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Articles by Wayne (continued)
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Continuation of article Some of my beliefs.
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To: Letters Editor, National Post
Re: Letter "Beyond belief" by Rev. Mark Woods, Oct. 5, 2000, p. A19
(About 148 words to follow, from ~~~~ to ~~~~ .)
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In his letter (Oct. 5, Beyond Belief), the Rev. Mark Woods implies that it takes just as much, if not more, "irrational arguments based on faith" to believe that a "whole bunch of nothing" could explode and eventually create life, as it does for his parishioners to believe religious dogmas.
I take strong exception to that point of view. Rational theories justified by fact can explain how matter can be created (and annihilated) in the vacuum state and how the interaction of matter and energy can produce and evolve all of life. Physics can reasonably explain the evolution of the universe from a millionth of a second after the big bang to now.
A theologian might challenge a scientist by saying that science cannot explain everything. Any scientist would readily agree, but would retort that at least science can explain some things, whereas religion cannot explain anything whatsoever.
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You are free to publish any or all of the above, edited as you wish, and to quote my name and city.
Signed: Wayne R. Paulson , Ottawa
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I think that my friend thought that it was I, not the pastor, who was being too dogmatic in a sense, and perhaps I was. In particular, I was assuming the validity of the big-bang theory, as opposed, for example, to a steady-state theory of Hoyle. However, it, to my mind, is more valid, even if it is not some absolute truth, than one's religious belief that the universe was created on the back of a big turtle. That theory begs the question of where the turtle came from. My big bang theory also begs a question. Where did the vacuum come from, a quantum fluctuation of which created a huge dump of energy from the false vacuum, from which energy evolved into the present mixture of energy and matter in which we now find ourselves? The, in my mind, equivalent problem faced by the pastor in believing that God created the universe is to explain where God came from. So, do we consider the two ultimate questions to be of equal strength or weakness, namely, (a) who or what created the initial vacuum, and (b) who or what created God, who then went on to create either (i) the initial vacuum, or (ii) the beginnings, if not the complete evolution of, the universe? The pastor did not even get to the distinction posited in the preceding sentence. He was disputing the idea that matter could be created out of a vacuum -- calling it a theory that required as much, if not more, irrationality as do his dogmatic religious beliefs. I strongly dispute his contention. It is an observable fact that matter can be created out of vacuum (the Casimir effect, among others). To imply, as he seems to, that by a vacuum we mean emptiness, is false. The vacuum state is not empty. It is humming with energy, the very energy from which, as governed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, matter can be created, albeit with brief lifetimes that are in accordance with that Principle! It does not require irrational belief, or at least not belief approaching in any way the degree of irrationality of believing that God exists, much less that He could, or would want to, create anything.
The following lettter that I sent may shed more light on the question of degrees of irrationality.
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C:\Up\Belief1.rtf 1-Feb-00
To : Letters Editor, National Post
Re: Article "Is belief
in God rational?", 29 Jan 00, p. B11
Rational belief in the
irrational?
(About 270
words to follow, from ~~~~ to ~~~~.)
~~~~~~~
In the article "Is belief in God rational?", Jan. 29,
the "reformed epistemologist" Alvin Plantinga is
portrayed as endeavoring to show that one may, without evidence,
be just as entitled to believe that Jesus is the Son of God as to
believe that, for example, the earth is spherical. He claims that
religious beliefs are rational, and therefore
"warranted", provided that they are held by sane people
with normal faculties and that there is some protocol by which
some beliefs may be invalidated.
This endeavor seems to me to be ridiculous. It puts emotional perception on the same basis as rational thought as a platform for establishing knowledge. Plantinga considers belief in God to be warranted on the basis of emotional perception. Why should we think that a belief in one God is warranted? Christians believe in either one God or three Gods. Other religions might believe in thirteen Gods. Are these beliefs all "warranted", and therefore true? Is it true that there is both (a) one and only one God and (b) exactly thirteen Gods? Is it warranted to believe that both (a) and (b) are true simultaneously? If one person believes (a) and another believes (b), is each person in possession of the truth? It would seem so if we accept emotional perception as a basis for knowledge.
