Stalin,Christian turned atheist .What went wrong?

Question

Stalin was aspiring to be a priest;so he must have been influenced by Christ? What went wrong?He is probably more despised than Judas. I have often wondered about someone like him losing their faith to have turned against Christ.Your comments?

Answer 1

He read Darwin's book and abandoned his faith. About 75% of children raised in Christian homes lose their faith after their first year of college. It definitely happens. God will never force someone to stay with Him. It's our choice.

Answer 2

Thank you for the respectful tone of the question. EDIT on the way: As you've seen and probably already knew, we do not believe it is possible to turn to a god. We're convinced that you are really turning to your imagination. Please don't take it as an insult, though some people present it in such a way. (This question has been asked before and usually with a snide comment thrown in.) If you didn't think there was a god of some kind, you'd think that too. First, "everything" does not really go wrong at once. There is always some bright side to look on, even if it is not immediately apparent. When the going gets tough, I turn to friends. I turn to my husband and I turn to myself. I find comfort in time with my child, my pets and on my own. I read, listen to music and form a plan to cope with whatever I am facing. I often like to have a good cry and a beer or cup of tea when I am frustrated. Once that's out, I get up, dust off and keep moving. Its simple, really. I thought when I gave up my god delusion I would feel alone or bereft. I don't. I feel fine in good times and bad. It may be hard for you to imagine, but if you try, I think you'll get it. Again, thanks for seeking understanding of people you do not immediately understand. That is very enlightened of you.

Answer 3

Stalin went from a Christian to someone who used every religious trick in the book to make a religion around himself!

The problem wasn't Christian to Atheist. The problem was Christian to Atheist who decided to create totalitarian dictatorship where people worshiped Stalin!

People turn to atheism all the time in this world. But only a select few decide to do what Stalin did. Look at Hitler. He was Christian, he may have stayed Christian, or become some kind of weird hybrid Christian/Pagan thing. Either way he was crazy, just like Stalin.

So what went wrong in each case was that a crazy person got too much power.

Answer 4

Vladimir Putin had a nightmare the other night (I was there I know). He dreamt the ghost of Stalin came back to advise him on current Russian policy. 'Oh father Joseph..' said Putin, 'What shall I do? The soviet economy is prospering, but these dissidents are threatening the stability of the state'?
'Show trials, the terror and assassinate the enemies of socialism' says Joe 'and paint the Kremlin purple'
'Why purple?' says Putin.
'Well done' says Stalin 'you only remembered and answered the second part of the sentence..you will make an excellent idealogue'
a propos?

Answer 5

lol and what about all the murderous so-called Christians that have been running rampant over the past few millenia?

To use Stalin to make a comment on atheism is ludicrous.

Anyway, he wasn't a communist, he was a Bolshevist. Big difference.

Answer 6

Stalin was never a Christian, but was placed in a seminary by his mother. His true nature became evident there. His heart was never changed, he never had true faith in Christ as far as being saved. He may have been religious at the beginning, but there are many people who are religious but lost just like Nicodemus. One of the greatest deceptions the devil uses is religious deception, because it deceives people into thinking they are connected to God when in reality they do not know Him.

Answer 7

The odds are that he only said he was an atheist because he was a communist. You had to say that to join the party. But many of them really weren't.

Answer 8

One of the answerers said "It's obvious he was never a Christian."

I would also argue that it is also obvious he was never a Marxist.

He just saw a chance to rise, and that happened to be the kind of system he was in, so he aped what he thought was the prevailing ethic in order to do so.

But he was too wooden and not very intellectual, so he couldn't even ape that ethic very well. He violated just about every precept that the Soviet "founding father" Lenin tried to teach him.

He gave up international revolution for his "theory" of "socialism in one country." He gave up on the concept of workers councils ("soviets") actually ruling the country, abandoning soviet democracy and turning the councils into a bunch of party hack handraisers for his regime. Early Bolshevik policies had followed Alexandra Kollantai's radical views on sexual freedom. Stalin instituted a new puritanism.

