During the reign of Dhu Nuwas, a political-power transferring process began and during it, the Himyarite kingdom became a tributary of the Kingdom of Aksum, which had adopted Christianity as its de facto state religion two centuries earlier. The Russian Orthodox Church, for centuries the strongest of all Orthodox Churches, was violently suppressed. In 2009, the BBC claimed that in 524 CE the Himyarite Kingdom, who had adopted Judaism as the de facto state religion two centuries earlier, led by King Yusuf Dhu Nuwas, had offered residents of a village in what is now Saudi Arabia the choice between conversion to Judaism or death, and that 20,000 Christians had then been massacred. Unlike later establishments of state atheism by communist regimes, the French Revolutionary experiment was short (seven months), incomplete and inconsistent. Another French word with a wild, wild spelling, “liaison” is almost impossible to spell without a dictionary. Even though it was brief, the French experiment was particularly notable because it influenced atheists such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. During the French Revolution, a campaign of dechristianization happened which included removal and destruction of religious objects from places of worship; English librarian Thomas Hartwell Horne and biblical scholar Samuel Davidson write that “churches were converted into ‘temples of reason,’ in which atheistical and licentious homilies were substituted for the proscribed service”.

The Casablanca terrorist attacks of May 2003 that killed forty-five people made it apparent that firm control over the religious sector was crucial for regime stability. Due to the strict enforcement of anti-clerical laws, people in strongly Catholic areas, especially the states of Jalisco, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Colima and Michoacán, began to oppose him, and this opposition led to the Cristero War from 1926 to 1929, which was characterized by brutal atrocities on both sides. As of November 2018, in present-day China, the government has detained many people in internment camps, “where Uighur Muslims are remade into atheist Chinese subjects”. For children who were forcibly taken away from their parents, the Chinese government has established “orphanages” with the aim of “converting future generations of Uighur Muslim children into loyal subjects who embrace atheism”. Article 27 prohibited any future acquisition of such property by the churches, and prohibited religious corporations and ministers from establishing or directing primary schools.

Later, the United States passed the Jackson-Vanik amendment which harmed US-Soviet trade relations until the USSR permitted the emigration of religious minorities, primarily Jews. The emergence of communist states across East Asia after World War Two saw religion purged by atheist regimes across China, North Korea and much of Indo-China. By 1935, 17 states had no priest at all. Agoplos Golam, Archimandrite of the Greek Orthodox Church, who was a visiting Greek priest to Jamaica (Jamaica Gleaner, April 10, 1928), and the Rt. Another way to understand the use of elohim in Scripture is by defining its Greek equivalent, theos. These disagreements typically revolve around the sacred tradition of mass, the holy orders and structural hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and the way the Virgin Mary and the venerated saints are respected in the Roman Catholic doctrine. Perhaps a story is a good way to begin. A general was sent against Najrān, a predominantly Christian oasis, with a good number of Jews, who refused to recognize his authority.

This process was completed by the time of the reign of Ma’dīkarib Yafur (519-522), a Christian who was appointed by the Aksumites. The time between deorbit and impact would only be a few minutes, and depending on the orbits and positions in the orbits, the system would have a worldwide range. The Soviet Union ended its war time truce against the Russian Orthodox Church, and extended its persecutions to the newly communist Eastern bloc: “In Poland, Hungary, Lithuania and other Eastern European countries, Catholic leaders who were unwilling to be silent were denounced, publicly humiliated or imprisoned by the communists. Leaders of the national Orthodox Churches in Romania and Bulgaria had to be cautious and submissive”, wrote Blainey. Soviet authorities relied heavily on coercion to spread their idea of scientific atheism. Nevertheless, historian Emily Baran writes that “some accounts suggest the conversion to militant atheism did not always end individuals’ existential questions”. Some Cristeros applied terrorist tactics, while the Mexican government persecuted the clergy, killing suspected Cristeros and supporters and often retaliating against innocent individuals. While the churches were generally not as severely treated as they had been in the USSR, nearly all their schools and many of their churches were closed, and they lost their formerly prominent roles in public life.