Chapter 6: Articles of Faith–How The Devil Has Man Revolt Against God
Serialized translation of the book 'How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World'
By Editorial Team of "The Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party"
June 15, 2018 4:20 pm Last Updated: June 15, 2018 4:20 pm
The Epoch Times is serializing a translation from the Chinese of a new book, “How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World,” by the editorial team of “The Nine Commentaries on Communist Party.”
Introduction
Almost all peoples of the world have their own ancient myths and legends that discuss man’s creation by their gods, in the image of God, and which lay the foundation of morality and culture for that people. These traditions leave a path of return to Heaven for those who believe in their gods. In the East and West, there are records and legends about how Nüwa and Jehovah created their people.
Gods admonish man to follow the commandments of gods or be punished by them. In times of widespread moral decay, gods destroy man in order to preserve the purity of the universe. Many races in the world have legends about how great floods destroyed civilizations. Some were recorded in detail.
In order to maintain the morality of human beings, there are times when enlightened beings or prophets reincarnate in the human world to rectify people’s hearts, to stop them from being destroyed, and to lead those civilizations to develop and mature. Such individuals include Moses and Jesus in the West, Laozi in the East, Sakyamuni in India, and Socrates in ancient Greece.
Human history and culture help people understand what Buddhas, Taos, and gods are; what it means to believe in God; and how to practice cultivation. The different schools of practice teach what is righteous and what is evil, how to distinguish truth from falsehood and good from evil, and finally they teach man to await the Creator’s return to Earth before the end of the world in order to be saved and return to Heaven.
Once people sever their connection with the god that created them, their morality will quickly deteriorate. Some races thus disappeared, such as the legendary Atlantis civilization, which was buried in the sea overnight.
In the East, especially in China, beliefs are rooted in the hearts of people through traditional culture. Therefore, it is difficult to deceive the Chinese people into accepting atheism with simple lies. In order to uproot the 5,000 years of beliefs and culture, the communist evil specter used large-scale violence to slaughter the elites who had inherited traditional culture, and then used lies to deceive young people from generation to generation.
In the West and other parts of the world, religions and beliefs are the main forms of maintaining contact between man and gods, and are also important cornerstones for maintaining moral standards. Although the communist evil specter failed to establish communist tyranny in these countries, it achieved its goal of destroying orthodox religions and corrupting human beings by deception, deviance, and infiltration.
1. The East: A Violent Revolt Against God
1) How the Soviet Union Destroyed Orthodox Religions With Violence
The Communist Manifesto calls for the destruction of the family, the church, and the nation-state. Obviously, eliminating and subverting religions is one of the important goals of the Communist Party.
From believing in gods to becoming a follower of Satan, Marx knew clearly the existence of gods and the devil. He also knew clearly that unvarnished demonic teachings were hard for people — especially religious people — to accept. Therefore he advocated atheism from the start, declaring that “religion is the opium of the people,” and “communism begins from the outset with atheism,” and so on.
People don’t need to worship the devil, but as long as people no longer believe in gods, the devil can corrupt and occupy the soul and eventually drag people toward Hell. That is why communist parties sing: “There has never been any savior of the world, / Nor deities, nor emperors on which to depend. / To create Humankind’s happiness / We must entirely depend on ourselves!”
Marx vilified religions and righteous gods in theory, while Lenin was able to use the machinery of the state to attack them after seizing power in 1917. Lenin used violence and other high-pressure tactics to oppress orthodox religions and righteous faith in order to force people to depart from gods.
In 1919, Lenin began the large-scale elimination of religion under the name of prohibiting spreading old thoughts. In 1922, Lenin passed a secret resolution stipulating that property of value, especially from the very richest religious institutions, must be carried out “with ruthless resolution, leaving nothing in doubt, and in the very shortest time.” He declared: “The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better because this ‘audience’ must precisely now be taught a lesson in such a way that they will not dare to think about any resistance whatsoever for several decades.”
For a time, a large amount of church property was looted, churches and monasteries were closed, a large number of the clergy were arrested, and thousands of the Orthodox clergy were executed.