I would not grace the term "warranted belief" with the term "rational". The terms "irrational", "emotional", "delusional" and "superstitious" seem more appropriate. That a belief could serve as a basis for truth is dangerous in that it would seemingly justify irrational beliefs, be they religious or otherwise. Remember the Crusades?
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You are free to publish any or all of the above, including my name.
Signed: Wayne R. Paulson, Ottawa
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Additional sources:
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http://www.afgen.com/brussell.html Extracts: My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others.
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End of the article Some of my beliefs.
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The question of whether or not Hitler was a Christian seems to provoke people and invite the answer "no" that most people would like to believe. I beg to differ.
I think that Hitler was a Christian. So were Martin Luther and Pope Paul III, in spite of strong anti-Jewish and genocidal statements by all three of these Christians. I also think that if Hitler had been an atheist and publicly proclaimed it, the Holocaust might not have happened. He would not have had the necessary support of religious believers that would have enabled him to carry it out. One must remember that it was not only the majority of the public that were Christian, instilled as they were by church-imposed hatred of the Jews throughout the centuries, most of his top aides were devout Christians.
The reason that most people want to see the answer "yes" is that they have a pollyannish view of what Christianity is all about. They forget that at the heart of Christianity is the belief in and worship of a supposedly all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful God, who, at the same time creates imperfect humans, impregnates a virgin without her permission, allows the offspring, Jesus, to preach that unless people believe in him they should be brought before him and slain, and promises people that he will save them from being tortured forever in Hell by his father, God, because God created them as being imperfect and harboring original sin from birth, provided that they abandon reason and believe in him. God then allows his son to be murdered on a cross, during which Jesus cries out "Father, why hast thou forsaken me?". In other words, it seems that God fostered Jesus to help save mankind from God's mistake of creating imperfect humanity, and from God's intention to torture forever humans because humans were not perfect and did not believe the "right" things. Even Jesus seems to have had last-minute doubts about how "loving" his Father was!
When Jesus states that those who do not believe in him, that is, the Jews and atheists, are to be brought before him and murdered, we have set up a belief system in which it became natural for Christianity to hate the Jews, and to love Jesus for doing so. Hitler, Martin Luther, Pope Paul III, and many other Christian leaders were natural heirs to this mainline tradition of hatred which one can call none other than a key cornerstone of the beliefs of Christianity as documented in the Bible and in the major Christian churches and in a history of massacres and torture by Christians in the Crusades and the Inquisitions for almost 2,000 years now.
Why is it that people are unwilling to believe that Hitler was a Christian "just" because he allowed millions of Jews (and others, not to be forgotten) to be murdered, when society seems quite willing to accept the idea that Pope Paul III was a Christian, in spite of his hope, even worse than that of Hitler, that the Jews should not only be murdered, but buried alive? It's on the record. Hitler had his victims burned after they were murdered. Christianity, at the urging of its chief spokesmen, has joyfully through the centuries done Hitler one better: the Christians burn their victims alive on their sacred crosses!
One might as well believe that God was not a Christian because he allowed millions of people to be murdered, even though he had the power to prevent it.
One reason for this willingness to believe the Disneyland view of Christianity is because children are indoctrinated from an early age into sanitized versions of such beliefs, while still retaining the basic core of the cruelty and perverseness of Christianity. The state-sanctioned funding of such religious indoctrination of the young people in our schools contributes to such belief systems, to the great detriment of society. Have we not yet learned a lesson from the very religious state of Nazi Germany? Germany hasn't even learned it yet!
If Hitler had openly professed that he was an atheist, I think that it is much less likely that he could have come to power and carried out his gradually escalating pogrom against the Jews, for the following reasons:
1. For one, atheists had no organized societies of believers; in contrast, the churches, especially the Lutheran and Catholic, had state funding by enforced taxation (as we do in Canada as relates to schools, very unfortunately!), considerable wealth , prominence in public affairs, and the loyalty of the majority of the public as church members.
2. In contrast to the hatred against the Jews built up throughout German society through the centuries by the Protestant churches and the Vatican, atheists had no reason to hate the Jews, particularly because atheists depend more upon reason, whereas religious systems depend, by definition, upon unreasoning and blind faith in unsubstantiated myths.
