Men Have Forgotten God – Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn Alexander Solzhenitsyn
As a survivor of the Communist Holocaust I am horrified to witness how my beloved America, my adopted country, is gradually being transformed into a secularist and atheistic utopia, where communist ideals are glorified and promoted, while Judeo-Christian values and morality are ridiculed and increasingly eradicated from the public and social consciousness of our nation. Under the decades-long assault and militant radicalism of many so-called “liberal” and “progressive” elites, God has been progressively erased from our public and educational institutions, to be replaced with all manner of delusion, perversion, corruption, violence, decadence, and insanity.

It is no coincidence that as Marxist ideologies and secularist principles engulf the culture and pervert mainstream thinking, individual freedoms and liberties are rapidly disappearing. As a consequence, Americans feel increasingly more powerless and subjugated by some of the most radical and hypocritical, least democratic, and characterless individuals our society has ever produced.

Those of us who have experienced and witnesses first-hand the atrocities and terror of communism understand fully why such evil takes root, how it grows and deceives, and the kind of hell it will ultimately unleash on the innocent and the faithful. Godlessness is always the first step towards tyranny and oppression!

Nobel laureate, Orthodox Christian author, and Russian dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag” address, given when he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion on May of 1983, explained how the Russian revolution and the communist takeover were facilitated by an atheistic mentality an a long process of secularization which alienated the people from God and traditional Christian morality and beliefs. He rightly concluded: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

The text of his Templeton Address is provided below. The parallels with the current crisis and moral decay in American society are striking and frightening. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear!

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“Men Have Forgotten God” – The Templeton Address
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.

The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.

The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it. It was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever. The only possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.

The same kind of defect, the flaw of a consciousness lacking all divine dimension, was manifested after World War II when the West yielded to the satanic temptation of the “nuclear umbrella.” It was equivalent to saying: Let’s cast off worries, let’s free the younger generation from their duties and obligations, let’s make no effort to defend ourselves, to say nothing of defending others-let’s stop our ears to the groans emanating from the East, and let us live instead in the pursuit of happiness. If danger should threaten us, we shall be protected by the nuclear bomb; if not, then let the world burn in Hell for all we care. The pitifully helpless state to which the contemporary West has sunk is in large measure due to this fatal error: the belief that the defense of peace depends not on stout hearts and steadfast men, but solely on the nuclear bomb…

Today’ s world has reached a stage which, if it had been described to preceding centuries, would have called forth the cry: “This is the Apocalypse!”

Yet we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it.

Dostoevsky warned that “great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared.” This is precisely what has happened. And he predicted that “the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the demon of evil.” Whether it really will be saved we shall have to wait and see: this will depend on our conscience, on our spiritual lucidity, on our individual and combined efforts in the face of catastrophic circumstances. But it has already come to pass that the demon of evil, like a whirlwind, triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth…

By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.

In its past, Russia did know a time when the social ideal was not fame, or riches, or material success, but a pious way of life. Russia was then steeped in an Orthodox Christianity which remained true to the Church of the first centuries. The Orthodoxy of that time knew how to safeguard its people under the yoke of a foreign occupation that lasted more than two centuries, while at the same time fending off iniquitous blows from the swords of Western crusaders. During those centuries the Orthodox faith in our country became part of the very pattern of thought and the personality of our people, the forms of daily life, the work calendar, the priorities in every undertaking, the organization of the week and of the year. Faith was the shaping and unifying force of the nation.

But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter’s forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.

It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.

The 1920’s in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy. Two metropolitans were shot, one of whom, Veniamin of Petrograd, had been elected by the popular vote of his diocese. Patriarch Tikhon himself passed through the hands of the Cheka-GPU and then died under suspicious circumstances. Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of God, were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate tundra of the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between. For tens of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from their children and thrown into prison, while the children were turned from the faith by threats and lies…

For a short period of time, when he needed to gather strength for the struggle against Hitler, Stalin cynically adopted a friendly posture toward the Church. This deceptive game, continued in later years by Brezhnev with the help of showcase publications and other window dressing, has unfortunately tended to be taken at its face value in the West. Yet the tenacity with which hatred of religion is rooted in Communism may be judged by the example of their most liberal leader, Krushchev: for though he undertook a number of significant steps to extend freedom, Krushchev simultaneously rekindled the frenzied Leninist obsession with destroying religion.

