Originally posted by Diogenes
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When talking about Communism, we're largely doing it from the perspective of trying to design our own political system. We're thinking about what the optimal political system might be and whether our countries' current systems could be improved by the addition of any new ideas of principles. Political systems are able to be changed and tinkered with fairly easily, and one could easily imagine some Western nation introducing, for example, the socialist idea of democracy in the workplace, and having employees automatically own shares in the businesses they worked at and getting to vote on the senior management etc. Or they might implement tax-payer funded universal healthcare. In general, single ideas and single laws can easily be taken from one political system and slotted into another to create a hybrid. So when we look at Communism in the USSR we tend to not be particularly interested in repeating the whole of it, but instead looking at the details of "what worked and what didn't? What might we want to retain and what might we want to reject?" In that context an analysis of "Stalin killed people, therefore all possible forms of communism and every single idea contained therein is evil" is... just moronic. It's not an interesting nor intelligent thing to say.
When we're talking about Christianity it's different. Christians worldwide largely believe whatever it is they personally believe, and virtually nothing any of us say is likely to change that. So instead of designing and optimizing a system like is the case with political science, when we look at Christianity, we're studying a phenomena we don't have much control over. So it's more interesting and useful to look at what the effects of that phenomena have been in the past and what sort of behaviors it creates. Usually the question being asked in a secular or apologetics context is not "what changes would be make to optimize Christianity?" but something like "is Christianity, as it exists in the present, a beneficial or harmful force in society?" The questions tend to presume an inability to directly alter Christianity and focus on assessing it as it currently exists or has existed in the past (i.e. a present and past focus), while political science discussions tend to focus on the future and on optimizing our political systems by the inclusion of specific ideas and thus presuppose the ability to be very selective about what ideas we do or don't include (i.e. a future focus). The different time-focuses of those discussions mean historical events tend to be more relevant in discussions on Christianity and it's history and less relevant in discussions on possible communist systems.
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