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It's a hexbear thing.

41 comments

  • Caring this much about the pope dying for it to become a struggle session is deeply embarrassing for all of us. It's the pope, he isn't that important of a dude, catholics are I guess supposed to do whatever he says but most don't. His suggestions are considered by many, that's about it.

    • Devout catholics didn’t care what the pope thought. He says look after refugees, don’t discriminate against other religions and challenge capitalsim. The catholics are just like “deus vult lol” but are often too lazy to go full tradcatch. The whole thing feels more like an identity than any sort of genuine belief system.

      • The whole thing feels more like an identity than any sort of genuine belief system.

        yeah thats why the struggle sessions happen. Because people thought that communism being anti-religion (as it should) means that communists in the global south should go around and burn down churches and shoot priests or something.

    • Yeah, I seriously don't get why this didn't just end after one single "the pope is dead" post, what are we even doing here

  • Seems fairly mild so far, like cats hissing and growl-meowing at each other but not really going into it tooth and tail.

    • This is entirely unrelated and I was thinking of messaging you before this all happened anyway, but I'll take advantage of the moment.

      Could you please recommend any writings where Stalin discussed religion? Or do you know if he ever wrote anything that fleshed out his personal thinking on it? I remember you shared some quotations or anecdotes of Stalin on religion with me before, and since you're the resident Stalinist™, I thought you'd be the person to ask.

      • Uh off the top of my head he was extremely secular and practically atheistic throughout his public life. The few times he's made any rare religious reference was usually in some form of recorded public address to workers where he either makes a well-known Orthodox religious reference to drive in a point or as a sort of "gods on our side" kind of throwaway phrase.

        Now if I really wanted to look deeper for where Stalin had more to say on religion, I'd want to look to the period of the great patriotic war where we see a rapid easement of relations between the Orthodox church and the Soviet state, particularly around '43 when Patriarch Sergius of Moscow worked his ass of trying to figure out how to build enough theological justification to compromise with the government in return for an end to active prosecution. This is also the time when we'd look for any writing in relation to the Islamic population of the Soviet Union as well.

        I can say there's some apocryphal writing saying he was still privately a believer and worked to soften the most harshest elements of the militant atheism that was practiced during the 20s, there's even an apocryphal story where Molotov was talking with him about some city plans and how there was a proposal to demolish some really old fucking church and replace it with some Soviet propaganda building, and Stalin just said "nah. Leave it."

        I'll try to look into it because it sounds like an interesting little project to dig around into.

41 comments