maff91@yahoo.com (maff) wrote:

Marx was half right - religion is a class A drug

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1043481,00.html
Andrew Anthony
Wednesday September 17, 2003
The Guardian

Your starter for 10. Who wrote the following words? "Religious suffering is

at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real
suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a
heartless world and the soul of soulless circumstances."

No? OK, here's the next line. "It is the opium of the people."

Yes, Karl Marx - you knew it all along. Unusually for Marx, the above

sentences still resonate with truth, still reflect an identifiable condition of
life as it is lived - at least by some people - today. Except, that is, the
last line, the one we all know.

Religion is no longer the opium of the people. When Marx was writing, in

1843, at the height of a philosophical and industrial revolution (and only a
year after Britain had defeated China in the opium wars), religion must have
afforded a comforting retreat from the uncertainties of rapid change. But you
have only to turn on the news to see that whatever religion offers the world
today, it's not the pacific escapism of an opium pipe.

Perhaps Marx should have tried some, because the atheist communists he spawned
became THE MOST violently destructive group of human beings known to man.
Behold:

Death by Government (1994) R.J.Rummel. Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick,
USA. ISBN: 1-56000-927-6

Forward by Irving Louis Horowitz

"All societies are in their nature imperfect artifacts. But those that
hold as their highest value the sanctity of the person are different in their
nature and essence from those who see their ultimate mission as obedience and
punishment for the transgressors."…
"Rummel's work needs no elaboration. But I would like to point to one
crucial aspect that stands out above all others: the need to revise our sense
of the depth of the horrors committed by communist regimes on ordinary
humanity. The numbers are so grotesque at this level that we must actually
revise our sense and sensibilities about the comparative study of
totalitarianisms to appreciate that of the two supreme systemic horrors of the
century, the communist regimes hold a measurable edge over the fascist regimes
in their life-taking propensities. For, buried in the datum on totalitarian
death mills as a whole is the terrible sense that communism is not "Left" and
fascism is not "Right" - both are horrors - and the former, by virtue of its
capacity for destroying more of its own nationals, holds an unenviable "lead"
over the latter in life taking."
"One might argue that the fascists had a greater sense of technological
modes of destruction, but the communists utilized the natural hardships of life
the better to destroy individual capacities for survival."
p. xii-xiii

TABLE 1.4
This Century's Bloodiest Megamurderes

Dictator Idealogy Country Years Murdered (000)

Joseph Stalin C USSR 1929-53 42,672
Mao Tse-tung C China 1923-76 37,828
Adolf Hitler F Germany 1933-45 20,946
Chaing Kai-shek M/F China 1921-48 10,214
Vladimir Lenin C USSR 1917-24 4,017
Tojo Hideki M/F Japan 1941-45 3,990
Pol Pot C Cambodia 1968-87 2,397
Yahya Khan M Pakistan 1971 1,500
Josip Tito C Yugoslavia 1941-87 1,172

C = Communist; F = Fascist; M/F = Militarist/Fascist; M = Militarist
p.8

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." JOHN 8:32
Good Christian books listed and described at:
http://www.hometown.aol.com/mrgoodsalt/index.htm

Religion is no longer the opium of the people. When Marx was writing,
in 1843, at the height of a philosophical and industrial revolution
(and only a year after Britain had defeated China in the opium wars),
religion must have afforded a comforting retreat from the
uncertainties of rapid change. But you have only to turn on the news
to see that whatever religion offers the world today, it's not the
pacific escapism of an opium pipe.