Letters to the Editor
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Hitler a "secularist"?
Karen Armstrong, in "Going Beyond God" agrees with the writer that Hitler was a secularist.
Yet Hitler said these things;
"The Party (Nazis), as such, stands for positive Christianity.."
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders."
You can find similar "Hitlerisms" at http://www.nobeliefs.com/speeches.htm
As for Stalin and Mao they were indeed secularists but they created a theology that put themselves in place as a deity.
Indeed, Stalin was educated in a seminary with the intent of being a priest! God apparently let him slip through his fingers.
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Hitler was not a secularist
Please stop perpetuating this slander. Hitler was a Christian.
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.
-Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)
from www.nobeliefs.com
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something other than yes, no and indifferent
"I refuse to get involved in arguments on the existence of God--which means that the term "atheist" (as opposed to the word "believer") is of no interest to me at all, no more than the word believer or the opposition of their very clear meanings. For me, there is something other than yes, no and indifferent--the absence of investigations of this sort, for instance."
-Marcel Duchamp, letter to Andre Breton, 4 Oct 1954.
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Fact Checking
If Armstrong is such an expert on the history of religions, why does she get facts about The Golden Rule wrong? In the book she says Jesus affirmed it and Hillel emphasized it, but she does not mention that the Jewish version dates hundreds of years back to Leviticus 19:18. Why? And why does she use the histroically inaccurate and linguistically ludicours term "Yahweh"? These are two sloppy errors which make me suspect her scholarship and approach her book with doubt. if she got these things wrong, what else did she get wrong?
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Contradictions and Ommissions
She kind of talks in contradictions with heavy ommissions doesn't she? Exactly how can she say "religious texts are basically about peace" and then when confronted with the Koran say "well, there are plenty of exhortations to violence in the Old Testement, too." Wow, that's quite a 180.
And those little side-steps. "Every philosophy...except the Greeks." You mean, everyone philosophy except the one which has shaped Western civilization? "Everywhere...except in Europe." Ah well, tiny insignificant Europe. Barely registers on the map, anyway.
Looks like she's using religion as her own series of Rorschach blots. Fine, but not very informative.
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hating religion
I hate religion the way I hate gambling. End product: more harm than good.
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atheist apolexy
First off, while I don't entirely agree with Armstrong, I don't entirely disagree, either. Armstrong's strength as a voice in the landscape of religious commentary is that she does point out the chief problem with many Christian apologists and preachers: the failure to really grasp the implications of an infinite, omniscient, omnipresent God, and the arrogance to presume to know the mind of such a being. Many Christians, particularly the fundamentalist and evangelical conservative kind, tend to try to stick God in a box and use him to justify their own fears and narrow-mindedness. God is bigger than that.
As for the uproar over Salon actually acknowledging that there are people of faith in this world -- the atheists need to get over it already. Like it or not, the vast majority of people in this country self-identify themselves as belonging to a faith of one description or another, usually Christian. If progressives are going to make themselves politically relevant again, they need to learn how to authentically communicate with people of faith on their own terms. Browbeating them by telling them they are infantile, stupid, deluded, or otherwise mentally deficient isn't going to get you there, and if progressives are going to insist on embracing this apporach, they'd better get used to political failure.
Salon lately has been doing a great job of ferreting out the "silent majority" among believers -- people who have a faith in a higher being, who even beleive in the Christian God, but who eschew the narrow, intolerant belief system that the GOP embraces. They've been chronicling the religious life of this nation just as much as they do what's at the box office, and that's as it should be, becuase the truth of the matter is that the religious life of this nation is (or should be) as relevant to progressives as what goes on in the gay community, or in the scientific community, or any other community in our country, or the birth of Brangelina's baby, for chrissakes. Relax already, willya?
And the truth of the mattter is, it is just as much a leap of faith to say categorically that there is no God as it is to insist there is one. The truth is, no one knows. So when atheists talk about how rational they are as opposed to people of faith, I can do nothing but laugh in the face of the hypocrisy.