After Lenin died, Stalin followed Lenin and started an extremely cruel cleansing in the 1930s. Apart from Communist Party members, intellectuals and people in the religious field were included in the cleansing. Stalin ordered the whole country to implement the Five-Year Plan of Atheism. He declared that when he completed the plan, the last church would be closed, the last priest would be destroyed, the Soviet Union would become a fertile land for communist atheism, and one would not find a trace of religion any longer.
According to conservative estimates, as many as 42,000 priests were tortured to death in the campaign. By 1939, there were just over 100 Orthodox Churches in the entire Soviet Union open to the public, while there were more than 40,400 before Soviet Union seized power. Ninety-eight percent of Orthodox Churches and monasteries in the entire Soviet Union were closed. Catholic Churches were also eradicated. During this period, cultural elites and intellectuals were sent to the Gulag or shot dead.
During World War II, to take advantage of the church’s financial resources and manpower to resist Germany, Stalin seemed to pause in the persecution of the Orthodox and Catholic churches, giving the impression that he might rehabilitate these religions. But he had a baser goal in mind: to exercise strict control over the restored Orthodox Church and Catholic Church as a tool to undermine traditional religions.
Alexy II of the former Soviet Union was promoted to bishop of the Orthodox Church in 1961 and became archbishop in 1964. He became Patriarch of Moscow in 1990, before the Soviet Union’s disintegration. After the Soviet Union collapsed, it briefly opened the KGB archives, which revealed that Alexy II worked for the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security, effectively the Soviet Union’s secret police agency).
Later, Alexy II confessed that he had been compromised and was an agent of the Soviets. He openly repented: “Defending one thing, it was necessary to give somewhere else. Were there any other organizations, or any other people among those who had to carry responsibility not only for themselves but for thousands of other fates, who in those years in the Soviet Union were not compelled to act likewise? Before those people, however, to whom the compromises, silence, forced passivity or expressions of loyalty permitted by the leaders of the church in those years caused pain, before these people, and not only before God, I ask forgiveness, understanding and prayers.”
Religion was thus made a tool for brainwashing and deceiving the public, under the control of the communist evil specter.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union did not keep the adulterated religion to its own territory, but systematically extended its malignant influence to the world.
2) The Chinese Communist Party’s Destruction of Culture, Religion, and Severance of the Connection Between Man and God
(1) The CCP Destroys Traditional Chinese Culture
Although China does not have a single religion for all people as in other countries, the Chinese people also have a firm belief in gods and Buddha. China’s religious life is unique: Unlike other regions rife with religious conflicts, Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and even Western religions have coexisted peacefully in China. These beliefs are the foundation of China’s traditional culture.
Despite the great flood that caused the destruction of mankind, China preserved a complete civilization. Since then, the Chinese nation continued to develop. It has kept a continuous record of its 5,000-year history and created a splendid and magnificent era that earned the esteem of many nations. China was called “the Celestial Empire.” Its culture deeply influenced the entire East Asian region and led to the formation of a Chinese civilizational sphere. The opening of the Silk Road and the spread of the four great inventions (papermaking, the compass, gunpowder, and printing) to the West promoted global civilization and influenced the development of Europe and even the world.
China’s splendid culture and beliefs have been integrated into the marrow of the Chinese people in the course of 5,000 years — and this made it the target the communist evil specter wanted to destroy. However, simply deceiving and tempting the Chinese people to give up thousands of years of traditional culture and beliefs and accept the Western ideology of communism was impossible. Therefore, the CCP used all manner of evil tactics over decades of persistent political campaigns. Starting with violent slaughter, the CCP undermined the essence of religion, persecuted intellectuals, and destroyed traditional Chinese culture, including its material culture (architecture, temples, cultural relics, antique paintings, ancient curios, and the like). The Party sought to sever the connection between God and man to achieve its goal of destroying traditional culture and destroying human beings.
While destroying traditional culture, the Party also systematically established the evil Party culture and used it to cultivate and train those who were not killed in order to turn them into tools to undermine traditional culture. Some followed the communist specter to slaughter others.
