[Steve] What are the bad results of not believing in God? [Platt] National Socialism, Fascism, Communism.
[Arlo interjects] I seem to recall a popular slogan of the Nazi party was "Gott mit uns". Indeed, on most of the WWII memorabilia my father brought home, this slogan appears throughout. There is also ample evidence that the Party Elite were not only interested in the Occult, but used religious ceremony and dogma throughout their existence. Painting the Nazi's as "atheistic" is simply a historically invalid rhetorical attempt to disassociate religion from the holocaust. But a closer look at the historical record shows that, at best, it was a warped understanding of religion, occult, master race and "divine right" that underscored the Nazi Party. Heck, even their primary symbol, the swasktika, is a religious symbol. We also have to historically back up and see that until the point of "secular enlightenment", people had no better systems to live under. The monarchies of Europe throughout the time of "Christ" to the Enlightenment were brutal, recognized NO human rights, people were imprisoned and executed on the whim of the monarch or lord. Under feudalism, people were no better than cattle, and were often considered as such to the lords of the fiefdom. During times of expansionism, the "religious folk" of Europe left a trail of devastation and dead "pagans" in their wake, the genocides in the Americas for one example. (Platt's argument here typically becomes one of raw body count. But consider the technological limitations of the time. Do you think that had the Europeans had Gatling guns upon arriving at the shores of the Americas, the slaughter would've been constrained? No. What we see in both cases is the malicious drive for power combined with the best tools of the day for instantiating that power.) Recall that Pirsig had said, "And yet, although Jefferson called this doctrine of social equality "self-evident," it is not at all self-evident. Scientific evidence and the social evidence of history indicate the opposite is self-evident. There is no "self-evidence" in European history that all men are created equal. There's no nation in Europe that doesn't trace its history to a time when it was "self-evident" that all men are created unequal. Jean Jacques Rousseau, who is sometimes given credit for this doctrine, certainly didn't get it from the history of Europe or Asia or Africa. He got it from the impact of the New World upon Europe and from contemplation of one particular kind of individual who lived in the New World, the person he called the "Noble Savage." The idea that "all men are created equal" is a gift to the world from the American Indian." (LILA) What has happened is that the neutering of religion by this secular philosophy has left "religion" scrambling to re-identify with the very anti-theistic philosophy that neutered it. It has tried to re-invent itself as a proponent of the "freedom of man" when any simple read through history has shown that "religion" has NEVER been about man's "freedom". It took a thousand years and the collision with a new people for "man" to wake up to the call of secular enlightenment, and we should never forget that. This re-imaging of "religion" is the fallout of "religion's" need to find its power in a post-enlightenment world. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
