(in process..more to come soon)
QUOTES TO PONDER
- “Righteousness makes nations great. Sin is a disgrace to any people.” Prov. 14:34
- “May the Lord give you wisdom and understanding, that you may obey the Law of the Lord your God as you rule over Israel. For you will be successful if you carefully obey the decrees and regulations that the Lord gave to Israel through Moses.” 1 Chronicles 22:12-13
- Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”Nobel Prize Winner Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
- ”The yearning for the spiritual just will not die. . . There is no clearer demonstration of this hunger than the experiences of Russia and China as each has, in its own way, tried to exterminate the idea of God, only to realize that He rises up to outlive His pallbearers. . . The greatest question of our time must be considered: Can man live without God?” historian Will Durant
It’s very common for some people, especially atheists, to cherry pick mistakes and corruption among believers and say that religion is the cause of most/all evil in the world. It’s regrettably true that there have been terrible things done by some religious believers, especially when they abandon God’s principles for their own traditions which usually turn out to be destructive. But history shows that rejecting belief in God or lacking belief in God is far more harmful and dangerous. At the government level, research by Dr. Rummel shows that atheist governments have killed over 30 times the number of people that even corrupt religious governments have. We will look at the case of Russia below based on some historical research, including some newly released from government archives in Russia and Georgia about the factors that influenced Stalin to do the horrible things he did.
Professor R.J. Rummel is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii and talks on how “free thinkers”/atheists are a major factor in the worst losses of life in history. He says:
“Most contemporary democide, far greater than any historical cases, has been by free thinkers, i.e., those who believe that the established religions are superstitions, and one should be scientific, objective, rational, etc. Communism is a case in point, where out of the 174,000,000 murders 1900 to 1999, about 110,000,000 were by communists, who are professed atheists.
…Historically, secular governments have also been very repressive and murderous. All communist and fascist governments (Hitler, Mao, Stalin, etc) have been secular, and also murderous. The worst of all such governments have been atheistic and communist, and murdered overall around 110,000,000 people in the 20th Century.” www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/QA.V2.HTML
Some people will claim that religions cause most wars. But research on the entire history of war shows that this is simply not the case.
“an objective look at history reveals that those killed in the name of religion have, in fact, been a tiny fraction in the bloody history of human conflict. In their recently published book, “Encyclopedia of Wars,” authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare, and from their list of 1763 wars only 123 have been classified to involve a religious cause, accounting for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare. While, for example, it is estimated that approximately one to three million people were tragically killed in the Crusades, and perhaps 3,000 in the Inquisition, nearly 35 million soldiers and civilians died in the senseless, and secular, slaughter of World War 1 alone.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-alan-lurie/is-religion-the-cause-of-_b_1400766.html, http://carm.org/religion-cause-war
And time after time, when atheists/free thinkers gain government power, one of the things they try hardest to do is to eliminate free thought for others.
Why did atheistic/secular communism cause the deaths of between 100-200 million people and why did it spread so rapidly? Why are we facing so many crises in modern times that are causing difficulties and disasters for many lives around the world?
Whenever we look for the cause of disasters and tragedies, there will usually be several factors involved. Marcus Aurelius wisely said:
“We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.”
But the answers to why so many tragedies with so many tragedies happened in Russia and other places are fairly simple. God tells us that the primary factor, the root of all evil is greed (1 Timothy 6:10). There are many secondary factors that greed causes as well and vast scientific and historical evidence agree that greed and these secondary factors cause pretty much every evil you can think of.
Greed influences those with power to promote many types of deceptions in societies. These can be called secondary factors. Those who promote various deceptions usually do so for very simple reason, most often greed or pride and so they can control others.
Oxford professor Felipe Fernando-Armesto wrote about how losing truth makes people easy to exploit saying,
“Once truth has been devoured, people swallow falsehoods whole. Without confidence in the concept of truth, listeners are disarmed against lies.” “Truth, A history and a Guide for the Perplexed”, Felipe Fernando-Armesto, p. 165.
Greed is a main cause of these secondary factors such as ignorance of or rebellion against God’s laws, high levels of economic injustice that produce desperate people, sexual exploitation and many others. Atheism and Darwinism that are major causes of the worst atrocities in history such as the holocaust in Russia that caused ~35 million deaths and also the even worse holocaust in China that caused between 40-80 million deaths (depending on which experts you talk to). We may not know the precise numbers, but any of those numbers are an obscene level of deaths.