The CCP understands well how to use economic interests, political brainwashing, and other means to make people succumb to manipulation. Repeated political movements, suppression, and slaughter have made the CCP increasingly familiar with these tactics, and have allowed it to get ready for the final battle between the righteous and the evil in the human world.
(2) Destroying the Bedrock of Traditional Culture
The landlords and gentry of rural areas, and merchants and scholar-officials of urban areas, were the elites of China’s traditional culture. They bore the mission of inheriting and spreading China’s traditions. In the early stages of the CCP’s seizure of power in 1949, the Party used a series of movements such as the land reform campaign, the campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries, the Three-Anti Campaign and Five-Anti Campaign to massacre landlords, gentry in villages, and capitalists in cities. Plundering social wealth while creating terror, the Party annihilated the elites who inherited and promulgated traditional culture.
At the same time, using the methods of “institutional adjustments” to “ideologically reform” scholars, and indoctrinating them with materialism, atheism, and the theory of evolution, the CCP systematically brainwashed a new generation of students, instilling hate toward traditional culture. Through the anti-rightist movement in the 1950s, all disobedient intellectuals were exiled and sentenced to re-education through forced labor, casting them to the bottom of society. The Party made the scholars — whose views were once respected and had guided society — the subject of mockery and ridicule.
Following the eradication of the traditional elites, the process of inheritance and passing on of traditional Chinese culture, which had lasted generations, was put to an end. Young people who came along later were no longer enculturated, socialized, and nurtured in that culture through the family, school, society, and village — and thus became a generation without traditional culture.
After the anti-rightist movement, whether in the family, school, or society, there were no independent voices. Yet the CCP was still not satisfied. After all, the elderly still preserved the memory of traditional culture, and the material carriers of traditional culture, including ancient artifacts and buildings, were everywhere. Moreover, traditional values continued to be passed along through art.
In 1966, the CCP initiated a movement aimed at destroying traditional culture on a larger scale — the Great Cultural Revolution. Using students brainwashed after the establishment of the PRC, they stirred up adolescent restlessness and rebelliousness, and used the campaign of Destroying the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits) to wreak havoc and catastrophe on traditional Chinese culture.
After the Cultural Revolution, the hellfire of Destroying the Four Olds burned across the land of China. Monasteries, temples, Buddhist statues and paintings, artifacts, and cultural sites were destroyed completely. The essences of Chinese culture that had been inherited and preserved for thousands of years was destroyed overnight, beyond restoration.
Before the Cultural Revolution, there were more than 500 temples and monasteries in Beijing. Among the thousands of cities and towns in China, every town had ancient walls, temples, and monasteries. Ancient artifacts were everywhere. Just 1 foot below the earth, artifacts of recent history were to be found; down another 2, 3, or 20 feet, artifacts left by preceding dynasties were countless. Yet during the Cultural Revolution, vast quantities of these items were destroyed.
The campaign to Destroy the Four Olds not only ruined the sites of religious practice, prayer, and cultivation — ancient places that represented the harmony between man and Heaven — but also went about eradicating from human hearts basic righteous beliefs, such as the belief in the harmony between humans and the cosmos. Many people, believing that such traditions are irrelevant, may not think much of this, but when people cut their ties with gods, they will in turn lose gods’ protection and approach a dangerous abyss. At that point, it’s only a question of time.
Further, to cut off the Chinese people’s connection with their ancestors and gods, the CCP took the lead in cursing the ancestors of the Chinese people and defiling and spurning traditional culture. Countries around the world usually revere their ancestors and kings of the past and value their traditions. Likewise, the sages and philosophers of Chinese history passed down a culture of splendor. This culture is a treasure that belongs to China and the world, and is worthy of the respect of future generations.
Yet in the eyes of the CCP and its shameless propagandists, the emperor, generals, scholars, and gifted people of ancient China were good for nothing. Such an insult to one’s own ancestors is indeed rare throughout history. Led by the CCP, the Chinese people came to oppose God, reject their ancestors, and destroy their own culture, putting them on a perilous road.
(3) Persecuting Religions
Religious belief is a vital component of traditional Chinese culture, and the Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism known to the world were intertwined in their brilliance and lasted for thousands of years of Chinese history. Many Western religions also played a role in Chinese history.
