According to a 2000 study by Kinnear, Kernes, and Dautheribes, the seven most-practiced religions of the world, the United Nations, and the American Atheists identified a “short list of universal moral values.” These are (1) the commitment to something greater than oneself, which may include the recognition of and commitment to a Supreme being and seeking the truth and justice; (2) self-respect with humility, self-discipline, and acceptance of personal responsibility; (3) respect and caring for others, such as the Golden Rule; and (4) caring for other living things and the environment. These universal moral values suggest that each religious belief system contains certain nuggets of truth and that these beliefs have aided humanity in its survival. These universal moral “laws” and our moral sense to do what’s right also suggest a divine and transcendent moral lawgiver: God.
To understand the full truth of our existence, universal morality, destiny, meaning, purpose, and spirituality, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Through Jesus, we have the source of all truth and the example of what we need to emulate in our earthly travels. He promised that we’d all face tribulations and would need to bear our own cross. He also promised paradise.
Values counter to these values suggest a dark source contrary to the light and love of Jesus: Satan. We were warned by the Blessed Virgin Mary numerous times in apparitions such as Our Lady of Success in the 16th and 17th centuries and at Fatima in 1917. At Quito Ecuador, our Lady warned us of the ways free masons and others would corrupt the Church in the 19th and 20th centuries with ideas counter to the seven sacraments such as that of Holy Matrimony. At Fatima Portugal, she warned that if certain conditions were not met, Russia would spread its errors. Russia has spread its errors through communism. Each of the values expressed in communism runs counter to values of the Bible from the Ten Commandments to Jesus’ messages and parables. These demonstrate their Satanic source.
The Communist Manifesto
In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published “The Communist Manifesto,” which is a foundational document that has been used by communist parties around the world to disseminate their ideas. In this document, they framed the world as a power and class struggle between the rich bourgeois and the poor proletariat. They argued for the elimination of all private property by seizing bourgeois property and turning it over to the state. They claimed their ideas would lead to a classless utopia with no religion, morality, or guiding principles. But they were wrong and their ideas are nothing more than a big lie. Communism equates with the most horrific and violent monster who roars against human dignity, individualism, love, truth, justice, forgiveness, and benevolence.
Around 120 million perished in the past century under communist leaders such as Stalin in the USSR, Pol Pot in Cambodia, and Mao Zedong in China. Why? One primary reason is that communism takes away the natural human motivation to work. Those who have worked hard in business and entrepreneurship (the “bourgeois”) were punished when the communist states stole their land, capital, and organizational assets and tossed them into the clink. These activities have been well-documented by a one-time USSR prisoner called Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his groundbreaking book “The Gulag Archipelago.” He documented the experiences of dozens of Gulag prisoners under Lenin and Stalin in the past century who had been unfairly imprisoned. Some were imprisoned when their neighbors ratted them out as anti-communists. Others were caught picking food from their own farms to feed their families rather than ship all crops to the cities. Still others were religious leaders who were gunned down on site or shipped into 10-year exiles. Others were imprisoned for the crime of being too successful financially, the farmers, entrepreneurs, and business owners.
On page 20, Marx and Engels write: “In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.”
In its communist “confession of faith,” more details are laid out. Its aim is to eliminate all private property and replace it with state-owned property. They further speak of subjugating the individual to the collective.
“The happiness of the individual is inseparable from the happiness of all, etc. (page 37)”
“In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying (page 23).”
“How will you arrange this kind of education during the period of transition? Answer: All children will be educated in state establishments from the time when they can do without the first maternal care (page 40)”
“What will be the influence of communist society on the family? Answer: It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents (page 52).”
“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.” “There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience (page 26).”
In other words, communism is its own religion that coincides with postmodernism with its desire to abolish eternal truths such as freedom and justice, along with religion and morality. Its foundation sews discord, chaos, and the “big lie.”
Question 22. Do Communists reject existing religions?
Answer: All religions which have existed hitherto were expressions of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples. But communism is that stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and supersedes them.”
How will communists take over?
I. “By limiting private property in such a way that it gradually prepares the way for its transformation into social property, e. g., by progressive taxation, limitation of the right of inheritance in favour of the state, etc., etc. II. By employing workers in national workshops and factories and on national estates. III. By educating all children at the expense of the state” (page 40).
The Gulag Archipelago
And how did these ideas play out decades later? In the Gulag Archipelago, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn offers details.
“In the spring of 1922 the Extraordinary Commission for Struggle Against Counterrevolution, Sabotage, and Speculation, the Cheka, recently renamed the GPU, decided to intervene in church affairs. It was called on to carry out a ‘church revolution’ – to remove the existing leadership and replace it with one which would have only one car turned to heaven and the other to Lubyanka. The so-called “Living Church” people seemed to go along with this plan, but without outside help they could not gain control of the church apparatus. For this reason, the Patriarch Tikhon was arrested and two resounding trials were held, followed by the execution in Moscow of those who had publicized the Patriarch’s appeal…Here and there in the provincial centers and even further down in the administrative districts, metropolitans and bishops were arrested, and, as always, in the wake of the big fish, followed shoals of smaller fry: archpriests, monks, and deacons. These arrests were not even reported in the press. They also arrested those who refused to swear to support the ‘Living Church’ ‘renewal’ movement” (page 22).
“The root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called ‘nuns’ in transit prisons and in camps. True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote: ‘You can pray freely. But just so God alone can hear.’ (She received a ten-year sentence for these verses)….In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code…True, one was still permitted to renounce one’s religion at one’s trial: it didn’t often happen but it did nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.” All persons convicted of religious activity received tenners, the longest term then given” of ten years (page 22).
And what were the prisons like?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath, that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums” (page 39).
The Naked Communist
In 1958, Cleon Skousen published his best-selling book called “The Naked Communist.” In 1961, he added 45 Communist Goals that were designed to destroy America. He was a professor, a scholar, a Mormon, and an FBI agent. These Goals included the following:
1. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
2. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of the teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
3. Gain control of all student newspapers.
4. Infiltrate the press.
5. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
6. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression.
7. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them ‘censorship’ and a violation of free speech and free press.
8. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
9. Present homosexuality, degeneracy, and promiscuity as ‘normal, natural, and healthy.’
10. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with ‘social’ religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a ‘religious crutch.’
11. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of ‘separation of church and state.’
12. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
13. Infiltrate and gain control of big business
14. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
15. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents.
The Ten Commandments
Consider the 10 Commandments and the way the Communists violated each with its anti-God, anti-religion, anti-family, anti-morality, and anti-property ideas:
I am the LORD your God. You shall worship the Lord your God and Him only shall you serve.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day.
Honor your father and your mother.
You shall not kill.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.
Were early Christians socialists?
Some have used verses such as the following from Acts 4: 32-35 ESV to claim early Christians were socialists: “Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common. And with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.”
They compare this passage with Marx’s “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.”
This comparison is faulty because the Christians willingly shared their goods with one another, while Marx advocated forcefully confiscating private property from individuals to give to the state. His system resulted in mass poverty, mass starvations, and the transfer of all wealth to top leaders in the government. The oligarchs/government party leaders are the primary ones with much money in Russia and China, respectively, while the Chavez family heirs and government friends among very few with much money currently in Venezuela.
Thank you for your time.
SJ Thomason, Ph.D. , is a professor of business who teaches courses in business management at the undergraduate and graduate (MBA, EMBA, DBA) levels.
Christian Apologist 