Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism

The following quote comes from Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, it is the concluding paragraph of the section on St. Augustine’s The City of God. He is closing out his remarks on Augustine’s eschatology and strangely concludes with a connection to Marx and a further reference to Nazism—Russell is thinly veiling his antagonism towards religion. I wonder also, being how this book was published in 1945, what influence the zeitgeist had upon him. Or maybe I am reading too much into it; nonetheless the quote is interesting enough to post for your enjoyment.

The Jewish pattern of history, past and future, is such as to make a powerful appeal to the oppressed and unfortunate at all times. Saint Augustine adapted this pattern to Christianity, Marx to Socialism. To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary:

Yahweh  =  Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah  =  Marx
The Elect  =  The Proletariat
The Church  =  The Communist Party
The Second Coming  =  The Revolution
Hell  =  Punishment of the Capitalists
The Millennium  =  The Communist Commonwealth

The terms on the left give the emotional content of the terms on the right, and it is this emotional content, familiar to those who have had a Christian or a Jewish upbringing, that makes Marx’s eschatology credible. A similar dictionary could be made for the Nazis, but their conceptions are more purely Old Testament and less Christian than those of Marx, and their Messiah is more analogous to the Maccabees than to Christ.