After the CCP obtained power through violence in 1949, it followed the Soviet Union. On one hand, the CCP promoted atheism and launched ideological attacks against belief in God. On the other hand, throughout a series of political movements, it used methods of violence and high pressure to suppress, persecute, and eliminate religions, including through the murder of religious practitioners. The persecution of those with orthodox faiths became more and more severe all the way until its peak with the start of the bloody persecution of Falun Gong in 1999.
After 1949, the CCP started persecuting religions on a large scale and banning religious gatherings. The CCP burned numerous copies of The Bible and scriptures from many other religions. It also demanded heavy punishments for Christians, Catholics, Taoists, and Buddhists, including that members register with the government and repent for supposed mistakes. Those who refused to comply were subjected to severe punishment.
In 1951, the CCP also explicitly declared that those who continued to attend religious gatherings would be executed or imprisoned for life. Numerous Buddhist monks were chased away from temples or forced to live and labor in secular settings. Catholics and Western priests in China were jailed and tortured. Chinese priests also went to jail, while believers were executed or sent to reform through forced labor. Christian priests and followers met the same fate as the Catholics.
After 1949, more than 5,000 Chinese Catholic bishops and priests were jailed or executed, and only a few hundred remained. Some foreign priests in China were executed. The rest were expelled. Over 11,000 Catholics were killed. Numerous followers were arrested arbitrarily or were subjected to extortionate fines. According to incomplete statistics, within the first few years of the CCP’s rise to power, nearly 3 million religious followers and members of religious organizations were arrested or executed.
Like the Soviet Communist Party, to strengthen the leadership over religion, the CCP established regulatory agencies for each group, such as the Chinese Taoist Association, the Chinese Buddhist Association, and the like. Against Catholics, the CCP established the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which it fully controlled. All religious associations were made to follow the Party’s will, which controlled and “thought-reformed” members. At the same time, the CCP used those associations to perform deeds that could not be done by the evil specter directly: to sow discord in and corrupt orthodox religions from within.
The CCP treated Tibetan Buddhism the same way. After dispatching armies and occupying Tibet in 1950, the CCP started a heavy persecution of Tibetan Buddhism. The 14th Dalai Lama escaped Tibet in 1958 and lived in exile in India, which the CCP considered a rebellion. In May 1962, the 10th Panchen Lama submitted to the CCP’s State Council a report about the Party’s sabotage of Tibetan culture, especially its Buddhist traditions:
As for the eradication of Buddhist statues, Buddhist scriptures and Buddhist stupas, basically speaking, apart from a very small number of monasteries, including the four great monasteries which were protected, in Tibet’s other monasteries and in the villages, small towns and towns in the broad agricultural and animal herding areas, some of our Han cadres produced a plan, our Tibetan cadres mobilized, and some people among the activists who did not understand reason played the part of executors of the plan. They usurped the name of the masses and put on the face of the masses, and stirred up a great flood of waves to eliminate statues of the Buddha. Buddhist scriptures and stupas, threw them into water, threw them onto the ground, broke them and melted them. They recklessly carried out wild and hasty destruction of monasteries, Buddhist halls, “mani” walls and stupa, and stole many ornaments from statues of the Buddha and precious things from the Buddhist stupas. Because the government purchasing bodies were not careful in making distinctions when purchasing non-ferrous metals, they purchased many statues of the Buddha, stupas and offering vessels made from non-ferrous metals and showed an attitude of encouraging the destruction of these things. As a result some villages and monasteries looked as if they were not the result of man’s deliberate actions, but rather they looked as if they had been accidentally destroyed by bombardment and a war had just ended, and they were unbearable to look at. Furthermore, they unscrupulously insulted religion, using the Tripitaka as material for fertilizer, in particular using pictures of the Buddha and Buddhist sutras to make shoes. This was totally unreasonable. Because they did many things which even lunatics would hardly do, people of all strata were thoroughly shocked, their emotions were extremely confused and they were very discouraged and disheartened. They cried out, with tears flowing from their eyes: ‘Our area has been turned into a dark area,’ and other such piteous cries.
