Amazing Post, worth a read……

Getting to Maher’s point, its hard to have an intelligent back and forth with someone who relies on religious dogma for the basis of their opinion, i.e. homosexuallty is evil because the bible says so, etc

Yes, “in the name of God” has been used all too frequently to justify war. I was simply pointing out that, historically, atheists have committed more atrocities – more unnecessary murders and deaths – than believers.

MH:

With due respect, this is a subject that I have studied intensively for over three decades. For you to make the claim that “We have killed more in the name of God than anything else in the history of the world” is simply not supported by…the history of the world. The statistics I provided for this come from dozens and dozens of books, articles, etc. Unless you can provide actual support for your statement, it is simply a “feeling” rather than a fact.

As for Hitler, most people simply do not read their history here. Hitler’s goal was a “master race” of “Aryans.” But Aryan is not a religion, it is a bloodline. Hitler’s actual “spiritual” beliefs (such as they were) were more closely akin to paganism than anything else.

In this regard, as early as 1933, at a meeting of the party faithful, Hitler said, “It is through the peasantry that we will finally destroy Christianity. One can be a German [Aryan] or a Christian, but not both.” And everything he did – even before he became Chancellor – was done with that singular aim (a master race) in mind.

Mein Kampf was largely a way to get the Germans to rally behind him, since the Jews were an easy first scapegoat for the economic damages done to the country. His use of Christian language and symbolism as Chancellor was “used” in the same way; to get the Christians to destroy the Jews. But as he implied said in 1933, once the Jews were gone, his next target was Christianity.

Indeed, he was already moving to destroy it during the war. He personally attempted to completely dismantle the “confessing church” (what we would now call evangelical Protestants). As for Catholicism, in one instance he had almost every parish priest in Prussia arrested on charges of attempting to help the Jews. Two years later, almost all of them had been murdered, with only 5% returning to their parishes. Hitler did this in other provinces as well.

As for the claimed relationship between Hitler and the Pope, this is perhaps the most absurd canard of all. Hitler HATED the Pope. This is because, while the Pope himself agreed not to help the Jews, he was turning a blind eye to individual priests who WERE helping them. Hitler was well aware of this, and there are documents showing that Hitler planned to move against the Pope as soon as he could.

None of this points to Hitler being a “Christian,” much less a Catholic. But perhaps the most obvious indication of this is the obvious.

As I noted, Jesus’ ministry was based on eleven precepts: love, peace, compassion, forgiveness, humility, patience, charity, selflessness, service, justice and truth. Yet Hitler was hateful, warlike, lacking in compassion, unforgiving, arrogant, impatient, uncharitable, egomaniacial, greedy, unjust and a liar. By what rubric, then, can one consider him a “Christian” – in ANY regard?

Don’t forget that Hitler was the master propagandist. Everything he did and said, and all the symbolism he used, were means to an end. His self-proclaimed Catholicism was of a piece here. He never was, and everything he actually DID proved that.

I do not “protest too much” because I know all too well how poor most people’s actual reading and understanding of history is. No, I do not claim to be “THE” expert. But as noted, I believe I speak from solid ground based on three decades of studying this very question. Nor did anything I said in my first post – or this one – absolve Christianity of the atrocities it is guilty of. But those atrocities are almost entirely in the past (by perhaps 300-500 years). As well, they are balanced to SOME degree by all the good done in its name. Almost every major social movement in the U.S. – abolition, child labor, suffrage, civil rights, etc. – were either founded by or co-led by Christians. As well, Christians built more (public) hospitals, universities, schools, orphanages, community centers, etc. than any group, with the possible exception of the government itself. And Christian groups – the Red Cross, Salvation Army and Medicin Sans Frontieres (which was founded by Christians, but has since become secular) – have been in the forefront of providing emergency and disaster relief worldwide for decades, regardless of age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or any other factor. I do not see the same level degree of direct “good” being done by atheists. (Which does not mean they do not do good things, or that they are not capable of doing them. Indeed, there has been a recent rise in atheist groups doing good works, which is a good thing.)

Peace.

