>>38289
But the church itself isn't a person, it is an organization, moreover one that if you follow anything at all about what Jesus said puts feeding, clothing, housing and so on the poor and downtrodden at its highest mark on the to do list solely below replicating belief in itself. Going by that one could easily regard or organizer churches as large aid societies and sprawling international communes and cooperatives.

I'm guessing that part of what must've happened in Europe is that in addition to the clergy getting tied up into monarchist and feudal politics that they eventually began getting land deeds not organizationally but for individual members of the clergy, thus putting monks who really should've been more like professional medics and charity workers taking a vow of poverty into being even more useless and pompous versions of the aristocracy. That being the case it seems to me that church reform is what was always what was needed. I can also see how that would lead to the church itself becoming incredibly separated from the laity until finally reaching the point that it outwardly was jockeying for position as a pillar of the system itself because it had been bought out and coopted by nobles, and had in return spread the message of such nonsense as claiming loyalty to your "lord" was the same as loyalty to the LORD which come to think of it makes a lot of things about the wording of the KJV make sense. Speaking of which what's particularly difficult for me to imagine is how any of these peasants tolerated their king being such a murderous adulterer that he outright schismed from the Catholic Church solely to create a church that was okay with his adultery. I can never take Anglicans seriously and I strongly suspect that may be part of why England in general is such a starkly atheist country.

>the classless society which is the end goal of the communist revolution.

I dunno. Something always struck me about it as like the counterfeit version, like a godless version of Christianity that wanted the State to become god and for the politburo to become its prophets. Outwardly the two things seem very similar to me, at least way more so than right wing ideologies which are fundamentally egocentric in a different sense, or rather in the way you have the utterly bizarre spectacle of people like Paul Ryan supposedly being a deeply religious man but who made his congressional staffers or whoever read Ayn Rands trash in spite of the fact Ayn Rand hated religion generally and Christianity particularly at least as much as the worst Communist. This as opposed to Christianity which is centrally an internationalist ideology that had always pretty much hated the very concept of nation or of any sense of border or government existing other than the Kingdom of God.

>>38291
Just like any other organization, church can be corrupt as well, and just like in other organizations, for one decent person who genuinely cares about people and trying his best to help them there can be scores and scores of assholes who only in it for money and power. Also, despite claiming to be a non-political entity, churches were a part of politics from the very beginning, even in pre-Abrahamic times: think Egyptian priests who were a considerable political force, pretty much holding the rulers on a short leash. Judeo-Christianity is no exception, as the early Jewish priests had both legislative and tax-collecting (called "tithe") functions, which are normally associated with the state rather than the church nowadays. So, there you have it: despite ostensibly being a charity organization created with only good intentions, church also offers an opportunity to fill one's pockets, and that of course attracts a lot of people with flexible morals, who in turn the church into yet another mechanism of exploitation. This is also why I'm very skeptical about different non-religious charity organizations, especially here in Belarus, because it's extremely likely that the money they collect to help the orphans or world peace or whatever end up in bureaucrats' wallets and accounts.

Henry VIII may have been a piece of shit, but he definitely wasn't an idiot. He understood well that the church is a part of politics, so he just used it for his own ends. And peasants? Peasants were completely dependent on their landlords. So what could they do? Or rather, why should they do anything? Material needs always trump spiritual ones; after all, it doesn't matter much what confession you belong to when you're dead. There could be some trouble from more independent strata, like yeomen, but they too probably decided that they don't like the church enough to risk their well-being for it.

>godless version of Christianity that wanted the State to become god and for the politburo to become its prophets

Soviet flavor of socialism isn't exactly communism, you know. But yes, it's quite ironic that Marxism which supposedly aims to do away with ideologies altogether ended up turning into an ideology itself in the USSR, and quite a dogmatic one to boot. It wouldn't be as bad if the state didn't have a complete control over all spheres of life, but the Soviet ideology influenced not only economy and politics, but also arts and sciences, and not in a good way (cases in point: socrealism and lysenkoism).

>>38293
I'm never going to be able to see Soviet Realism in any way shape or form as anything but blatantly superior to the absolute piece of piss trash garbage that American and other modern Capitalist culture had produced, from Piss Christ, to canned tins of shit, to those fucking abomination sculptures of I think he's Brazilian and look like malformed drops of molten lead that somehow was perverted into being even more crass and tasteless, to bubblegum pop and most 80s music, to most of Warhol, to most of Marcel DuChamp, to just on and on up to and including whatever the fucking hell you call nuStar Wars and capeshit. This is all the more evident of our blatant inferiority in the realm of painting with SocRealist bullshit. Was it actually good? Well no maybe not, but compared to just about every single MoMA installation it sure as hell was.

Besides which what I've found so far is that a lot of Soviet artists, composers and so on were kept on a pretty loose leash by the Party. They all pretty much seemed to basically only have to be all yeah yeah and Marx Lenin blah blah whatever to get crap past the censors and get funding from the state apparatus. I also have long suspected that the USSR would've just chilled out had the roles been reversed and much of the Capitalist world collapsed by the mid 90s. We may not have had as many cool vidya games on the one hand, but I still have doubt that the USSR wouldn't be producing computer games anyway and besides which we probably just lost out on a lot of supremely awesome technical and scientific advances as a result.

But again, you have to keep in mind your audience here. I know you are dealing with the horrible realities of your shared cultural experience, but the sheer volume of pure shit I must put up with on a seemingly daily basis here and the absolutely superstitious and outright doctrinal anti intellectualism of my country are only among a few of the things that have left me so completely jaded it is hard not to see the places where the differences among us were admirable. It also isn't like we don't have the same stuff going on here constantly where pretty much the only reason things like pornography and videogames are even legal at this point for good or ill is because it's directly in our Constitution, and even then this country has a rich history of censorship official and otherwise anyway. Like right now the GOP leadership is trying to convince the Justice Department to make combating pornography its number one priority for one example. It seems to me that a lot of stuff in the USSR particularly the later period was pretty hands off.