After the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, many Lamas were forced to turn secular, and numerous precious scriptures were burned. Until 1976, out of the 2,700 temples originally in Tibet, only 8 were left. Jokhang Temple, built more than 1,300 years ago before the Tang Dynasty and the most important temple in Tibet, was also ransacked during the Cultural Revolution.
In China, the cultivation of Taoism has an ancient history. More than 2,500 years ago, Laozi left behind the Dao De Jing comprised of 5,000 characters. It is the essence of Taoist cultivation. The spread of the Dao De Jing was not limited to Eastern countries; many Western countries also translated it into their native languages. Yet during the Cultural Revolution, Laozi was criticized as hypocritical, and the Dao De Jing was deemed “feudal superstition.”
The core beliefs of Confucianism were benevolence, righteousness, the moral disposition to do good, proper conduct, wisdom, and trust. Confucius set the moral standards for generations. During the Cultural Revolution, the rebels in Beijing led the Red Guards to Qufu, Confucius’s hometown, where they sabotaged and burned ancient books and smashed thousands of historical tombstones including that of Confucius. In 1974, the CCP started another movement to Criticize Lin [Biao], Criticize Confucius.” The CCP considered as worthless the traditional thinking of Confucianism regarding how one should live and the moral standards to uphold.
Even more brutal and tragic was the persecution launched in July 1999 by then-Party leader Jiang Zemin toward Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa) and its cultivators, who practice Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance. Furthermore, the Party carries out organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners, a crime that has never before existed on the planet.
During a short few decades, the CCP completely devastated thousands of years of China’s traditional culture, moral values, and beliefs in self-cultivation. As a result, people no longer believed in gods, turned away from god, and experienced a spiritual emptiness and corruption of moral values. Thus society worsened day by day.
2. In the West: Infiltrating and Restricting Religions
The devil of communism also made systematic arrangements for attacking religious believers in non-communist countries. Through the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the CCP, it used money and spies to infiltrate the religious institutions of other countries, under the pretext of “religious exchange,” to warp righteous beliefs or to directly attack them and introduce socialist and communist ideologies into religion. This then led to believers continuing to worship and practice in religions that had been changed by communist ideology.
1) Infiltrating Religion
Curtis Bowers, producer of the documentary Agenda—Grinding Down America, revealed that he found testimony before Congress in 1953 given by Manning Johnson, a high-level Communist Party member. Johnson said:
Once the tactic of infiltrating religious organizations was set by the Kremlin, the actual mechanics of implementing the ‘new line’ was a question of following the general experiences of the living church movement in Russia where the Communists discovered that the destruction of religion could proceed much faster through infiltration of the church by Communist agents operating within the church itself. …
In general, the idea was to divert the emphasis of clerical thinking from the spiritual to the material and political — by political, of course, is meant politics based on the Communist doctrine of conquest of power. Instead of emphasis towards the spiritual and matters of the soul, the new and heavy emphasis was to deal with those matters which, in the main, led toward the Communist program of ‘immediate demands.’ These social demands, of course, were of such a nature that to fight for them would tend to weaken our present society and prepare it for final conquest by Communist forces.
The devil of communism indeed acted this way. For example, some Marxists disguised themselves and infiltrated Christian churches in the United States. They started to enter the seminaries in the 1980s and 1990s and miseducated generation after generation of priests and pastors who then went on to influence religion in the United States.
The Bulgarian historian Momchil Metodiev, after extensive research in Cold War-era Bulgarian Communist Party archives, exposed the fact that the Eastern European communist intelligence network closely collaborated with the Party religious committees to influence and infiltrate international religious organizations.
On a global scale, one organization that was significantly infiltrated by communism in Eastern Europe was the World Council of Churches (WCC). Established in 1948, the WCC is a worldwide inter-church Christian organization. Its members include churches of various mainline forms of Christianity, representing around 590 million people from 150 different countries. The WCC is thus a major force in world religious circles.
However, the WCC was the first international religious organization to accept communist countries (including the Soviet Union and its subordinate states) as members during the Cold War, and to accept financial support from communist countries.
