Don’t get me wrong, I know Anton LaVey is a huge piece of shit regarding his flirtations with fascist attitudes and eugenics. I’ve known a few of them and they tend to have straight up obnoxious opinions on communists despite the fact that we both share a lot of the same criticisms of religion. Then there’s LaVeyanist groups attacking leftist groups as well.
Generally, it seems like there’s a lot of left-leaning ones with a good mass of reactionaries with a anti-theist bend. Is there a reason the anti-communism comes into play here though?
Could also purely be anecdote. Reason I post is because I’m curious on the thoughts you all have.
Because being critical of religion is not an ideology. Atheism is not an ideology. The ideological part comes into play when they start to advocate for extreme individualism and Ayn Rand style sociopathic egoism. And that is always going to clash with communism regardless of any shared belief in the non-existence of a god or gods.
I could not have said it better myself. Just being against things is not really enough to build up a society of substance and the little they do stand on is nonsense that’ll scatter the masses anyway. It’s cool for a couple of moments when you want to break out of a haunted religious upbringing, but a well-rounded ideology needs to develop later if you actually want to affect change and have an accurate analysis of reality beyond catering to self-indulgence.
Exactly. It’s not enough to be against something, you have to be for something else. It’s why i don’t much like it when some people on the left just describe themselves as vaguely anti-capitalist. It’s good to be against capitalism but what are you actually for? In the case of communists it is clear: we have a well defined vision of the kind of society we want to build. We are for socialism.