TPD wrote:Not attending church or practising religion actively doesn't exactly mean you're atheist. Lots of people have some kind of belief but don't present it by participating in church-related activities. Then again, I guess it also depends on the definition of atheism and whether it's just the pure rejection of the idea of a higher power or an absence of religiousness. But I am sure that the number of self-proclaimed atheists is much lower and putting the number of "atheists" as high as 2/3 in a country that has had quite a tradition seemed a bit too much.
If you never, ever attend church services (not even Christmas services) nor have any kind of discernible religious beliefs I would term you an atheist. You could conceivably be a deist, but in my book the differences between atheists and deists are pretty minuscule except at a high-class philosophical level. I have never understood why to be an atheist you have to actively "reject" a higher power, I do all the time because I am virulently anti-religion but that's just me, if your actions indicate that you live your life according to the principle that there is no God, than I think that qualifies you as an atheist more than one who simply self-identifies as one. Similarly, one who claims to be an atheist but holds silent vigil every day at sunrise to prevent bad occurrences I would term a theist. As I also said before, if you wind the clock back just a few years you have 70% of the same country proclaiming themselves atheist. This doesn't mean they were all honest, but I think it casts doubt over whether or not the current religious portrayals of Russia are accurate. I also have a beef with many of the current methods of religious polling because most don't have an "Atheist" option, or even a "Secularist/Non-Religious" option, usually the only way to go that route is to circle in "Other" and write in "Atheist". If I were given one of those tests I'd probably end up classifying myself as a Russian Orthodox for lack of a better option.
TPD wrote:Otherwise you'd end up being either a milkmaid or digging canalisations, IF you were lucky.
What other use would you have for believers of The Great Sky-Fairy? The greatest mistake of the Soviet Union (apart from its stubborn refusal to modernize its command economy system to cope with the needs of an emerging information/service-based global market) was that it moderated on religion enough to let that cancer eke through into the modern day. Quite honestly, if you believe in your "God" enough to go to the camps for him, and your "God" is so merciful as to let you suffer like that, than I have no problems at all with you being put to work for the good of the nation until your harebrained ideas die with you.