The communist infiltration of the WCC included important victories, such as the election of the Russian Orthodox metropolitan bishop of Leningrad, Nikodim, as president of the WCC in 1975. Another victory was the decades-long role played by Bulgarian communist spy Todor Sabev, who served as deputy general secretary of the WCC between 1979 and 1993. Historian Momchil Metodiev notes that in the 1970s, Nikodim led the infiltration under directions from the KGB, with support from bishops and agents in Bulgaria.
Based on a released KGB file from 1969, historian and Cambridge University professor Christopher Andrew writes that during the Cold War, important Russian Orthodox Church representatives in the WCC secretly worked for the KGB, exerting covert influence on the WCC’s policies and operations. A released KGB file from 1989 shows that these KGB-controlled Russian Orthodox Church representatives successfully inserted their agenda into the WCC’s public communications.
If we understand how the Eastern European communists infiltrated and manipulated the churches, it is not difficult to understand why the WCC disregarded the opposition of its members and insisted on funding the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) in January 1980. The ZANU-PF was a notorious group of communist guerrillas who were known to murder missionaries and shoot down commercial flights.
The WCC was also infiltrated by the CCP through the Chinese Christian Council, a Party tool to control religion. The Council is the only official representative of communist China in the WCC, and due to monetary and other influences, the WCC has for years gone along with CCP interests.
The general secretary of the WCC officially visited China in the beginning of 2018 and met with several Party-controlled Christian organizations, including the Chinese Christian Council, the National Committee of Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches in China, and the State Administration for Religious Affairs. In China, the number of members of non-official Christian groups (underground churches) is far greater than the official ones; yet WCC delegates didn’t arrange to meet with any non-official Christian groups in order to avoid friction with Beijing.
2) Restricting Religion
The infiltration of the communist specter in the West is omnipresent, and religion has been buffeted by ideologies and behavior that vilify God. Ideas like “separation of church and state” and “political correctness” stemming from communism have been used to marginalize and sabotage righteous, orthodox religions.
The United States was built as one nation under God. All U.S. presidents, when sworn in, put their hand on the Bible and ask God to bless America. Nowadays, when religious people criticize behaviors, ideas, and policies that depart from gods, or speak out against abortion or homosexuality, which are forbidden by God, communists in the United States, or the militant Left, go on the offensive. They use “separation of church and state” to say that religion should have nothing to do with politics, and so seek to restrict the will of God, and the admonishments and limitations on human behavior laid down by gods.
For thousands of years, gods have made themselves known to those who have faith. Faithful people with righteous beliefs accounted for the majority of society in the past and had a tremendous positive influence on social morality. Today, people can only talk about God’s will within church. Outside of church, they can’t criticize or resist the attempts to undermine God’s parameters for human conduct. Religion has almost lost its function in maintaining the morality of society, and as a result, morality in the United States has collapsed like a landslide.
In recent years, political correctness has been promoted to new highs, to the point that people are hesitant to say Merry Christmas in a country that was founded on Christianity. This happens only because some claim that it’s politically incorrect and hurts the feelings of non-Christians. Similarly when people openly speak of their belief in God or pray to God, some claim this to be discriminatory against people with other beliefs, including nonbelievers. The fact is, all people are allowed to express their beliefs, including respect for their gods, in their own ways, and it has nothing to do with discrimination.
In schools now, classes that involve righteous beliefs and traditional values are not allowed to be taught. Teachers are not to speak of Creation, for the reason that science has yet to prove the existence of God. Science has also yet to prove atheism and evolution — but these theories are taught as truth in schools. Speech that attacks, rejects, and vilifies gods, on the other hand, is all protected and glorified under the banner of freedom of speech.
The communist specter’s infiltration of society and restraints against and manipulation of religion, culture, education, the arts, and law is an exceedingly complex and systemic issue. We will discuss it in detail in future chapters.
