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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The exploitation of superstitious religious belief for ego-driven, power-mad, homicidal purposes is merely one gambit of many, as far as the ability of humans to pervert any collective impulse to serve the worst potentials latent in their nature.
Secularism is not immune to that terrible tendency.
Consider the 20th century: the Nazis, bottom line, organized their will to power around materialist sociobiology. They made their overtures toward religions ranging from Nordic paganism to integralist Roman Catholicism, but that was simply doublespeak. Fundamentally, they were "humanists"- they simply had a more circumscribed view of what counted as authentic humanity, based on quack genetic theory.
Then there were the Marxist-Leninists, whose regimes unleashed reigns of terror from the Ukraine to Pnomh Penh to Pyongyang, with not a bit of "God talk" or "religion" in any of it. What often functioned in exactly the same way were cults of personality based around the secular deification of human beings- Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il-Sung...
this does not speak well of the simple absence of spirituality and religion as an anodyne for the propensity to mass homicidal violence in human societies.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