But there is something they did not expect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today people are sent to the labor camps for their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells–they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia. It is true that millions of our countrymen have been corrupted and spiritually devastated by an officially imposed atheism, yet there remain many millions of believers: it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out, but, as is always the case in times of persecution and suffering, the awareness of God in my country has attained great acuteness and profundity.

It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.

The West has yet to experience a Communist invasion; religion here remains free. But the West’s own historical evolution has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness. It too has witnessed racking schisms, bloody religious wars, and rancor, to say nothing of the tide of secularism that, from the late Middle Ages onward, has progressively inundated the West. This gradual sapping of strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more dangerous than any attempt to assault religion violently from without.

Imperceptibly, through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the West has ceased to be seen as anything more lofty than the “pursuit of happiness, “a goal that has even been solemnly guaranteed by constitutions. The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short lived value. It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system. Yet it is not considered shameful to make dally concessions to an integral evil. Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation, the West is ineluctably slipping toward the abyss. Western societies are losing more and more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to atheism. If a blasphemous film about Jesus is shown throughout the United States, reputedly one of the most religious countries in the world, or a major newspaper publishes a shameless caricature of the Virgin Mary, what further evidence of godlessness does one need? When external rights are completely unrestricted, why should one make an inner effort to restrain oneself from ignoble acts?

Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis–race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain “equality”–the equality of destitute slaves. This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today’s free world. Indeed, the broader the personal freedoms are, the higher the level of prosperity or even of abundance–the more vehement, paradoxically, does this blind hatred become. The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion of material goods nor in merely making money.

This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.

Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.

With such global events looming over us like mountains, nay, like entire mountain ranges, it may seem incongruous and inappropriate to recall that the primary key to our being or non-being resides in each individual human heart, in the heart’s preference for specific good or evil. Yet this remains true even today, and it is, in fact, the most reliable key we have. The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy, leaving us at a dead end. The free people of the West could reasonably have been expected to realize that they are beset · by numerous freely nurtured falsehoods, and not to allow lies to be foisted upon them so easily. All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek it in vain. The resources we have set aside for ourselves are too impoverished for the task. We must first recognize the horror perpetrated not by some outside force, not by class or national enemies, but within each of us individually, and within every society. This is especially true of a free and highly developed society, for here in particular we have surely brought everything upon ourselves, of our own free will. We ourselves, in our daily unthinking selfishness, are pulling tight that noose…

Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.

To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our bands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.

Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag”. Templeton Prize Lecture, 10 May 1983 (London).

The Voice Crying in the Wilderness

Chris Banescu

7/18/2011

Comments
Barbara, "Ambassador for Christ"9/10/2023 10:48 pm
Excellent writing from AS. I am presenting his comments in the three minutes I am allowed to speak at my local school board monthly meeting, in order to attempt to wake people up. Woe to those parents, teachers and board members that do not believe! God will not be mocked and they will be held accountable!
Gerrard W Rudmin2/13/2022 5:30 pm
Is there a transcript of his address in Russian?
James10/14/2021 4:58 am
@Joe Bravo! A very concise and yet eloquent way of interpreting what is really meant by the cultural-political Marxists-in-liberal clothing we must somehow bear with, endure, and love because they too, for all their double-speak madness, are created in the image of God. I think it might be time to read Dostoevsky's "The Possessed" which is becoming increasingly prophetic in its insight, wisdom, and applicability to our days.
Joe Vasicek10/10/2021 11:26 pm
In the last few years, I've developed five keys to understanding the secularists and Marxists of our time who dominate the culture and are driving us to the oblivion that Solzhenitsyn warned us of in this magnificent speech. Those keys are: 1. If they say something is true, it is probably false. 2. If they say something is false, it is probably true. 3. If they make an accusation, it is actually a confession. 4. If they say you should do something, you should do the opposite. 5. The most important truths are the ones they never talk about. Applying these keys to Ben's comment from 2013, we transform it into this: "There is a God. Reconcile yourself to Him. Men cannot be good without His wisdom. Marxism and atheism have been the basis of suffering for way too long. The younger generations will see through the sham of modern, secular logic and reasoning, and recognize the need to return to Him."
John Girvan9/1/2021 12:44 am
Amen!
Michael2/8/2019 10:20 am
Ben wrote his comment many years ago, yet his oblivious arrogance in the face of Solzhenitsyn's hard-learned lesson is so striking that I must respond. At the same time, I would like to defend the Enlightenment from Solzhenitsyn's criticism, which I'm convinced was misplaced.