3. The Twisted Theology of the Communist Specter
In the past century, various distorted theologies gained currency as communist thought swept through the religious world, subverting clergy and infiltrating and subtly corrupting orthodox religions. Clergy shamelessly interpreted the scriptures according to their whims, distorting the righteous teachings left by enlightened beings from orthodox religions. Especially in the 1960s, “revolutionary theology,” “theology of hope,” “political theology,” and other distorted theologies saturated in Marxist thought brought chaos to the religious world.
Many priests in Latin America were educated in European seminaries in the last century and were deeply influenced by the new theological theories that had been altered by communist trends. “Liberation theology” was active in Latin America in the 20th century during the 1960–80s. Its main representative was the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez.
This theology introduces class struggle and Marxian thought directly into religion, and interpreted God’s compassion for humanity to mean that the poor should be liberated — so religious believers should take part in class warfare in order for the poor to attain equal status. This school of thought used the Lord’s instruction for Moses to lead the Jews out of Egypt as the theoretical basis for the belief that Christianity should liberate the poor.
Liberation Theology
This emerging theology, which emphasizes class warfare and the establishment of socialism, was greatly praised by Fidel Castro, the leader of the Communist Party of Cuba. Although the traditional Catholic Church has resisted the proliferation of these so-called emerging theologies, the new Pope, appointed in 2013, invited the representative of liberal theology, Gutiérrez, to attend a press conference in the Vatican on May 12, 2015, as the main guest, thus showing the present-day Catholic Church’s tacit acquiescence and support of liberation theology.
Liberation theology first spread through South America and then through the world. In various parts of the world, many emerging theologies similar to liberation theology have appeared, such as “black theology,” “women’s theology,” “Death of God theology,” “liberal theology,” and even “queer theology.” These distorted theologies have greatly disrupted Catholic, Christian, and other orthodox beliefs around the world.
Death of God Theology
During the 1970s, in the United States, the leader of the infamous Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ (“Peoples Temple” in short), who called himself the reincarnation of Lenin, was a Marxist believer and set the original teachings of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as the doctrine of the Peoples Temple. He claimed that he was proselytizing in the United States in order to achieve his communist ideals.
After killing American congressman Leo Ryan, who was investigating allegations against the cult, he knew that it would be difficult for him to escape, so he cruelly forced his followers to commit mass suicide. He even killed those who were unwilling to commit suicide with him. In the end, more than 900 people committed suicide or were killed. This cult tarnished the reputation of religion and adversely affected the righteous faith people had in orthodox religions. Thus it had a serious negative impact on people in general.
4. Religious Chaos
The book The Naked Communist, published in 1958, lists 45 targets in the United States for communism to destroy. Astonishingly, most of the goals have already become realities. Number 27 in the list is: “Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with ‘social’ religion. Discredit the Bible. …”
In the religious sector today, the three original orthodox religions in particular — Christianity, Catholicism, and Judaism (together referred as the revealed religions) — have been demonically altered and controlled by the communist specter, and have lost the functions they had in their original forms. New denominations established or demonically altered with communist principles and concepts have become even more direct promulgations of communist ideology. Religions were important cornerstones in maintaining the smooth and normal operations of the Western world, yet they have been deformed beyond recognition by the communist specter.
In the churches of various religions nowadays, many bishops and priests simultaneously promulgate deviated theologies, while also corrupting and consorting with their followers in a non-stop series of scandals. Many believers go to church because they think it’s a civilized thing to do or even a form of entertainment or social life, but they’re not genuinely committed to cultivating their character.
Religions have been corrupted from within. The result is that people lose their confidence in religions and their righteous beliefs in Buddhas, Daos, and gods. Consequently, they end up abandoning their beliefs. If man does not believe in the divine, God will not protect him, and ultimately humankind will be destroyed.
On June 29, 2017, the Victoria Police Department in Australia hosted a brief press conference to announce that “because of charges made by multiple plaintiffs,” the Australian Cardinal George Pell would confront allegations related to sexual offences. Pell became the archbishop of Melbourne in 1996 and cardinal in 2003. In July 2014, under assignment by Pope Francis, Pell took responsibility for supervising all financial transactions in the Vatican. He wielded enormous power and was the No. 3 person at the Vatican.
