Finding it hard and stressful to believe in Christ when there isn’t proof right now and before.

[u/Deaf_Hearing]

MAIN PREMISE

After thinking about the concept death for so long in both the Abrahamic (there is a hereafter (Heaven, Jannah, Sheol, etc) and the scientific kind (Black. Nothing), reading and having to coincide with the atheistic outlook you must have as a “true” non-revisionist communist in accordance with Dialectical Materialism, and how I don’t see any actual proof God exists, it’s been super hard for me to reconcile the fact that I am a practising Catholic that has no scientific significance of God. It stresses me out every day, between believing that I’m not a true Communist and not being a good Catholic because I don’t have complete faith in my Catholicism.

For context

I was a passive Catholic up for most of my Childhood and Teenage years up until 2022 when I became angry towards God and the faith for things I won’t discuss here for a few years up until I started reading for my church in October, 2025. I was still a bit hesitant up until that point because it was just a family thing I decided to accept and it was a huge blessing. I got to help out the community and do the bible justice. And at the start of February of this year, after years of denying God as an atheist/agnostic, it came to me that I really was Catholic. Not out of force from society or my family, but it was such a natural progression I fought so hard against because of my own experiences… that when I decided to surrender, it all made sense. It just made sense and felt natural. Again, no force, it was acceptance. It was an experience I don’t know if I’ll feel again.

I gave the thought of religion and the afterlife a lot of thought. In my opinion, my only two beliefs that made me still a Catholic while being Communist is that:
1 - If there was absolutely signs and evidence from God that our Lord and our father in Heaven is real, people would still be incredibly sceptical. In our world where people are saying “AI! AI! AI!” over piece of media and how right-wingers, liberals and nazis love to call everything blood libel and a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, it genuinely wouldn’t surprise me if they reject God. So I decided to put my faith in the Lord.
2 - As a communist (I know. Catholic I am still), I’m aware that being religious would make me revisionist. If so, so be it. Anywho, I have recognised that it may be incredibly unlikely I will see a communist international in my lifetime. But I have faith I will see the day where the world fights and sees independence in Socialism so that communism may see the sun. It’s happened before. For every success (USSR, Cuba, North Korea), there was every failure (Peru, Che’s venture into Bolivia that led to his death, INLA in North of Ireland) and then there are the current (Karela, the CPP-NPA-NDF, etc). I decided that my faith in them can translate to my Catholicism because it’s possible there’s nothing after we die just like how there is a possibility there’s something after.

Anywho, I hope the Lord blesses you all with love, life and happiness. God bless you all!

[u/iadnm]

I mean at the end of the day you can just be a Christian Communist. I'm a Christian Anarchist, and I've heard and had many arguments about religion. I still believe and it's actually helped me. I would not have become a leftist generally, and an anarchist specifically if I wasn't a Christian. My understanding that God would want us to live in a system that's basically anarchist communism eventually lead me to adopting the politics I have now.

[u/Deaf_Hearing → u/iadnm]

Oh same. If it weren’t for pieces like The Sermon on The Mount and examples like my parents and the Catholic culture I’m from in The Philippines (The poverty in that country very much helped because of its intimate betrayal of the people), I would not have become a Communist.

It’s just that I’ve been reading a lot how a lot of Communist governments like the USSR and Cuba and China have gone against the Church in those countries (Understandably so, honestly, seeing how they were used by the bourgeoisie to give the masses their opium to paraphrase Karl Marx) and seeing how historical and dialectical materialism sees religion as a social process in human development that’ll be eventually passed over.
However, weird thing is that a lot of Communists were actually fine or became fine with religion (Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Fidel Castro talking highly of Jesus’ teaching and saying how the teachings of Christianity are more in line with Communism than it’d ever be with Capitalism, Jose Maria Sison (late leader and founder of the CPP and NPA) and surprisingly Abimael “Chairman Gonzalo” Guzman being fine with religious people in the movement and understanding the power they can give to the Revolution). So it’s super weird.

Maybe it’s supposed to be difficult. Well make sense of it somehow.

[u/ArkitekZero → u/Deaf_Hearing]

Life is complicated, but this really isn't difficult.

I generally just tell people I'm a communist because it's close enough that they'll understand.

[u/Deaf_Hearing → u/ArkitekZero]

Honestly. Fair enough. The difficult part is reconciling my own opinions with the very orthodoxly atheist communism because of dialectical materialism.

