Word: atheism
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...bolder than their elders. The official Communist response to new religious stirrings has been modified reprisal. Five of the Christian Seminar members are under arrest; others are being harassed or undergoing forced "psychiatric" treatment. In January authorities arrested Father Dmitri Dudko, a Moscow priest whose fiery sermons attacked official atheism. In what dissidents consider a pre-Olympics "cleanup," many other prominent Orthodox believers were rounded up in late 1979 and early 1980. Among them: Father Gleb Yakunin, an Orthodox priest who appealed to the regime and the World Council of Churches for religious liberty and founded the Christian Committee...
Considering the fact that the 1917 Revolution was dedicated to the destruction of religion, the present standoff is something of a triumph for Orthodoxy.* The early Bolshevik regime confiscated church lands and abolished religious influence in schools. Intense atheism campaigns in the 1920s and '30s led to the imprisonment and death of thousands of priests and the desecration of countless churches. In the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, workers boasted that they burned 20,000 icons in socialist competition. By 1939, when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler, the Russian Orthodox Church had only 100 or so churches open throughout...
...million rubles for the Red Army. In desperate need of a spiritual force that could bolster national solidarity, Stalin allowed the church more freedom. Since then, except for a strong antireligious period in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the church's right to peaceful coexistence with atheism has not been seriously threatened...
...Besides that, the 20th century is littered with the sorry results of supplanting God with an absolute force that is not divine, such as the "people" in Nazism or the party in Communism. Küng's lucid analysis contends that atheism's 19th century patriarchs proclaimed their theories but never bothered to prove them. Ludwig Feuerbach, the founder of modern atheism, asserted that religious beliefs were mere projections of mankind's noblest qualities; Küng responds that such philosophers' belief in the goodness of human nature is far more likely to be such...
...Whatever atheism's weaknesses, what about the other side? Can God's existence be established by reason, without resorting to the Bible, revelations, church dogmas or a leap of faith...