Have you actually read Marx? Or read a book about Marxism? Can you explain what "Marxism" or "socialism" actually claims to be about?

I got to vote socialist here in the Netherlands in our last election and they won - which happens a lot here.

So far they have demonstrated a combination of creativity and solid competence. Debates here are pretty astonishing, because they're almost always about practical matters.

There are two parties that talk about religion here - an anti-Muslim party, and a pro-Christian party. They sound like American parties - they just make stuff up. One of them does OK at the polls, but they never end up being part of the government (which always involve coalitions), because the last time someone did that, it was months of screaming and then the government fell (happens all the time in parliamentary democracies, of course). People here are busy - they have no time for crazy people talking about God and refusing to actually deal with real problems.

Regarding "Men have forgotten God": if this were true, why are the most religious countries the ones with the highest number of crimes, the lowest educational level, and the widest disparity between rich and poor?

I lived for thirty years in one of the most Christian countries in the world, and people treated each other like shit, and the government treated the people like shit, and the businesses treated people like shit.

Pathetic, mentally ill homeless people littered the streets of every major city; the police were a brutal military force with no checks on their behavior. Corrupt politicos like Reagan, Bush and Trump were almost universally lionized by religious leaders despite flouting laws, customs and the words of Jesus.

Now I live in one of the least religious countries in the world. Even though the GDP per capita is a third less than the United States, cities are beautiful and clean, the only homeless people are by their own choice, and the country is capable of incredible feats of civil engineering. For example, that socialist party I was talking about is setting up plans to raise the bed of the great river running through Amsterdam by 4 meters to run a bike path under the river! (And it seems likely they will do it too.)

I would add that I read much Solzhenitsyn's work back in the day. He's a fine writer, but he also had a lot of terrible ideas. He strongly believed that Russia should have military domination over its neighbors, that both the Ukraine and Belarus should belong to Russian. He moved to denying the Holodomor by the end of his life, and was a monarchist - which given the psychotic, destructive and incompetent nature of Russian royalty was quite a stretch.