It is unknown where Stalin himself was during the October uprising in which the Bolsheviks took power. He was not present at the Smolny Institute, which they took over for their headquarters, not at the St. Petersburg Soviet offices, not at the headquarters of the Military Revolutionary Committee, and not in his home. No member of the workers militia ever came forward later to say that Stalin had fought by their side. The Bolshevik courier whose job it was to deliver messages to him during those days returned unopened envelopes to their senders.

Yet when Stalin's bureaucratic regime had pushed aside both the workers councils and the old Bolshevik revolutionaries, articles were pushed in the press that he controlled claiming he was the great leader of the uprising.

Later he attacked all of the old revolutionaries who had actually DONE something. By 1941 every single member of Lenin's original Central Committee was dead, disappeared, or in prison, except for Stalin himself and a cowed and frightened Alexandra Kollantai.

He almost single-handedly destroyed the Chinese revolution of 1927, requiring his supporters there to follow his edicts like biblical commandments. The fact that he ordered retreats when support for the CCP was strong and ordered advances when they were weak was irrelevant - what counted was following his orders. In the end almost 200,000 Chinese communists in the cities were executed by Chiang and the Kuomintang, who opposed the communists, and the Chinese revolution was set back 22 years. It was later led to a half-as* victory by a Stalin-wannabe named Mao tse Tung, who had "earned" his position by leading a purge in which the old-style communists in the Chinese party were killed.

Stalin killed off the old guard of the revolution in the Red Army, jealous that people like General Tukachevsky actually had real support among the people, while his was the result of fear. As a result, he had to sign a pact with Hitler, because there was no way the Soviets could fight the Nazis then.

But instead of being honest and saying "We can't fight them, we have to make a deal," he painted the pact as a GOOD thing, and told people that the deal wasn't to gain time, but that the Nazis were OK! All of this while German communists, and millions of others, were going to the death camps.

He hid in his dacha and refused to believe that the Nazis had violated their pact, only emerging days later when the Nazi invasion had taken thousands of square miles of territory and killed thousands of people. The generals that had survived his purges were scared to do anything without orders. He had told them to maintain their positions before he went into hiding. Afraid to do anything without new instructions, they sat on the former front lines facing west, while the Nazis rampaged into the country behind them, to the east.

Stalin first formed the huge networks of camps called the gulags to imprison the thousands of old communists who thought he was betraying what they had fought for. Later he expanded them to hold millions of ordinary Soviet citizens who had the temerity to question something, to have any of the old communist books that he banned, or who had just stepped on the wrong toes.

Stalin destroyed the ability of the USSR to gain the support of workers in the west, and brutalized workers in the east. After stumbling around for 75 years with murderous bureaucrats in his mold sitting on its shoulders with their hands around its throat, the USSR finally collapsed.

While Stalin tried to build his reputation on the legacy of Lenin, his predecessor, there is some question as to whether the doctors that treated Lenin in his final days actually prescribed the medication that Stalin got him to take. Some very credible evidence suggests that Stalin may have poisoned Lenin.

Documents from the old Czarist secret police before the revolution show that a man with many of Stalin's characteristics was a paid police agent inside the Bolshevik movement.

So it appears that EVERYTHING about him was a fraud. The only thing we know for a fact about Stalin is that he was, as the revolutionary Leon Trotsky described him, "The Gravedigger of the Revolution."

He was neither a Christian nor a Marxist, but carried out the worst aspects of both philosophies.

Answer 9

What went wrong? He saw some of Hitler's paintings.

Answer 10

Communism was a faith, a non theist one but had all the trappings of a religion. It had the great socialist future as its heaven, the writings of Marx and Lenin as its bible, the party officials as its priesthood and the party leader as its pope or arch-bishop. It was run as a mad 'theocracy' where it was a sin to question the party orthodoxy with a banishment to the hell of Siberia.
He didn't loose faith, he merely swapped one faith for another.

Answer 11

Hitler was a self proclaimed "Christian" who used his belief in God to justify his bigotry and hatred in Mein Kampf. What went wrong?
I have often wondered about someone using the name of God to try and justify the unjustifiable.


Many people stop believing in God when they grow up and start questioning what they have been taught.
People can be evil whether they believe in God or not.