Steve asked: What are the bad results of not believing in God? Platt answered: National Socialism, Fascism, Communism.
dmb says: As Arlo pointed out, "Painting the Nazi's as "atheistic" is simply an historically invalid rhetorical attempt to disassociate religion from the holocaust". One of Hitler's top officers was so fanatical a believer that his failure to find the holy grail drove him to commit suicide. In fact, the Catholic Church has been criticized for its complicity with fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain. The history of anti-Semitism within Christianity goes back at least a thousand years. Mussolini and the Italian Fascists were given support by the Vatican and could not have come to power without that help. Likewise, Franco was very interested in reasserting the power and authority of the Catholic church in Spain and tried to re-establish the monarchy upon his death in 1975. In fact, a common theme among these fascist and their theist friends was their fear and hatred of "godless communism". Fascism was/is the attempt to reassert tradition in the face of secular democracy and so it is certainly no accident that fascism is essentially anti-intellectual, anti-democratic and religious. (And if you see a parallel between that and today's neocons, it is only because you're paying attention.) And even if fascism were entirely secular, it still would not fit Sam Harris's idea of legitimate position based on reason or evidence. There's a nice little documentary called "Italian Fascism in Color" that is worth seeing on this point. Netflix has it, if you're interested. See, the thing about drawing lessons from history is that one has to first learn what actually happened in history. Otherwise its just, "yea, team! Our side is good and the other side is evil", which is exactly the fascist attitude. _________________________________________________________________ Need to know the score, the latest news, or you need your Hotmail®-get your "fix". http://www.msnmobilefix.com/Default.aspx 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/