Research based on material newly released from Russian and Georgian government archives shows in more detail how the factors of corruption in churches (esp. abandoning Bible economics), economic injustice, atheism and Darwinism are related and how they influenced many people to look for a different kind of society that they hoped would be far better, but turned out to be much, much worse.
We should remember that the Bible predicted in many places that in the period before Jesus comes that there would be a small group of genuine believers (Rev. 12:17;14:12), but also many corrupt believers/churches without real godly power to change lives (2 Peter 2-3, 2 Timothy 3:1-5, Revelation 18). These corrupt believers would produce many scoffers and materialistic ideas that would become very common and that there would be very difficult times (2 Timothy 3:1-2). But the early church also had difficult times and yet beat the Roman empire over time by consistently following God’s principles, especially the golden rule and God’s economic principles (Acts 2:42-47, 4:32-35).
Religious people in Russia and China and the places where communism became popular usually rejected several major crucial truths in the Bible:
1) They did not teach people how to fairly distinguish truth from deceptions.
2) They did not teach about the golden rule, equality and justice for all, nor how much God hates poverty.
3) They did not seriously teach the truth of the balance of God’s free grace for salvation which results in following God’s laws because they are a way to love people, be successful, be healthy, happier and have many other kinds of benefits.
4) They did not teach about Bible economics that can save individual families thousands of dollars a year according to science and many people’s experience.
5) They did not teach about health principles that can save individual families thousands of dollars a year according to science and many people’s experience.
6) They did not teach about marriage principles that can save individual families thousands of dollars a year according to science and many people’s experience.
7) They did not teach or practice the principle of keeping the Saturday Sabbath which God gave to people as a gift/benefit (Mark 2:27) and which is a symbol that points to the important principles above. They replaced it with the man made tradition of Sunday (Jesus strictly forbade replacing God’s laws with man’s traditions in Mark 7:5-13). This broke the connection and weekly focus of remembering God as the Creator and opened the door much further to Darwinism and atheism in the minds of many future leaders of atheism in Russia.
God tells us that when we forget His laws, all kinds of troubles will become common.
“The people of Israel have rejected what is good, and now their enemies will chase after them…Even though I gave them all my laws, they act as if those laws don’t apply to them.” Hosea 8:3,11
Satan is a cunning general whose temptations sometimes harm people in the short term. But sometimes his temptations are planned to cause harm long term for many people. Of course not everyone who becomes a Darwinian or atheist or whatever is going to do horrific evil, just like not every Roman or communist or Nazi did horrific evil. Satan knows he can’t get 100% to do the worst evils. He just wants to influence as many people as possible towards harmful ideas.
“[Satan’s] object is to instigate evil, and when he has succeeded, throw all the blame upon the tempted ones. He points to their filthy garments, their defective characters. He presents their weakness and folly, their sins of ingratitude, their unlikeness to Christ, which have dishonored their Redeemer. Christ’s Object Lessons pg. 168-170,
He tempts one generation to reject a few laws or doctrines such as God’s the law against idolatry or coveting. Then years or generations later people ignore the health laws or the Sabbath or creation. Then they fall prey to Darwinism or capitalism or communism and follow greed which causes economic injustice and desperation. Then due to so much injustice in the world, some people become revolutionaries and overthrow all truths and doctrines of God altogether and try entirely new worldviews like atheism and communism, the new age, Islam or others. The next generation will go a few more, until entire societies have very high levels of immorality, crime, injustice and millions of lives are harmed. This happens at extreme levels in countries that are officially atheist.
Economic and political injustice in Russian society at that time, an abusive/drunk father, some corrupt/drunk priests who were anti-nomian, etc. made Stalin much more open to the idea that God doesn’t exist and were fertile soil that caused him to consider Darwinism materialist/godless speculations far more seriously than he would have otherwise. These factors combined to transform him from being a quite devout believer, into a nationalistic revolutionary, then a radical atheist Marxist and eventually a brutal communist and atheist dictator.
Anti-nomian is one of the very worst evils in the history of humanity and has directly and indirectly caused millions of deaths because of people who revolted against the abuse they suffered from anti-nomians who didn’t take God’s laws seriously. Legalism is also evil, but hasn’t caused as much dreadful harm as anti-nomianism has. Neither have anything to do with the Bible. They are both dreadfully false gospels and those who continue to follow them will either be lost themselves or they will cause vast harm to other human beings and be least in heaven as Jesus himself said in Matthew 5:19, 7:21. They are a blight on humanity.