Ben's words come straight from the mouths of Bolshevik revolutionaries, who, so self-assured in their moral superiority, went on with their Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cuban, etc. contemporaries to create the absolute most hellish regimes ever devised, surpassing those of the Nazis and Vlad the Impaler. That he cannot see or appreciate such monumental irony, would be utterly bewildering if I had not come to expect it from leftist militant atheists in general.

The more I grow and mature, the more I realize the fundamental problem with Ben, and with the Marxist revolutionaries, is not so much that they lack religious faith. It is that they believe they lack it, so they pour their faith ever-more fanatically into their ideology and the institution of the state. Their ideology is their infallible god, and the state is their almighty high priest. Their cult-like zeal has no checks or boundaries, precisely because they believe themselves so immune to the crazed excesses of blind faith without reason. Hypocritically, they view their supposedly more superstitious brethren with a dismissive, poisonous contempt and disrespect that can only lead to hatred, domination, and terrible suffering if left unchecked. How could they ever recognize this though? How could they possibly be misguided, if they're only correcting the silly and backwards rubes who aren't, what is it today, "woke?" What cause do they, the superior minds of the age, have to be cautious about anything?

Ben's haughty attitude is a stark contrast to humility of Enlightenment thinkers, whom I hold in much greater esteem than Solzhenitsyn does. There's a baby in the secular bathwater of the Enlightenment, and the aim of the vast majority of Enlightenment thinkers was not at all to replace God with materialism. The brazen kings of the age claimed divine authority over an earthly church and government, laundering their whims and even their tyranny through God's name and thereby taking it in vain (that is, using the name of God to further their own vanity). The Enlightenment thinkers rejected this and the idea that any earthly government's power derives from a divine mandate. Instead, they rationally determined that every human soul has an inherent individual dignity and free will that no king or collective has any claim over, or any right to diminish or violate. Whether that dignity and free will is God-given or inherent merely through reciprocal self-ownership, it is not compatible with arbitrary state coercive power...and so the Enlightenment thinkers correctly reasoned that arbitrary state coercive power had to be curtailed to the greatest possible extent. They sought to peacefully advance toward a culture in which everyone could worship their God as they chose, without the danger of an unhinged earthly theocracy torturing or killing them for doing it "wrong" (or more likely in that case, more right), and absent the general tyranny of arbitrary power. Even in the United States, where the Founders fought a bloody revolution, they fought it defensively against a jealous foreign power that invaded after they declared their separation in writing. Leaning on thousands of years of human history, they subsequently invented a restrained and limited form of government that even flawed and corrupt people could not abuse and subvert without great effort and lengthy sabotage. Their work has finally become unraveled and twisted over time, but it took many generations for power-hungry elites (and progressive/Fabian Marxists making their long march through the institutions) to lead people so far astray and make them forget their true cultural heritage. One price of forgetting the past is that many today characterize America's Founders primarily by their failure to immediately eradicate the institution of slavery. Marxists try to discredit Enlightenment ideals on those very grounds, and they betray their perennial lack of perspective by doing so. The Enlightenment provided the very intellectual footing to reject the arbitrary state power that Marxists so rely upon...and so perhaps we should be careful before we join them in maligning it.

