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It's a hexbear thing.

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  • Is this about my comment, or am I being egocentric? In case it is about my comment, I post here some clarifications I made there:

    I messed up. I misunderstood Hexbear, wrote a confusing comment, unintentionally offended you, then reacted badly to your angry replies, many of which misrepresented what I wanted to say. Now with hindsight, I ask you to read this:

    1. I did not mean to accuse hexbearites of being bad like New Atheists. I wanted to use the antisocial behavior of New Atheists (fruitless anti-religious intolerance) as an anti-example. In my experience, leftists discern between “theocrat” and “religious comrade". I felt this thread was an outlier. But then I worded my comment in an confusing way, appearing to conflate you with New Atheists.
    2. The accusation of loving war crimes in the Middle East is for foaming lunatic New Atheists like Sam Harris, not Hexbearites.
    3. I meant that anti-religious bashing is easily misrepresented by right wing propaganda. I explicitly said that the “atheist elites” narrative is disinformation. Cubans practice their religions in peace, just not theocracy.
    4. I did not mean all “true” Christians are Catholics or whatever.

    I am a newbie and autistic (actual diagnosis). I care a lot for detail and took offense with misrepresentations. And I am still getting up to speed with the LGBT movement.

    Today I realized this analogy. When Rede Globo (massive right-wing media corporation) sheds tears for “democracy”, I wish them go pound sand. They supported the military dictatorship for decades, and still distort reality in favor of capitalism, NATO, and Israel. Becoming softer is not enough. I would forgive them if they actually switched sides.

    So I can relate to trans people who look at the historical crimes of organized religion (such as the Catholic Church), and who suffer religious hate even today, saying they will only respect the Catholic Church if she actually switches sides. Malcom X said: stop sweet talking!

    • This meme is not about your comment in particular, but it was inspired by the general hullaballoo about religion yesterday. I wasn't really paying attention to who said what, I didn't even read most of the comments, I just saw a gargantuan wall of people getting very passionate about a sore point.

  • 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.

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