But it also happens in many harmful ways in many other countries, such as those in Europe, America and Australia. In Australia, as in other countries, the anti-nomians caused much immorality, which in turn produced many atheists ridiculing religion for it’s claims to be a moral worldview. That produced much disregard for human life and has caused atrocious crimes and immorality of many kinds to sky rocket in recent decades as scientists and doctors have seen and testify to in this article.
Sorry atheists, but you’re wrong.
creation.mobi/sorry-atheists-but-youre-wrong
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SOME FACTORS THAT LED TO THE RUSSIAN HOLOCAUST
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The British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore is one of the world’s leading historians on revolution, empire and Russia. He has written a new biography of Stalin titled “Young Stalin” based on newly accessible Georgian communist party archives as well as memoirs of Stalin’s friends and various historical sources. Many things were kept out of official biographies before the fall of communism if it deviated from the official propaganda. In his account, you can see quite clearly how a mix of corrupt religion, economic injustice, alcoholism, abuse, sexual exploitation, cruelty of priests and government injustice were major factors that combined to cause Stalin to accept Darwinism and then atheism and become the the person he did and to commit the atrocities he did. These are some of the major steps in that process.
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1) IMMORAL/ANTI-NOMIAN PRIEST FACTOR
(encouraged drunkeness, promiscuous and rejected Sabbath)
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The priests in Stalin’s childhood disregarded godly principles in many areas (antinomianism) and used wicked levels of force and racism to root out Georgian identity (also anti-nomianism) completely disregarding many verses where God instructed people to treat others with the golden rule and to treat everyone equally and to treat foreigners in the same fair way they did Israelites (Numbers 9:14, 15:15, Matt. 23:8 and many other places).
This was compounded by the antinomian disregard for God’s instructions on the use of alcohol. Priests encouraged Stalin’s father to drink many times, a demonic habit that has ruined millions of families. The father went home and following the example of disobedient priests, ignored God’s law about not being harsh with children and often beat up his son Stalin throughout his childhood years.
“Provincial Georgia was priest-ridden, but these men of God enjoyed their worldly pleasures. Once church services were over, the priests spent much of their time drinking wine in Gori’s taverns until they were blind drunk..Stalin remembered: “As soon as Father Charkviani finished his service, he dropped in and the two men hurried to the dukhan” They returned home leaning on each other, hugging and “singing out of tune,” totally sozzled…Keke begged Father Charkviani not to take Beso drinking…but that did not help.” Beso found he “could not stop drinking. A good family man was destroyed,” declares Keke.
Worse, “Gori’s priests were notoriously debauched. All three were prominent local men who enjoyed rescuing a pretty young wife in trouble.”13 (p. 25-6)
In additions, the anti-nomians replaced God’s law of Sabbath worship with the man made tradition of Sunday (something Jesus strictly forbade in Mark 7:5-13), which broke the connection and weekly focus of remembering God as the Creator.
Thus anti-nomianism (in regard to foreigners, nationalism, alcohol and Sunday) opened Stalin’s mind to very serious considerations of Darwinism and atheism much more strongly. This eventually resulted in Stalin having no moral boundaries of any kind and led him to see no problem with murdering up to 35 million people.
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2) IMMORAL/ANTI-NOMIAN FATHER FACTOR
(alcoholic, abusive to children)
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Here are some excerpts from Montefiore’s book starting with what Keke (his mother) said about Stalin,
“He for his part loved me very much too. When he saw the drunken father, his eyes filled with tears, his lips turned blue and he cuddled me and begged me to hide him.”
Beso (Stalin’s father) was violent to both Keke (his wife) and Soso (Stalin).
“Undeserved beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as the father himself, believed his schoolmate Josef Iremashvili, who published his memoirs. It was through his father ‘that he learned to hate people.”
“Beso treated him ‘like a dog, beating him for nothing.’..Once, Soso arrived at Davrichewy’s house with his face covered in blood, crying: ‘Help! Come quickly! He’s killing my mother’ The officer ran round to the Djugashvilis to find Beso strangling Keke. This took a toll on the four-year old….He first learned violence at home: he once threw a knife at Beso to defend Keke.”