Contrast the restraint of the Enlightenment revolution with the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and other Marxists, who invariably started their revolutions by enacting the purest, most hatefully vicious forms of their envious ideologies, every single time, without exception. True Marxism/Communism has indeed been tried. It just never resembles the imagined utopia of its ideologues, because it inherently requires glorifying the requisite totalitarian government power and devaluing every stable, virtuous tradition of the country's pre-revolutionary culture. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, especially given a blank slate on which to draw its design, and especially when the only people who would ever attempt such a thing must necessarily already be the absolute most imprudent, envious, vicious kind of people ever to walk the Earth.

In many ways, the Enlightenment thinkers were the polar opposites of reckless Marxist revolutionaries: Whereas Marxists revel in their arrogance and glorify unrestrained coercive power over their "inferiors," the Enlightenment thinkers approached their work with a deep humility. Like the authors of the Magna Carta, their reverence for their Creator and His works extended so far as to demand that even rulers must humble themselves. Their work was not structurally perfect, and the political class carefully exploited every minor flaw over time to create gaping holes, but the fruits of unprecedented abundance and freedom demonstrate they were going in the right direction when you compare them to what came before, or to the unprecedented famine and oppression of Communist rule. Those who came after simply failed to stay vigilant and patch the holes as they were discovered, until it was too late...and as our technological prowess has grown, so too has the ambition and hubris of the power-hungry both inside and outside of the globalist establishment. We must do better to curtail them, and soon.

It may be fair to say that the goodness of the Enlightenment created a new kind of test for mankind to stumble through: As G. Michael Hopf has said, "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." However, Solzhenitsyn himself said in this speech, "Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder." If our spiritual growth is part of God's plan, we were no more meant to linger in eternal servitude to a king or a Tsar as we were to linger in perpetual tyranny under a Communist regime. The Enlightenment was the kind of progress mankind needed to see that rulers should not be worshipped or seen as any extension of God...and if removing the yoke of earthly tyranny exposed us to new spiritual tests, it's simply our responsibility to overcome them.

I say all of this not as a devout Christian, but as an optimistic agnostic. I cannot fault anyone for doubting the existence of a God in general, and I especially cannot fault anyone for doubting the infallibility of the Bible in particular. I understand doubt, and I cannot reconcile my heart and mind with some of the Bible's more troublesome passages, even with a proper contextual reading. I'm sad to say I probably never will. However, one thing that I cannot abide is the militant, spiteful rejection of God and everything belief in God stands for.

After all, I cannot help but recognize the truth in what Solzhenitsyn says: The repeated, unlearning arrogance of unrepentant Marxists (self-aware or not) illustrates rather convincingly why human society requires God as a focal point to properly function. It almost doesn't matter for this purpose whether God actually exists, or whether Christianity is exactly correct: Societal belief in both provides a baseline norm of morality and piety that steers people away from their worst self-indulgences. It is possible to be a good and moral atheist who acts essentially as a Christian should towards other people. The average atheist may even advance through Kohlberg's stages of moral development more quickly than the average Christian, because they need to work harder to develop a reasonable morality at all, instead of relying on "fear of punishment" as a limiting crutch. However, what works for atheists at a small-scale interpersonal level tends to fail catastrophically at the level of political ideology. Without God to limit their hubris, few have the right temperament to safely navigate the moral vacuum without falling gradually or precipitously into ultimately violent and miserable ideologies built on initially subtle destructive moral vices. Belief in God is essentially what saved humanity from falling into Marxism sooner than it did. At the same time, I caution believers against a false sense of security that professed faith in God alone is sufficient to ward off evil: The barbaric atrocities of today and yesterday's brutal theocracies prove otherwise.

Instead, I believe what human society fundamentally needs is a reverence for the kind of God who demands humility of us, especially the powerful. We need our greatest moral authority to demand a vigilant respect for the divine spark inside each and every other person, instead of validating our worst and most intemperate impulses. If we doubt, we must at least leave room in our hearts for that kind of God. If we disbelieve entirely, we must at the very least form our individual moralities around the basis that such a God would be the supreme moral authority, were He to exist. We must above all not reject and mock that notion of God, because it leaves a moral void in which any contradictory ideology may take hold as our new god and moral authority. Worse, it poisons us against all of the virtues we might otherwise uphold. I still believe it is a virtue to think for yourself, carefully and critically, and to use logic and reason to cautiously inform your sense of objective morality...but it is clearly a vice to ignore the lessons of history and exalt your subjective morality as unquestionably superior to that of those more self-aware of their religious faith.

