Yes, he went to mass.

I am not too sure if he met with the Pope, but then the Pope did have a deal going where he declared himself neutral to the Nazi regime.

The reason you haven't heard of any of this is because you have not bothered to read the history, you just took the religious rightwing nutjobs at their word.

I was discussing actual Nazis - and responding to claims that they were an atheist movement. They weren't.

I do not mean that religion makes someone a monster, after all, Stalin actually was an atheist.

What I am saying is people who throw things around like "Hitler was an atheist" should bloody well get their facts straight.

Sorry I misunderstood the crux of your post.

That one is easy: they were raised by people who believed, in a society where belief is held to be a virtue and non-belief is held to be a flaw.

This society got that way through non-belief being punishable by death for most of recorded human history.

You don't have to be a scientist to get to look at the raw data or the deliberations on why something works the way it does. You might not understand the data without specialist training, but that doesn't mean you can't look it up and figure it out for yourself.

IE: You are basing the rest of your post off of one craptastic straw man.

The difference boils down to this:

An old atheist does not believe in religion, but makes excuses both for the religion and for their non-belief. They keep quiet about their atheism in order to get along, and sometimes even go so far as attending one of the more liberal churches.

A new atheist is an old atheist who has gotten sick of putting up with religious crap.

I don't think I am wiser than all the wisest men of history.

Nor do I think that all the wisest men of history knew everything and were always right.

Which I suppose means I am wiser than you, a person who thinks that just because some ancient said something it is true.

If you feel that believing in a big Santa in the sky lends your life more "magic" well I suppose that is for you to decide.

But if you are going to pick something for its fantasy value why not at least have fun with it and call yourself a Jedi?

It is pretty clear to me that in November, if Hillary wins the nomination, things like this letters page will be used to paint her supporters as racist hypocrites by the McCain campaign.

And the McCain campaign will be right.

Now you can cry and whine and whinge but Ferraro's statement was racist. She followed it up with yet more racist whining of the sort which sounds more like the KKK whinging over affirmative action than the words of a Democrat.

And it has shown just how far certain supporters of Hillary's campaign are willing to go in overlooking things that hurt their candidate.

Joe Conason has been a supporter of Hillary Clinton to the point of people wondering if he and she shouldn't just get a room. That he has not supported what amounts to outright bigotry from a Hillary staffer shows that for him at least, it was not about race or gender.

Why not express your disgust at Ferraro's statements, and then point out that Hillary is not Ferraro.

That is unless you are becoming suspicious over whether Hillary shares Ferraro's views on this issue.

It is racist because it dismisses everything Obama has achieved and proclaims his achievements to be purely because he is black.

It then repeats the KKK whine that white people are being discriminated against in favour of black people - a very common racist kant.

It is an attempt at writing off Obama's entire political record to this point by making him the affirmative action candidate, when in America, the history clearly shows that race has been a barrier to black people achieving success.

It is also a repeat of the same sort of bigotted attack that she used against Jesse Jackson when he helped Mondale to a 49 state loss.

It is the use of the precise strategy which turned Hillary Clinton into a Democrat way back when Nixon was using race baiting to further his campaign.

It is funny how these things work, because at a point I struggled to come up with a comparative presidential candidate to Hillary. She isn't the Democrat's GW Bush. She is the Democrats' Nixon.

she helped Mondale to a 49 state loss.

Don't knock the soon to be Congressman Death...

Don't listen to your gut.

It doesn't know what it is talking about.

Okay Cookie, why your gut is a moron.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/12/21/right_and_obama/

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/12/29/obama_europe/

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2008/01/10/new_hampshire/

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2008/03/07/vetting_candidates/

Easier way to deal with it:

press the ctrl key, and then roll the scroll wheel away from yourself. That should make the image bigger, and thus easier to read.

If it had just been the once, I would agree with you on not calling her a racist.

But...

"if Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race."

The man who won that election supported Apartheid.

Traditionally, a recession is a decline in GDP for two successive quarters. The US uses a measure of it being over a few months, rather than the normal quarterly view.

A depression is a particularly bad recession.

An economic collapse is a complete economic collapse.