(September 21, 2015 at 7:23 pm)Losty Wrote:(September 21, 2015 at 7:18 pm)Huggy74 Wrote: How does Stalin (who WAS atheist) NOT fall under the definition of a "militant atheist"?
How many people did he kill in the name of atheism?
He was an atheist, and he was a militant communist, but he was not a militant atheist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism
Quote:State promotion of atheism as a public norm first came to prominence in Revolutionary France (1789–1799). Revolutionary Mexico followed similar policies from 1917, as did Marxist–Leninist states. The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1917–1991) and the Soviet Union (1922–1991) had a long history of state atheism, whereby those seeking social success generally had to profess atheism and to stay away from houses of worship; this trend became especially militant during the middle Stalinist era from 1929 to 1939. The Soviet Union attempted to suppress public religious expression over wide areas of its influence, including places such as central Asia.
Quote:Within about a year of the revolution, the state expropriated all church property, including the churches themselves, and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed (a much greater number was subjected to persecution). Most seminaries were closed, and publication of religious writing was banned. The Russian Orthodox Church, which had 54,000 parishes before World War I, was reduced to 500 by 1940. A meeting of the Antireligious Commission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) that occurred on 23 May 1929 estimated the portion of believers in the USSR at 80 percent, though this percentage may be understated to prove the successfulness of the struggle with religion.