“…Keke…, who adored him, needed physical discipline to govern her unruly treasure. ‘The fist which had subdued the father was applied to the upbringing of the son,’ said a Jewish lady who knew the family. ‘She used to thrash him,’ Says Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana. Psychiatrists believe that violence always damages children…Many children abused by alcoholic fathers repeat the behaviour to become child- or wife-beaters themselves, but a few become murderous tyrants.”
In later life, he believed in violence as both the holy scythe of history and as a useful management tool, encouraging his henchmen to “smash people in the face as a means of checking up on them” Yet he admitted that he “wept a lot” during his “terrible childhood”.
(in the footnote: *For what it is worth, Adolf Hitler was beaten by his drunken father, Alois. Stalin…was at least partly to blame for the early deaths of both his wives. He abandoned his illegitimate children, ignored his son Yakov for almost fifteen years and then bullied him.
The family lost the home which was Stalin’s birthplace and became wanderers. They had at least nine different homes, depressing rented rooms, in the next ten years, hardly a table upbringing.2
Keke’s misery was indeed well known: Egnashvili, Father Charkviani and the police chief Davrichewy did their bit to help her…Keke’s life was falling apart. The business was failing…”When I was ten,” Stalin recounted in 1938,” my father lost everything and became a proletarian.” p. 29-32***
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3) IMMORAL/ANTI-NOMIAN GOVERNMENT (rejected Bible economics and supported economic injustice)
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While still the finest choirboy at the church school, Stalin started to show an interest in the plight of the poor and to doubt his faith….One event…made a deep impression on Stalin. On 13 February 1892, the teachers of the church school ordered all their pupils to attend a gruesome scene***(check quote) that they hoped “would arouse fear and respect in the boys”: a hanging. Three gallows were erected…the condemned men had stolen a cow and, in the ensuing pursuit, had killed a policeman. But the boys learned that the criminals were actually just three “peasants who had been so oppressed by landowners that they escaped into the forest,” petty Robin Hoods, attacking only local squires and helping other peasants…The executions were a Russian show of strength; young Davrichewy called the condemned men “holy martyrs”…The three bandits in leg irons were marched onto the scaffold…the crowd threw stones at the hangman, who was masked and clad completely in scarlet…The hangman kicked away the stools…If anything, the spectacle helped make Stalin a rebel.” pg. 48-51
4) EXPOSURE TO DARWINISM
Montefiore reports that Stalin borrowed a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species when he was a teen (or a book about Darwin’s views).
“Stalin read it [Darwin’s Origin of the Species] all night, forgetting to sleep, until Keke found him. ‘I loved the book so much, Mummy, I couldn’t stop reading…’ As his reading intensified, his piety wavered.”
One day Soso and some friends, including Grisha Glurjidze, lay on the grass in town talking about the injustice of there being rich and poor when he amazed all of them by suddenly saying:
“God’s not unjust, he doesn’t actually exist. We’ve been deceived. If God existed, he’d have made the world more just.”
“Soso! How can you say such things?” exclaimed Grisha.
“I’ll lend you a book and you’ll see.” He presented Glurjidze with a copy of Darwin.”
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin, p. 25, 29-31, 49, 55,56. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2007. (referencing memoirs of G. Glurjidze, P. Kapanadze, G. Elisabedashvili and Demna Shengelaya, quoted in Kaminksy-Vereshchagin, pp. 50-54).
Trotsky also was enthralled by Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. He said: “Darwin stood for me like a mighty doorkeeper at the entrance to the temple of the universe.” He said that Darwin’s ideas “intoxicated” him. And he thought it insane for someone to think that belief in God could find room in the same head as belief in Darwin’s ideas.
6) ABUSIVE SCHOOLS
Eventually, Stalin was sent to a seminary to study for an advanced degree. But the place was abusive:
“‘The [Russian] Empire’s seminaries were notorious for the savagery of their customs, medival pedagoguery, and law of the fist,’ comments Trotsky. ‘All the vices banned by the Holy Scriptures flourished in this hotbed of piety.’ This seminary, nicknamed the Stone Sack, was worse than most….The monks were determined to squeeze any hint of Georgianness out of their proudly Georgian boys. Georgian literature was totally banned.
A few years earlier, in 1885, a pupil had beaten up the rector for saying ‘Georgian was a dogs’language.’ The next year, the rector was murdered with a Georgian khanjali sword. The seminary was to pull off the singular achievement of supplying the Russian Revolution with some of its most ruthless radicals. ‘No secular school,’ wrote another seminarist, Stalin’s comrade Philip Makharadze, ‘produced as many atheists as the Tiflis Seminary.’ The Stone Sack literally became a boarding-school for revolutionaries.”