The 2002 Spotlight column in the Boston Globe carried a series of reports on Catholic priests’ sexual molestation of children in the United States. The reporters’ investigation revealed that over the past several decades, there were close to 250 Boston priests who had molested children, and that the church, in an attempt at cover-up, shifted clergy around from one area to another, rather than informing the police. The priests continued to molest children in the new areas, thus creating more victims.
Similar events quickly spread across the United States. The revelations extended to priests in other countries with Catholic presence, including Ireland, Australia, and others. Other religious groups began to publicly denounce the corruption of the Catholic church.
Eventually, under public pressure, Saint John Paul II was compelled to hold a conference in the Vatican for U.S. Catholic cardinals, at which the Vatican admitted that the sexual molestation of children is a crime and that the administrative structure of the church would be reformed. Further, the church would expel priests who had sexually offended children, and the criminals would be jailed. The church paid over $2 billion in settlements for the abuses.
Skimming money off believers in the name of religion has also been a common occurrence. For example, in China, various religions have rampantly embezzled money by taking advantage of believers’ faith in Buddhas, Daos, and gods, effectively turning religion into a business. Money is charged for religious ceremonies and for worshipping by burning incense, with fees sometimes running up to 100,000 yuan ($15,000).
More churches and temples have been built, looking all the more splendid on the surface, while righteous belief in God diminishes. Disciples who genuinely cultivate are fewer and fewer. Many temples and churches have become gathering places for evil spirits and ghosts, and temples in China have turned into commercialized tourist sites where monks earn salaries, and Buddhist and Daoist abbots preside as CEOs.
During the so-called wave of studying the Report of the Chinese Communist Party’s 19th Congress, the deputy chairman of China’s Buddhist Association claimed at a Training Program for the Spirit of the 19th Congress, “The 19th Congress Report is the contemporary Buddhist scripture, and I have hand-copied it three times.” He also stated, “The Chinese Communist Party is today’s Buddha and Bodhisattva, and the 19th Congress Report is contemporary Buddhist scripture in China, and it shines with the glowing rays of the Communist Party’s belief.”
There were also people who called upon Buddhist believers to follow his example and apply the method of hand-copying scriptures to hand-copy the 19th Congress Report with a devout heart so that they could experience enlightenment. When this news report was published in the Nanhai Buddhist Institute in Hainan Province, it led to enormous controversy and was ultimately deleted. The report nevertheless spread widely on the internet. This incident shows that official Buddhism in China is full of politician-monks, and is fundamentally not a cultivation community. Instead, China’s official Buddhism has become a tool used by the Chinese Communist Party for its United Front work.
For more than a thousand years, bishops around the world were directly appointed or recognized by the Vatican. The 30 or so bishops previously recognized by the Vatican in the Chinese region have not been acknowledged by the CCP. Likewise, the Vatican and the Catholics loyal to it in China (particularly the underground believers) have not acknowledged the Communist Party-appointed bishops. However, under constant coercion and enticement by the CCP, the new Pope has recently begun conversations with the CCP that appear set to provide Vatican recognition for the CCP-appointed bishops. Thus, bishops previously appointed by the Vatican would be sidelined.
The church is a faith community whose purpose is to enable believers to cultivate, uplift their morality, and ultimately return to Heaven. When deals are done in the human world with an evil spirit in revolt against God, where the communist specter is allowed to arrange and appoint bishops and thus take charge of matters concerning the belief of tens of millions of Catholics in China, how would God look at the matter? What will the future hold for the tens of millions of Catholics in China?
In China, a country with a rich traditional culture, the specter of communism painstakingly arranged a system that violently destroyed traditional culture, demolished orthodox religions, and annihilated people’s physical bodies, while simultaneously demoralizing society and severing the connection between man and gods — all with the purpose of completely destroying people.
In the West and other parts of the world, the specter used deception and infiltration to demonize orthodox religions, and to confuse and mislead people so as to have them give up orthodox beliefs. They thus drift further away from gods until they face total destruction. No matter what means were used by the specter, the ultimate goal is the same—to destroy humankind.
Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/chapter-6-articles-of-faith-how-the-devil-has-man-revolt-against-god_2562880.html
