In response to a cartoon of a power switch for "Star Trek Future" with humanity trying to push it to "On" and Religion trying to push it to "Off":
This is the socialist worldview in a nutshell.
Socialists believe the following:
1. All progress is social. This means that all human problems are solved by rearranging collective human behavior.
2. How to rearrange human behavior to solve problems is already known.
3. Problems therefore exist because there are people who don't want to behave in this known fashion.
4. Therefore, problems exist because certain people are in the way of progress.
Socialist politicians may be grifters who believe in nothing, but their (living) voters, the socialist true believers, hate you, and this is why.
They believe you, your existence, your non-compliance with their plans, is all that stands between humanity and paradise.
This is why they will always murder you if they have power. This is why unchecked socialism always leads to the censor, the secret policeman tapping your phone, the neighbors dragged away in the night, the torture chamber, the gulag, the mass grave.
Because if you think that nothing stands between you and paradise but stubborn people, then you think you can murder your way to paradise.
When a socialist demands socialism, you either comply or you do not.
If you do not comply, he wants to murder you.
If you do not comply, then the socialist policy he enacts not only fails to bring about paradise, it makes things worse, so he demands a further socialist policy.
If you do not comply, he wants to murder you.
If you repeatedly comply, then eventually things get very bad indeed, and the socialist casts about for someone to blame. Surely there must be some non-compliant person around here somewhere. Some counter-revolutionary. He must be found and murdered, and then paradise will be attained.
This isn't about religion.
"Religion" is merely the label they paste on your non-compliance. If you were an atheist, they'd just use another label.
That giant finger in the drawing isn't your beliefs.
It's you.
They think you are evil.
Not wrong, evil.
And they want to kill you.
Not all of them think they do, of course. There's a group called "democratic socialists", who append the word "democratic" to the front, to mean "I don't want to kill you, I only want to use the political process to force you to comply."
But when they do, your society enters the same downward spiral described above. So they eventually decide to kill you. They will always, eventually, reach the point where they decide to kill someone.
Because they always think their utopian plans will work if they kill just one more person, and their utopian plans will never actually work no matter how many people they kill.
What actually works isn't socialism, it's technology.
Here's how:
1. All progress is technological. This means that all human problems are solved by figuring out a better understanding of the universe, and creating a piece of technology based on that understanding.
2. Creating new science and technology is hard, and requires a lot time, money, and effort.
3. Problems therefore exist because not enough time, money, and effort has yet been invested to produce the necessary technological breakthrough.
4. Therefore, there is absolutely, positively, 100% no way to solve all human problems right now by acting differently. But we can optimize society for technological progress.
In other words, the "star trek future" isn't waiting for us to become atheists, because atheism doesn't produce technology faster or better than any religion that isn't anti-technology.
That "star trek future" is instead waiting on us to invent warp drives, teleporters, and matter nanoassemblers.
And every single piece of progress that humanity has achieved came not from social activism, but from technological advancement.
The 40 hour work week was merely demanded by unions. It was actually enabled by industrial technology.
Democracy, republicanism, and other forms of populist government were merely demanded by revolutions and philosophies. They were enabled by the rifled firearm.
And so on.
For every positive change in society and civilization, there is one or more critical pieces of technology that allow it to happen.
Once that technology exists, the change is trivial. When it does not exist, forcing that change is disastrous, not positive.
A 40 hour work week would exterminate a civilization of bronze age agriculturalists. Democracy would destroy a medieval kingdom.
Progress is technological progress.
This is why socialism must be stopped.
Because socialism interferes with technological progress, which is the real driving force behind progress of any kind.
You cannot murder your way to utopia.