In short, perhaps it is enough to say this: Every society and system and ideology has its flaws, but Marxism is arguably the best benchmark I've ever seen for pure evil. The ideology is based at its very core on the sins of envy, sloth, pride, and wrath, and it's responsible for more universal death and misery than probably any other ideology in human history. That makes it the antithesis of almost everything good, just, virtuous, and moral. When Marxists hate Christianity with such a burning passion, it tells me only one thing: Christianity must be, by and large, more right than wrong.
Janis Schmidt1/25/2019 2:48 pm
I bow to the wisdom of Russian writers "Men have forgotten God."
Kirill1/6/2019 3:36 pm
Instead of rising to the heavens humanity’s material form is doomed to turn into the ashes from whence it came, so are the tomes that proclaim divine providence and anything material. Flames of revolution turn everything to ash, man or Word. And in the chaos there is no way to tell the difference between the ashes. The reality is that with revolution all is lost, humanity, religion, morality etc. Claiming that one is the domino to topple them all is folly. The reality is chaos, they all get consumed regardless. In the end not much more can be taken from this text than the lesson that hatred is blind, and if change is fueled by any sort of hatred then it will lash out at everything around it.
George12/17/2018 3:32 am
For at least the last 25 years I have seen the patterns of what this man describes here in Canada, yet only a day or two ago did I discover his writing which confirms precisely what has been and continues to occur.

Unfortunately there are many who have swallowed the communist/socialist Koolaid, who allow the cancerous germ of Marxist entitlement to invade and fester in our land. I can only hope and pray for deliverance for our people.
joe11/8/2018 5:50 pm
forced to read this in my religion class in high school. great piece for the younger generation such as myself to read.
Gretchen 11/8/2018 5:49 pm
hi everyone! I would like to say I really enjoyed this and would recommend it to anyone looking for a good read. jambo!
Oshoma9/6/2018 12:25 pm
This is the year 2018, and reading the address by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, sounds like something that was written yesterday.
The following points jumped out to me, and are worth noting, an

"And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century [and even the 21st century], here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God"

"Imperceptibly, through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the West has ceased to be seen as anything more lofty than the “pursuit of happiness"

The church (myself inclusive) needs to WAKE UP!!
MARY SEFERI4/24/2018 6:13 pm
Glory be to God, our Creator, who loved humanity so much He came as a man to take our sins, and give us eternal life, if we choose to live and believe in Him. Thank God for his love and fulfillment of the truth.He is Risen! Yes Indeed, HE is risen.
Stevizard9/15/2016 7:17 pm
As in Russia, much effort is being spent in the United States to remove God from our consciousness, to extricate him from public forums, and to subdue His followers.

LGBT/Q legalization is a merely a pre-cursor to anti-defamation laws prohibiting anyone, including the church, from pointing a finger at sin.

Fallen mankind knows that the power of the Gospel is the power to forgive repentant men and women of sin. If they can convince the world that there is no sin, neither is there a reason to repent, and the Gospel is made impotent, without power.

Solzhenitsyn points to a day of persecution some time in the future. Should that day come, the vast majority of Christians will deny their faith succumbing to simple peer pressure. Many others will deny Christ when under threat. Only a very few will endure the lion's den, the torturer's rack, or the flames as did faithful Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna.


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Luke 18:8 (KJV), I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?

