggest problem with fascism is the fact modern fascism (very underground) supports eugenics to a degree I cannot stand - Not to mention their fetishism for conquering the world and being emperors.