The following response by Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace in a conversation with Napoleon, sums up the attitude of many non believers.

NAPOLEON: Monsieur Laplace! I have read with great interest your Traité de mécanique céleste - all five volumes - but nowhere have I found any mention of the Good Lord.
LAPLACE: Sire, I have had no need of that hypothesis.

There is a theme that runs through all the worlds’ major religions which more then justifies lumping them together and then casting them collectively into a bin labelled “nonsense.”

The major religions claim that there is some being or god out there or in heaven that directs affairs on earth. Depending on a persons belief system the being is said to be; an old man, Allah as revealed through Muhammad, Jehovah, the three headed monster much admired by numerous christen sects, a female goddess, an old woman, young things frolicking about on Mount Olympus and so on.

The point I make is that there is no empirical evidence for any of these beliefs. No objective tests that can verify the belief. Building up an elaborate belief system on basis of phantasies can not be called, “Reason.”

Dr. Muehlenberg states that the Judeo-Christian tradition gave rise to modern science. I say so what! It is like contemplates the scaffolding when looking at a piece of architecture.

John I Flemming, a quick search on google came up with the following quotes (plenty more out there)

"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Ralph Mannheim, ed., New York Mariner Books, 1999, p. 65.)

"My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter." Adolph Hitler, in a speech delivered April 12, 1922 Published in "My New Order"

"I am now as before a Catholic..." quotation from Hitler was recorded in the diary of Gerhard Engel, an SS Adjutant, in October 1941.

It is possible that these are fabrications but I've not seen any serious rebuttal of the idea that Hitler made those kind of comments. What seems to be the subject of debate is if Hitler believed them or he was using the guise of christainity to get away with murder. Christains trying to distance themselves seem to like that position.

R0bert

Robert, thanks for that. My reading tells me Hitler believed in God in a pantheistic sense. He hated Christianity as evidsenced by these statements from his "Table Talk": "Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure." And: The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practices a lie of the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, whereas in reality it seeks only to enslave them. In the ancient world, the relations between men and gods were founded on an instinctive respect. It was a world enlightened by the idea of tolerance. Christianity was the first creed in the world to exterminate its adversaries in the name of love. Its keynote is intolerance." If Hitler was religious it was idiosyncratic religion.

Clearly, theory of human evolution (lets just ignore the massive missing link in the fossil record) and the big bang theory certainly dont requires leaps of faith. Oh no, they are predicated on very reasonable logic and there are absolutely no leaps across the chasm of absent proof in these two theories.

And then the scientists ridicule the true believers of religion (not me) whilst keeping a straight face, then wounder why many of us cant do the same.

The fundamental adherence of scientists to their way of looking at things, to the exclusion of alternates, is positively... religious. Its ironic, given that the essence of science is inquiry, possibility, evidentiary proof and open mindedness.

Why does science take the view that it must exist to the exclusion of spirituality? Einstein failed spectacularly in his pursuit of a unifying theory of everything. Is it possible that science, logic, objectivity are ideal ways to understand the external/physical worlds and spirituality are adequate ways to understand inner/psychological subjective perception?

They dont have to be mutually exclusive.

trade215,

Einstein understood very well that science and religion do not have to be mutually exclusive, in fact he is quoted as saying that 'Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.'

True genius.

Thanks RObert for doing the search, I've just done a similar one and found basically the same information you have. I won't regurgitate it here, but anyone who wants to can type "Hitler" and "Christian" or "religion" into a search engine and get similar results.

John I Flemming: the point I was making was that, whatever brand you want to call it, Hitler clearly identified himself at various times very strongly as a religious individual, and that religion appears to have been Christian.

Some of this goes to the "who gets to decide who is a REAL Christian/Sikh/Buddhist" argument that is implicit in many schools of thought. Is self-identification enough? Is peer identification? Should we, as Hitler himself did, issue the literal badges of religion?

Taking this point and harking back to my original post, the question again arises: if someone undertakes their activities in the name of religion OR secularism, then good or bad, does the belief system actually OWN that incident or behaviour? I'm not sure (a big call on OLO I know) I know what the answer to that is. I think this is some of what Pamela Bone was trying to (metaphorically) unpack in her article.

I'm not trying to have a go at any particular religion, I'm just not sure that Muehlenberg's thinking about secularism is any less fuzzy than that with which he wishes to accuse Pamela Bone.