Is Kim Jong un an atheist?

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This guy makes a good argument that North Korea is a pseudo-theocracy (I remain unconvinced).

http://www.nkeconwatch.com/2006/10/14/i ... ous-state/

But what about the nut that runs the country?

Can a presumably sane person who lived in Switzerland till only a few years ago really think he's God?

Why do you presume he is sane? The whole population it would seem is living in a cloud of state manufactured delusion, it is quite likely that the sort of adoration his 'people' show him would make it hard to remain level headed

He seems to have left the west earlier than I thought.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Jong-u ... _education

Still he almost surely spent much of his youth in Europe.


Between that and his fear of assassination he seems very aware he's mortal.

Most Marxists (with the exception of Robert Mugabe) are.

Marx said that 'religion is the opiate of the masses' ( ie exists to keep the working class docile) and thus is a tool of exploitation.

So Marx has the reputation for being "history's most famous athiest". And indeed when Lenin, and Mao finally put Marxism on the map they banned religion from the mainstream communist world.

But Marxism is like any other creed- it can be interpreted in different ways. The Liberation Theology movement in Latin American was led by radical catholic priests who were influenced by Marxist thinking but ostensibly retained their Catholicism ( though the creed was never anything but condemned by any Pope).

In the final chapter of the "Communist Manifesto" Marx HIMSELF says "...and the guiding light of the universe is on our side!"( sounds a helluva lot like history's most famous athiest is talking about a diety there).

So, like Christians, Marxists vary in how "textually literal" they are.

Kim Song's regime is beyond Marxist (theyve gone into their own ideology of Kim-ism) and beyond a dictatorship into being a heritary monarchy. So its hardly surprising that they would take the standard Stalinist style cult of personality to a whole new level-and add elements of the supernatural.

And Kim borrowed widely to create his iconography as well.

He even seems to have borrowed an ingredient from us Americans: every American presidential candidate prior to the 20th Centurey claimed to have been "born in a log cabin" ( ie a 'man of the people, born on the frontier'). And Kim was born in a log cabin too ( I'm sure that he was an honest little boy who would admit to chopping down his dad's cherry tree as well)!

Due to marx's textbook militant atheist background and overt hate for religion I'd say he was an atheist (though your quote is puzzling) and since Marxism is intrinsically atheistic it is fair to assume any who follow it are atheists unless there is concrete evidence to the contrary.

I have yet to see any evidence the Kim's are anything but atheists and yet to see and yet to see any quotes saying they are from any respectable source.

It's maddening.

While Soviet Communism wasn't kind to religion, the Marx quote is often taken out of context. It wasn't contempt for religion, but recognition of its pacifying effect on people. Opium was legal in Russia when Marx said that, and he used it himself.

This is the full quote;

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

Marx may have been an atheist, but he didn't hate religion, and nothing he wrote in his manifesto suggested doing anything like what came after.

Kim is not an atheist. He believes in his grandfather. Kim is a maniac, just like the entire family.

ruveyn

We must also note that North Korea doesn't adhere to traditional Marxism-Leninism, but rather their own hard-line of communism called Juche.

They try to create an illusion of religious freedom, but while the Kims are officially atheist (not that we should take any North Korean data seriously), they have an extensive cult of personality that surpasses even Hitler and Stalin.

Even then, North Korea wasn't the most hostile communist country toward religion. That honor goes to Albania, which between 1967 and 1990, officially banned religion--the only time that has ever happened in any country. Their leader at the time, Enver Hoxha, had a personality cult similar to the Kims.

"the Kims are officially atheist"

Where did you get this information???

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YG2A ... te&f=false


That is a strange opinion, particularly when "Marxist" is increasingly conflated with any left-wing economic system. North Korea isn't actually Marxist, for example.

Adam Smith and Milton Friedman were both atheists- is capitalism "intrinsically atheistic"?

Could please elucidate why you think Mugabe is a Marxist?

Ahh, no he didn't:

"The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself"

Karl Marx 1843/44

He is officially an atheist I know of no researcher with the access to reliably check. If you ask a North Korea what they believe, they will tell you that they are an atheist, especially if you ask that question in company. The North has an official totalitarian ideology, but it is explicitly non-religious. You could make a functionalist argument about how some elements of the ideology work in similar ways to religious belief but it would be based on heavily selective evidence mining.

91 what were you doing in NK?

I study Chinese foreign policy and political economy so I was there for research.