User blog comment:Weedle McHairybug/Peace doesn't really sound very good to me... (various MG references and real life references ahead)./@comment-77.27.160.189-20121102004601

I am saying that Communism was acting like a Religion. They shared similar characteristics.

Many close observers of the Communist movement, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, have concluded that it can be understood only as a faith that demands the total allegiance of its adherents. In his authoritative study The Nature of Communism, Professor Robert V. Daniels says:

"The Communist Party is a sect, with beliefs, mission, priesthood and hierarchy. It is a church, in the very obvious sense that it is the institutionalization of belief. . . . Fervor, dogmatism, fanaticism, dedication, atonement and martyrdom can all be observed in the Communist movement.

"So far does the character of the Communist’s allegiance to the movement correspond to religious commitment that we can even observe the intensely emotional phenomenon of conversion when individuals are persuaded to embrace the Communist faith."

The principal dogma of Communist theology is "dialectic materialism." As expounded in the "sacred writings" of Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin, the dogma holds that the physical world of things which can be seen, felt, weighed, and measured is the only reality that exists. All talk about a spiritual dimension to human experience is nonsense.

Communist dogma goes on to state that economic forces — not human aspirations for freedom, nor other political ideals — are the real shapers of history. In particular, the determining factor in the evolution of society is the class struggle — the inevitable conflict between the exploiters and the exploited, the capitalists who own the tools of production and the workers who use them.

It is an article of faith with every devout Communist that the working out of the class struggle will eventually bring the Communist Party to power in every part of the world. When that red millennium comes to pass, time class struggle will cease, the Communist state will surrender the dictatorial powers it has had to assume during the struggle, and everyone will live happily ever after.

Lenin declared in one of his tracts that Communism must always be "militantly atheistic." "All modern religions are instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to drug the working class," he said.

The Communist Party has been in power in Russia for nearly half a century, and throughout this time it has followed, with varying degrees of zeal, Lenin’s prescription of "resolute hostility" toward all rival religions. Periods of harsh and open persecution have alternated with periods of relative tolerance, but always the power of the state has been employed in whatever fashion seemed most opportune to undermine faith in God.

Although Soviet Russia clearly has some first-class brains in its service — its space program is sufficient testimony to their existence — they evidently have not been utilized in formulating the government’s program of atheistic propaganda. Some of the arguments used by the Russian Communists in recent years to "disprove" the existence of God recall the late C. K. Chesterton’s wry remark that he owed his conversion to Christianity to atheists, whose flimsy logic "aroused in my mind the first wild doubts of doubt."

For example, the official Soviet propaganda apparatus has made a very big thing; of the statement by cosmonaut Gherman S. Titov that he looked all around for God while orbiting the earth in his spacecraft, and — "I didn’t find anyone out there."

The straight-faced emphasis given by Moscow Radio to Titov’s "discovery" suggests that there must be high-ups in the Communist Party who really believe that if God existed he would be readily visible to any space pilot

This childish type of atheism is evidently not too appealing to the Russian people, who have been bombarded with it for decades through their schools, newspapers, and broadcasting stations. Leonid Ilyichev, head of the Communist Party’s ideological commission, acknowledged in 1964 that there was a great need for more effective preaching of the atheist message. "The number of people practicing religious rites continues to be relatively high," he said.

Of still greater significance, perhaps, is the report of Harrison Salisbury, veteran New York Times correspondent who knows modern Russia as well as any Westerner, that "some of the most brilliant Soviet scientists" are quietly revolting against the purely materialistic concept of the universe laid down in Communist dogma.

"These men have not become believers in a formal religion or dogma," Salisbury says. "But they are no longer atheists. They believe that there must exist in the universe a force or power that is superior to any possessed by man."

Your argument is that since the government of the USSR attacked the Christian Church, it can't be religious. But in the Islamic world, Christians are persecuted and oppressed by the Muslims. The conflict between Communism and Christianity is similiar to the conflict between Islam and Christianity: it's a conflict between 2 conflicting "religions" or "faiths".