[MD] The End of Faith - Spirituality

[Arlo Bensinger]

[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.