From your link:
“The Black Book of Communism,” a postmortem of communist atrocities compiled by European and American academics in 1997, concluded that the human cost of genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, and artificial famines stood at over 94 million."
This is fuzzy math, that includes WW2 deaths. This is an example of unfair accounting. Think about it. Did the Soviet Union have mass killers? Of course it did. But, if a mass killer killed 10 people and was himself executed, that's 11 more victims of Stalin. That is, I repeat, fuzzy math.
And Holodomor was not Stalin's. The issue for the young USSR was sanctions and gold blockade. It just so happened in the 1930s, that the capitalist west, only wanted grains but not gold from Stalin's USSR. You can apply a simple logic to this. IF the holodomor was deliberate, why did it cease in by 1933/1934? Did Stalin die or stop ruling USSR? there is more to the history than just the narrative of the West.
Now, we need to be precise as to how we appropriate responsibility for the deaths. For instance, in a 1996 60 Minutes interview, Madeline Albright, the Secretary of State from 1997 to January 2001, and Ambassador to the UN from 1993 to 1997, during the Clinton administration, answered, “the price is worth it,” in response to the claim that 500,000 children have died due to the United States sanctions on Iraq, followed by the question, “Is the price worth it?”
So, who's responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children if not Christians in America? If this was Russian operation and Russian boycott, I know that Putin would be blamed. No doubt. While after American bombings that destabilize Middle East, and that result in terrorism there, the blame for the outcome is always on someone else. Of course you can make non Americans look like evil villains.
Again, as I have stated in other posts in this thread, the debate over actual numbers of dead under various political/ideological regimes misses my point about the human heart being fundamentally corrupt and reflecting that corruption in and through any society, communist, democratic or theocratic. This number-crunching, is, in my view, a red-herring - at least as far as my greater point is concerned.
There seems to be this idea you and others have that pointing out the evil in a Communist regime somehow gives a pass to the evil in capitalist/democratic ones. I've never stated nor implied such a thing.
Nobody follows Christianity or Christ's teachings. Even you don't follow them, because Christ was a communist.
You have no idea of the actual character of my living. Why, then, are you so quick to make confident assertions about it? You erode your statements when you are so rapid in making them from a basis of ignorance.
Christ was not a communist. I expect, though, you're relying on equivocation in making this statement, adjusting what is typically meant by "communist" to achieve your assertion.
He preached against possessions (
Luke 14:33) and taught that woe to the rich and blessed are the poor (
Luke 6:20).
No, in fact, Christ did not preach against having private, personal property, only of the making of exclusive, myopic, selfish investment in earthly possessions. As I expected, you have reduced Communism down to this one thing, in the process wildly over-simplifying both Christ's teachings and the nature of Communism.
Luke 14:33
33 So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.
You've adopted a very literal reading of this verse in service to your assertion above, but what about the following statement given by Christ:
Luke 14:26-27
26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.
27 Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.
Reading in the highly literal way you have with
Luke 14:33, one would have to conclude Jesus was promoting religious suicide in these verses. A Christian is not merely a communist, he's got to hate himself and execute himself on a cross if he wants to be a disciple of Jesus! Of course, this is not at all what Christ was really indicating. A hyper-literal interpretation of Christ's words, though, leads directly to such a silly interpretation - just as it has in your interpretation of
verse 33.
Did Christ renounce all that he had? How about his disciples? Did he renounce them? Wouldn't "all" necessarily include them? How about his robe? Doesn't it fall under the universal category of "all," too? Did Jesus renounce his clothing, walking around naked, instead? Do we see the early disciples of Jesus renouncing all they had in emulation of Christ? No, the NT describes Christians owning various possessions, including houses. Lydia had house. So did Ananias (
Acts 16). And Titius Justus (
Acts 18:7). And Nymphus (
Colossians 4:15). And so on.
The same sort of interpretive mishandling has occurred with your use of
Luke 6:20. The verse does not offer a prescription, does it? No. It makes a statement/promise concerning a particular state-of-affairs but does not enjoin poverty as a way of life.
Christianity is actually "Paulinism". Paul preached personal responsibility (if one should not work, then they should not eat, 2 These. 3:10). While Jesus was saying.. "give to everyone who asks of you",
Luke 6:30.
??? These are not necessarily mutually-exclusive statements.
As a general rule, one should work in order to supply to themselves the means to buy food. But doing so does not prohibit charitable giving of the sort commanded by Christ. Paul himself was the object of charitable giving many times, as he acknowledged in various of his NT letters, urging such giving of his fellow Christians. (
Romans 12:8; 2 Corinthians 8:1-15; 2 Corinthians 9:5-11, etc.)
Another feature of Paulinism, is dividing between state and personal responsibility.
Romans 13 says that all authority is basically from God, including possible punishment by death (
Romans 13:4 says the gov authority carries a sword for a reason, my paraphrase). This is the root of Christianity today. Christians who have authority, and have command of the military find no issues with using the military to support American interests, even as they worship and pray to Jesus, who "was a man of peace and not of sword".
This may be your view, but can you anchor it in concrete examples that clearly show the relationship between Paul's teachings and American military expansionism? I very much doubt it.
But, and this is perhaps off topic, but I think it highlights the double thinking in Christians. Supposedly, Stalin killed 60million+ people, and that makes him evil. And yet, Christians worship a God who would torture trillions of people in Hell. For eternity. And this God will remain good and holy forever and ever. With these standards, it's no doubt there exists this duality of thought among Westerners.
This, obviously, rests upon a glaring category error. People may be murderers, genocidal killers of one another, but God, as the Creator and Sustainer of all life, has a unique corresponding prerogative to be the Taker of life, as well. No human stands in this category with God. When God ends a person's temporal existence, then, He isn't ever guilty of murder; He merely exercises His divine prerogative as Creator and Sovereign over all things.
The Bible never says God tortures people in hell. They suffer
torment, yes, but one can be deeply tormented without ever being tortured by another. In any case, as with human law, the severity of the punishment generally acknowledges the severity of the crime. So, too, with God. Hell indicates to us, not God's cruel intemperance, but the full awfulness of our sinful rebellion toward Him. Hell is so horrendous because our sin is so horrendous.
"But our sin is merely temporal, finite!" you might retort. "It's unfair to punish such evil forever!" To which I reply simply that our sin is not finite insofar as it is always ultimately against
God Himself, in defiance of the infinite, holy Maker of Everything.