These beatings assuredly made him much more open to other worldviews that might not have so much of the injustice that he experienced.
IMPORTANT CONCLUSION/ACTIONS
What’s scary is the anti-nomianism that inspired Darwinism and atheism in Russia, China and ~28 officially atheist countries which sacrificed ~150 million lives, is now being adopted in the west. It may cause another holocaust or it may just cause enormous loss of life due to people refusing to follow God’s principles that 1000s of scientific studies show bring the highest quality of life. Either way, it’s going to do more damage to life than the debasing idolatry (such as child sacrifice) in Bible times did, partly due to much larger numbers of people affected now.
Economic and political injustice in Russian society at that time, an abusive/drunk father, some corrupt/drunk priests who were anti-nomian, etc. made Stalin much more open to the idea that God doesn’t exist and were fertile soil that caused him to consider Darwinism materialist/godless speculations far more seriously than he would have otherwise. These factors combined to transform him from being a quite devout believer, into a nationalistic revolutionary, then a radical atheist Marxist and eventually a brutal communist and atheist dictator.
Anti-nomian is one of the very worst evils in the history of humanity and has directly and indirectly caused millions of deaths because of people who revolted against the abuse they suffered from anti-nomians who didn’t take God’s laws seriously. Legalism is also evil, but hasn’t caused as much dreadful harm as anti-nomianism has. Neither have anything to do with the Bible. They are both dreadfully false gospels and those who continue to follow them will either be lost themselves or they will cause vast harm to other human beings and be least in heaven as Jesus himself said in Matthew 5:19, 7:21. They are a blight on humanity.
What’s scary is the anti-nomianism that inspired Darwinism and atheism in Russia, China and ~28 officially atheist countries which sacrificed ~150 million lives, is now being adopted in the west. It may cause another holocaust or it may just cause enormous loss of life due to people refusing to follow God’s principles that 1000s of scientific studies show bring the highest quality of life. Either way, it’s going to do more damage to life than the debasing idolatry (such as child sacrifice) in Bible times did, partly due to much larger numbers of people affected now.
Christians can choose to walk a different path. We can avoid the horrible tragedies of the past if we act with wisdom, especially in the 7 areas where churches in Russia and China became corrupt and followed man’s ideas instead of God’s. Ellen White writes:
“In your association with others, put yourself in their place. Enter into their feelings, their difficulties, their disappointments, their joys, and their sorrows. Identify yourself with them, and then do to them as, were you to exchange places with them, you would wish them to deal with you. This is the true rule of honesty. It is another expression of the law. “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Matthew 22:39. And it is the substance of the teaching of the prophets. It is a principle of heaven, and will be developed in all who are fitted for its holy companionship. MB p. 134-5.
“there is a yet deeper significance to the golden rule. Everyone who has been made a steward of the manifold grace of God is called upon to impart to souls in ignorance and darkness, even as, were he in their place, he would desire them to impart to him. The apostle Paul said, “I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the barbarians; both to the wise, and to the unwise.” Romans 1:14.
…whatever you may possess above your fellows places you in debt, to that degree, to all who are less favored. Have we wealth, or even the comforts of life, then we are under the most solemn obligation to care for the suffering sick, the widow, and the fatherless exactly as we would desire them to care for us were our condition and theirs to be reversed…The standard of the golden rule is the true standard of Christianity; anything short of it is a deception…
A religion that leads men to place a low estimate upon human beings, whom Christ has esteemed of such value as to give Himself for them; a religion that would lead us to be careless of human needs, sufferings, or rights, is a spurious religion. In slighting the claims of the poor, the suffering, and the sinful, we are proving ourselves traitors to Christ. It is because men take upon themselves the name of Christ, while in life they deny His character, that Christianity has so little power in the world. The name of the Lord is blasphemed because of these things.
Of the apostolic church, in those bright days when the glory of the risen Christ shone upon them, it is written that no man said “that aught of the things which he possessed was his own.” “Neither was there any among them that lacked.” “And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all.” “And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God, and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.” Acts 4:32, 34, 33; 2:46, 47.
When those who profess the name of Christ shall practice the principles of the golden rule, the same power will attend the gospel as in apostolic times.” Ellen White, Mount of Blessing, p. 134-9.