Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Frederick. From my perspective, a belief in Marxist/Leninism is no different from more conventional religious belief. In fact Stalin understood this perfectly: he consciously modeled himself as Saint Paul following Lenin’s Jesus, he introduced the Heroes of the Soviet Union as latter-day saints, and created the Pioneers to replace Orthodox Christian youth groups. Marx’s Das Kapital was of course the Soviet version of the Christian Bible and Historical Determinism replaced god’s grand plan.

As for religious mythologies providing any input into true morality, I’ve yet to see a single convincing example, whereas there are literally thousands of examples of the converse. More importantly, my point is that it’s impossible to equate morality with abdication of responsibility, which is what religious people do when they accept the “rules of living” laid down by their particular set of myths. By attempting to argue that “not all religious actions are harmful” one merely falls into the standard utility trap in which the argument “the Nazis weren’t all bad” is equally valid.