MAN HAS FORGOTTEN GOD.

When I started going to school in Rostov-on-Don, other children , egged on by Komsomal members ,taunted me for accompanying my mother to the last remaining church in town , and tore the cross from around my neck.A few years later, I heard a number of older people offer this explanation for the great disaster that befallen Russia; “ Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this have happened.’
Since then I have spent well-neigh 50 years working on the history of Russian revolution; in the process I have collected hundred of personal testimonies , read hundred of books, and contributed eight volumes of my own. But if I were asked to day to formulate as concisely as possible main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “ Men have forgotten God’
What is more, were called upon to identify the principal trait of the entire 20th century, I would be unable to find any thing more precise than to reflect once again on how we have lost touch with our creator. The failing of human consciousness
Deprived of it’s divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.
Dostoyevsky warned that great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared. That is precisely what has happened. The 20th century has been sucked in to vortex of atheism and self-
destruction. This plunge in to the abyss is a world wide process, East and west and has aspects that are dependent neither on political system ,nor on levels of economic and cultural development.
It was Dostoyevsky , once again who said of the French revolution and its seething hatred of the church that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism ’But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized militarized and tenaciously malevolent 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, militant atheism a central pivot. To achieve its ends, communism needs to control population devoid of religious feeling. The degree to which the atheistic world long to annihilate religion, the extent to which sticks in his throat, was demonstrated by the web of intrigue surrounding the attempt on the life Pope Jhon
Paul 11in 1981.
Yet in Russia- where churches have been leveled, where tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were tortured, shot in cellars , sent to brutal camps. where even to day people are sent to labor camp for their faith- Christian tradition survives. west has yet to experience a communist invasion: religion remain free. but the west too is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness.
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 constitution. The concept of good and evil have long been banished from use. It has become embarrassing to appeal to eternal concepts, embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system.
When eternal 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 and ideology.
All attempts to find way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness , in repentance, to the creator of all.

Condensed from
National Review
ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN.