Posted by
Mark McConnell on Tuesday, November 21, 2006 4:19:25 PM
The
Christian Science Monitor has an opinion column by Dinesh D'Souza, called
Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history.
Updates - Dennis Prager spoke today with Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard about his book, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. The great atheist regimes not only excel all others in murdering their own citizens, they also engineered history's most spectacular train-wrecks, the most disastrous wars thus far in history. "Secular societies are much less able to withstand the temptations of evil".
- The question always arises whether Hitler was actually an atheist. There are many ways of answering this, but they all strike me as quibbling.
One of the most final answers comes from Hitler's letter to Himmler, supposedly dated October 14, 1941. I cannot entirely trust a document that was supposedly written on the very day that Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations, but most statements can be reproduced from elsewhere. What all documents establish is the basic fact, hardly controversial, that Hitler was a populist manipulator who spoke in such a way that he united an entire nation behind his outrageous ego. So far as he believed in God, he was as was Muhammad, such a singular spokesman for God that God doesn't matter at all apart from him.
"Being weighed down by a superstitious past, men are afraid of things that
can't, or can't yet be explained - that is to say, of the unknown. If
anyone
has needs of a metaphysical nature, I can't satisfy them with the party's
program. Time will pass until the moment when science can answer all
the questions.
"So it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the
churches.
The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death ...
"... One may ask whether the disappearance of Christianity would entail the
disappearance
of a belief in God. That's not to be desired. The notion of divinity gives
most men
the opportunity to concretize the feeling they have of supernatural
realities. Why
should we destroy this wonderful power they have of incarnating the
feeling for
the divine that is within them?"
Hitler to Himmler, October 14, 1941
Update: