The Kims and the 21st Century
Ultimately, neither Hitler nor Stalin or Mao were able to get past death. That
is, until Kim Il-Sung. When the founder of the North Korean State died in
1994, his “death” was explained as a state of “sleep.” The Korean
Communists had no difficulty invoking Korean religious mythology by telling
the public of how “heavenly cranes,” who had descended to earth to collect
Kim Il-Sung to take him to Heaven, were forced into a conference when
confronted by the wailing Korean people, who could not stand losing their
Great Leader. After long deliberations, they decided to leave the Great
Leader in a state of “sleep” in his mausoleum on earth.
The Korean Worker's Party immediately declared him the “Eternal President”
of the state. Take your time to realize that North Korea's official equivalent
to President Barack Obama is a corpse that ceased to live 19 years ago, but
will continue in that post long after Mr. Obama has departed from the White
House…
If Kim Il-Sung was not supposed to be “divine,” how else could one claim
that he decided the measurements of the benches that were constructed for
college students to use? Or that he personally wrote not mere “Little Red
Books,” but entire textbooks about engineering, mathematics and other
deeply technical subjects?
No Moral Dilemma Here
I wonder what will be the response of the theists to being informed that one
of their core retorts (its not an “argument,” which implies that some thought
has gone into it) against atheism has fallen apart. Clearly, none of these
apples ever fell far from the tree. The Hitler cult used the creeds of Christ
and Muhammad as well as the pagan Germanic belief systems, and Stalin
designed his expressly on the Christian Trinity. Chairman Mao used China's
oldest religious order that had never really died, and Korean mythology
came swiftly to deify the Marxist-Leninist patriarch of North Korea. How any
sane man or woman could ever imagine that any of these individuals were
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