Sherry9/7/2016 8:48 am
II being a lover of JEHOVAH GOD seeing this was about to comment on the ignorance of Ben, but didn't want to waste precious time, for he is already is a vessel of wrath fitted for destruction by Jehovah. I then was about to exit out of here because I saw no intelligence, when I noticed Rich's comment. Rich I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the Catholic church you are attending is not of Jesus. Jesus never prayed for the Catholic church period. The Catholic church was a universal name given to all churches at first by the immoral "Romans". If you actually prayed about it to Jehovah God to reveal the truth about Roman Catholicism, he would. Read your past History on how the REAL CHURCH should be. Jehovah never wanted 41,000 denominations(and growing).
Worshiping the pope is not what I call GODLY, he is a man just as you are. He is certainly nobody special, we are amazed at how the crowds turn out to see him out his little four inch peep hole as he reads whatever. I mean it's utterly astounding to watch, as I laugh at the ignorance of humankind. Reminds me of the Baal-worship of Nimrod and Semiramis.
Suzanna Balfour7/26/2016 11:31 pm
For Chris Banescu:

Dear Mr Banescu,

May I please have your permission to quote from 'A Voice Crying in the Wilderness'.

I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest opportunity.

With sincere thanks in anticipation,

Suzanna Balfour
27th July, 2016
jeffrey ayd7/13/2016 12:04 am
Logic and reasoning have brought us to where we are. Is'nt it logical to kill by whatever means at your disposal anything that is denying you what you want. Why not???

How many undesireable conclusions can be wrought by faulty reasoning without the intermediation of the guiding hand of providence.
Ruth8/4/2015 9:04 pm
Solzhenitsyn becomes more obviously true as time goes on. Also see 'Marx and Satn' by Richard Wurmbrand. It really blows the lid off the Marxist deception. And Freud is a fraud, and Charles Darwin too. See the Edinburgh Creation Group for some excellent videos on these subjects. Jesus lives!
Jsmith6/15/2014 8:15 am
Dear All, we are all brothers and sons of Adam, who was not only our father but also a messenger of God.

God is just one and only. God is just one and only. God is absolute in power.
Everyone is in need of God and He is not in need of anyone.
God has not begotten any son, nor He is begotten of anyone;
and no one is equal to God and nothing is like God.

All blessings we are enjoying or anyone else is enjoying comes from God only, therefore we must worship none but God alone.

Worship is for God only.

Many thanks to our God who created us. And why shouldn't we worship God who created us and to whom we will be returned.

How can we deny God, we did not exist and He brought us into existence. And He will make us die and then He will make us alive again and to Him is our final destination.

Thank you for reading me. May God reward you for this. Ameen
Je'6/8/2014 6:46 am
Ben,
"Religion has been the basis of suffering for way too long." Perhaps you should read the Gulag Archipelago before you make sure stupid comments. Millions upon millions suffered-and the perpetrators did NOT believe in God-so it seems that good and evil does reside in all our hearts,(in atheist hearts, as well) as the author says.
Timmy5/15/2014 8:39 pm
He is right, it is happening again: http://www.LittleScroll.com
Rich1/11/2014 2:00 am
I recently discovered Alexander Solzhenitsyn and am currently reading a book on his life. He is a deeply profound thinker who not only has thought a great deal about life but has lived it. I agree with most, if not all, of Mr. Solzhenitsyn's thoughts in this article.

I know Ben commented on this article that there is no god. I know more and more people who hold his worldview. Some of them friends of mine. I love them dearly but don't agree with them. The challenge I see is that established laws in most countries are based on the 10 commandments. If you take that away and start from scratch what point of reference do you use to define good or bad? Who defines good and bad, and can that definition change over time to meet the wants and desires of a given society? As an American, I can see this happening in my country. Different laws are being enacted either through the electorate or through court decisions that 20 years ago would not even have been considered acceptable. I cringe at what types of laws will be enacted over the next 20 years.

I hope and pray that the Eastern Orthodox Churches and Catholic Church (to which I belong) will be united as one again as Jesus prayed. I think our very survival as mankind is dependent on it.
Mike12/22/2013 10:22 pm
Ben, You picked the wrong context to make your ignorant claims. This article is concerning the atheistic communist period of Soviet history which slaughtered upwards of 60 million people because they had forgotten God. History is doomed to repeat if God is forgotten again.
Imagicka10/6/2013 9:42 pm
An excellent discussion of this article:

http://www.reddit.com/tb/1nufi5
Ben10/6/2013 9:13 pm
There is no god. Deal with it. Man can be good without this silly idea. Religion has been the basis of suffering for way too long. The young generations will change that through logic and reasoning for good, without the need for invisible beings.
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