In Christianity – which Maher attacks with greatest fervor – it is almost exclusively Pentacostal/Charismatic and some evangelical Protestants to whom Maher’s comments apply. But they only make up ~25% of the faith-based population. But anyone who follows Maher’s diatribes and really fact-checks them knows that Maher never met an actual fact that he likes.

The majority of Christians (the only faith for which I can speak, being a center-left evangelical minister) are actually saddened by the way the minority has come to represent the whole.

Re his opening comment that “Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking,” perhaps he should tell that to Copernicus, Bacon (who established the scientific method), Kepler, Galilei, Pascal, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Mendel, Kelvin, Planck, Pasteur, Leeuwenhoek, Darwin and other scientists who were either deists, theists or devout Catholics. The argument that science and religion are necessarily at odds is a canard that Maher is well aware of, but chooses to ignore.

Maher also deliberately fails to note the historical fact that it is atheism – not religion – that has caused more unnecessary deaths in human history. According to numerous historians and scholars, the total number of people who died in holy wars, Crusades, Inquisitions, witch hunts, etc. is ~75 million – in all of recorded history. Yet Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot – committed atheists all, some of whose policies were openly anti-religious and pro-atheist – are responsible for over 100 million deaths – in just 75 years! And if we add in Hitler (who was a pagan, not a Catholic, no matter what he claimed to the contrary), we can add another 13 million.

Ultimately, the majority of Christians make SOME attempt to follow Jesus’ teachings. And His ministry was based on eleven precepts: love, peace, humility, compassion, forgiveness, patience, charity, selflessness, service, justice, truth. Yes, plenty of Christians fail to live up to these virtues; as I myself have said many times, there are many Christians who wouldn’t know Jesus if He bit them on the ear. And those are the Christians that Maher is (or should be) talking about.

Ultimately, Maher and his “New Atheist” ilk are as uninformed and…fundamentalist-extremist in THEIR views as they claim many believers to be in theirs. The hypocrisy of the “New Atheists” is why even many atheists do not take them seriously.

Peace.

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Thanks for this, Michael:
I’m unable to resist citing and commenting on several aspects of this wonderful, insightful piece by Mr. DiEugenio:

“…What is particularly surprising is that, early on, Matthews writes that one of the things that attracted him to Kennedy and made him write this book was JFK’s management of the Missile Crisis. (See p. 9) But then why ignore The Kennedy Tapes? Since it is, from the American side, the most complete chronicling of the crisis we have today…”

When the The Kennedy Tapes was published, I was instantly compelled to add an important and very telling scene to JACK. What had leapt off the page for me was the virtually operatic counterpoint: While Generals, Admirals and other Hawks were verbally contemplating the number of airstrikes and troops that would be required, Jack was musing aloud: “What does he (Khrushchev) want? Why is he doing this?” That was Jack Kennedy.

“…So here is my question to Matthews: If you were a playwright, would you spend, say, 90 minutes of exposition in Act I and only 30 minutes for the tension-building and explosive climax in Acts II and III? Why would you do such a thing? …Matthews’s problematic approach might have some value if the author was trying to relate past formative events to later presidential decisions. That is, what did Kennedy do as a younger man that impacted his policy decisions while he was president? But this is what Matthews really does not do…”

Especially because Matthews apparently misses (as did all of the dozens of books/authors Holt and I read in researching JACK) the key point: his second-son relationship to his father, and to brother Joe. Incidentally, our show is virtually the only treatment of Jack’s life to really focus on that area, and its explanation for so much of who he was.

And truly unforgivably, Matthews’s (and most other biographers’) omission of the fact that Jack had issued his executive order to begin removing the troops from Vietnam – unquestionably the final straw in the decision to have him killed.

All in all, James DiEugenio has written a superb, thoughtful explanation for yet another hatchet-job on Our Last Hero.

Tom
http://www.ThomasBSawyer.com

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 10:18 PM, Michael Butler wrote:
Tom,
I am going to post this tomorrow. I know you will find it interesting. I suggest that we keep this for all Involved with JACK to read it. Not to influence the script but to understand more what type of man Jack was. A great piece. My do we miss him.
Michael
http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/276-74/9273-why-mr-hardball-found-jfk-elusive

http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/whalethanks.asp