Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.
Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the object worship of the state.
The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inflicted by governments.
Ireland has remained a Catholic nation, and as such sets the eternal destiny of man high above the isms and idols of the day. Her people would accept no system that decried of imperiled that destiny. So long as that was their attitude none of the forms of state-worship now prevalent [elsewhere in the world] could flourish in their land.
This was the first major political broadcast on the new national radio station.
Quite interesting, North Korea is as if it's an entirely secular dictatorship. In North Korea you might think that was the case since it has an officially Communistic ideology, but it's not, it's the most religious state it's possible to imagine. It's actually two people who have been fused into one, maybe this is reminding you of something, there's the father and there's the son. It's one short of a trinity.
Louis XIV was very frank and sincere when he said: I am the State. The modern statist is modest. He says: I am the servant of the State; but, he implies, the State is God. You could revolt against a Bourbon king, and the French did it. This was, of course, a struggle of man against man. But you cannot revolt against the god State and against his humble handy man, the bureaucrat.
We considered the Dear Leader our god. That's huge. He's more than our parents. I thought all of the world respected Kim Il Sung. That's why we were bowing to their pictures.
The worship of the nation has been able to make men tolerate under its authority what they could never have tolerated from princes: a submission to rule, which, through sumptuary laws on food and drink, through conscription, through a cast-iron system of compulsory instruction for all on State ordered lines, and through a State examination at the gate of every profession, has almost killed the citizen's power to react upon that which controls him, and has almost destroyed that variety which is the mark of life.
I've been reading [Nikita] Khrushchev Remembers. I know he's a bit of a lad himself - but he seemed to think that making a religion out of an individual was bad; that doesn't seem to be part of the basic Communist idea. Still people are people, that's the difficulty.
You know what the fastest growing religion in America is? Statism. The growing reliance on government.
Libertarianism is 'cultish,' say the sophisticates. Of course, there's nothing cultish at all about allegiance to the state, with its flags, its songs, its mass murders, its little children saluting and paying homage to pictures of their dear leaders on the wall, etc.
The cult of the omnipotent state has millions of followers in the united States. Americans of today view their government in the same way as Christians view their God; they worship and adore the state and they render their lives and fortunes to it. Statists believe that their lives - their very being - are a privilege that the state has given to them. They believe that everything they do is - and should be - dependent on the consent of the government. Thus, statists support such devices as income taxation, licensing laws, regulations, passports, trade restrictions, and the like.
My memory - faded, as I say - is that Paul Johnson was trying to vilify all intellectuals who were at all critical of the states he worships, and of power generally (except, of course, the power of enemies, which we must denounce, imitating the commissars who are his models, though he doesn't understand it).
In any socialist government, they must destroy all alliances other than your alliance to the government, and they want the government to become your God. That for you to totally depend upon government. So we become slaves to government, through taxation, through regulation, through all kinds of restrictions, that makes us not free anymore.
The fundamental basis is this: Socialism requires that government becomes your God. That's why they have to destroy the concept of God. They have to destroy all loyalties except loyalty to the government.
The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.
One of the greatest dangers is secular religion - state worship.
The Chancellor, the late Chancellor, was only partly correct, he was obsolete. But so was the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under 'M' for mankind... in the Twilight Zone.
In general I don't think the image of the state as a divinity is very helpful.
To call the State an organism shows a diseased tendency to make a fetish of words.
A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state.
There is a reason why you see such an antagonism to religion. Because communism necessitates the destruction of religion for one reason. Communism needs for government to be your God. So there cannot be any alliance to anything but government. So an alliance to God must be destroyed. That's why socialism and anti-religion go together.
There certainly are those who worship the state much as divinities are worshipped. Not just the state but even leaders.
A new type of superstition has got hold of people's minds, the worship of the state. People demand the exercise of the methods of coercion and compulsion, of violence and threat. Woe to anybody who does not bend his knee to the fashionable idols!