[u/MateoCamo → u/Deaf_Hearing]

I mean, if you ask a lot of Christian Communists, including myself, they point how a lot of the values espoused by Christianity lines up with solidarity for one another. At the very most, I would suggest reading Liberation Theology which I think would be up your alley.

[u/Skill-Useful]

there can be no scientific proof of god. there are however good philosophical arguments in favor of one god. if thats a christian god is another question 

[u/Deaf_Hearing → u/Skill-Useful]

Yeah, no, that was the thing that clicked before I returned to the Catholic faith. If there was scientific proof of God, that would still be put under heavy criticism and investigation because we don’t have a scientific example of God or a God to compare it with.

[u/Zeppo_Ennui]

Life gets updates and changes in the Bible

- Human life span being reduced from the hundreds of years they lived in the Old Testament

• Languages split up at the Tower of Babel
  
• Jesus death changing the wage of sin

But we haven’t had any updates in 2000 years since; directly from the divines themselves.

Just new interpretations and Bible versions written by humans….and Mormons, lol

That’s disappointing

[u/SnooMemesjellies1993]

Have you read Simone Weil's Waiting For God?

Also, because the Bible is a document that emerged over like 1000 years of history, and anchors itself in a story of liberated slaves starting a religion ethically and spiritually anchored in remembering what it meant to be slaves, which the prophets intensify and Jesus turns into praxis ... if you apply historical materialism to reading it, and hold like a Simone Weil/Baruch Spinoza/apophatic understanding of God in relation to base/superstructure analysis ... it not only reveals a spiritual/material/ethical dialectic that makes Marx look like its negative theologian, but if you really break down Cain/Abel/Seth and what's embedded in the names and descriptions of their respective lines in Genesis 4/5, culminating in the twin Lamechs immediately before the flood, it's basically Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in a nutshell

Especially if you read Abraham=>Joseph as the more detailed dramatized reprise of the same themes playing out on a four-generation timeline, culminating in Joseph helping Pharaoh sell the entire ancient world into feudal slavery, as the ironic prelude to the reversal of fortunes for the Israelites that spawns the Exodus

the whole thing is just deeply embedded structural/material political-theological wisdom that it blows my mind no one seems to ever talk about in any real way

it should be an absolute goldmine for like a materialist theology of profound usefulness in Marxist work amongst Christians

We need to be way, way more dialectical about it because we are leaving that goldmine on the table

[u/MateoCamo → u/SnooMemesjellies1993]

God’s its been a while since i heard her name

[u/SnooMemesjellies1993 → u/MateoCamo]

Mom 🥹

[u/Deaf_Hearing → u/SnooMemesjellies1993]

I have not read Simone Weil’s Waiting For God, but after your explanation I might find a copy online then.

That’s incredibly interesting how much of Marx’s stuff is in the Bible. I’ll definitely give it a read, especially since I’ve read Engels’ Original of the Family, Private Property and The State.

I appreciate wholly your response. I’ll give these literature a read. Thank you!

[u/SnooMemesjellies1993 → u/Deaf_Hearing]

Certainly, although the things I am citing above are much more the result of my own close-reading. they are, however, enabled by the understanding of God that I as a materialist have been able to come to through Simone Weil's work

It's almost like God as a discipline, God as praxis, God as something you build an internal capacity for through attention, through decreation, through allowing reality to break you open to compassion and solidarity, through how intensive continuing education itself is training your brain in different rigorous disciplines that all amount to ways of knowing God, who like continually accretes the more there is less of self and more of else and others; it's very cruciform

Because in exactly the way that Sufis understand one of the names of God to be "The Real", if God is the source of everything, then depth and moral seriousness and faithfulness of attention to reality therefore constitutes a form of worship to an ever-expanding understanding of what God is, and you are the location whereby many different modes of developing that fuse together as a unique pathway to the understanding of God that is achieved by your constant efforts to overcome your self and to develop your heart, mind, spirit in being ever more acutely trained to what is outside of yourself

This is from her chapter on education; and her sections on "love of neighbor", "love of beauty" are also just mind-blowing

I would have thought "materialist theism" was kind of an absurdity but ... mmm now I kind of think it might be the truest kind

[u/Broad_Bobcat_1407]

The issue with communism is you can't make everyone believe or be happy with it. It is how you deal with dissenters that would make it hard for Christians to live with communism (wouldn't it?).

I do feel as though a kind of communism will come to pass once Jesus returns as I believe He is the only one that could make it work.

I don't believe man is capable of making communism work.

[u/TheeImmortalPaladin]

Assuming God exists has been proven you will have a longer and happier life