3. Atheists would have protested the aggression against the "godless communists", at least so far as the "godless" aspect was concerned, whereas the churches, especially the Vatican, were eager to fight against "godless communism", in part because communists posed a threat to church power and wealth and irrational belief systems, as well as to Germany as a nation.
4. The Vatican would not have so willingly entered into negotiations with Hitler that resulted in the (infamous in my view) Concordat of 1933 between the Vatican and Hitler under which: (a) the Vatican gained additional power over its bishops in Germany; (b) the Vatican agreed to cease supporting the Freedom Party, consisting mostly of Catholics, that constituted the only major political opposition to the Nazis; (c) Church gained a form of state-imposed tax subsidy of the general public that still endures today; and, (d) the Vatican never once issued a note of protest against the increasingly harsh measures against the Jews -- measures of which the Vatican was fully aware.
If only Hitler had been an atheist, he would not have had so much support of the legacy and irrational prejudices of Christianity against the Jews and non-believers, and the Holocaust might not have happened!
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From Cecil's Mailbag by the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board
In my numerous online debates in various chatrooms, I have learned the following: many Christians seem to think that Adolf Hitler was an atheist (or at least wasn't "Christian"). Of course I and my fellow atheists know better, as Hitler mentions his devotion to Christianity numerous times in his writings. Can you clear this up for me? Was Hitler an "honest to God" Christian, or was he simply using religion as a means of control?
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--Carl Stieger SDSTAFF David replies:
The short answer is a definite "maybe" or, more precisely, "probably neither." The looooong answer is somewhat more complicated.
You are right that Hitler did mention Christianity many times in his writings. He paid Christianity a lot of lip service in Mein Kampf, and he claimed to be a Christian. But Hitler's secretary, Martin Bormann, also declared that "National Socialism [Nazism] and Christianity are irreconcilable" and Hitler didn't squawk too much about it. Similarly, Hermann Rauschning, a Hitler associate, said, "One is either a Christian or a German. You can't be both." In addition, Hitler declared Nazism the state religion and the Bible was replaced by Mein Kampf in the schools. You really want confusion? Randy Alley, one of my best WWII history sources, noted that the SS were supposedly forbidden to believe in God--yet the military's belt buckles said "Gott mit uns" ("God is with us")! See photo, below.
First, let's look at what he said that seems to put him on the anti-Christian side:
According to a press release from Catholic League President, William A. Donohue (2/4/99): "Hitler was a neo-pagan terrorist whose conscience was not informed by Christianity, but by pseudo-scientific racist philosophies. Hitler hated the Catholic Church, made plans to kill the Pope, authorized the murder of thousands of priests and nuns, and did everything he could to suppress the influence of the Church. In 1933, Hitler said, 'It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood.'" The Catholic League also quoted Hitler, in a 4/23/99 Op-Ed ad in the New York Times, as saying, "Antiquity was better than modern times, because it didn't know Christianity and syphilis." Ouch!
Unfortunately, the press release had no citations attached and the Catholic League did not include any reference to it in the package they sent when I asked about them. The syphilis quote is cited as having come from Hitler's Third Reich: A Documentary History, by Louis Snyder, but they are quoting Patrick Buchanan quoting this book. In other words, they may not have actually checked the source themselves (if they did, why mention Buchanan?). This makes me a bit worried about the validity of both of these (I have not been able to find the book to check on my own). While this doesn't necessarily make them untrue, we have to recognize that there are a lot of bogus Hitler quotes floating around, some allegedly coming directly from Mein Kampf, for example. The problem is that people who have actually read Mein Kampf find that they aren't in there anywhere! I'm not saying these quotes fall into that category, but just a note to be wary of lots of the unsourced "quotes" that are around. (I did my best to check out the various Mein Kampf quotes that I use here, including referencing a friend who actually plowed through the whole thing.)
That said, we can move on to some other relevant info. Jehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describes the real "god" of Hitler and the Nazis in his article, "The Trauma of the Holocaust: Some Historical Perspectives," by saying: ""They wanted to go back to a pagan world, beautiful, naturalistic, where natural hierarchies based on the supremacy of the strong would be established, because strong equaled good, powerful equaled civilized. The world did have a kind of God, the merciless God of nature, the brutal God of races, the oppressive God of hierarchies." In other words, definitely non-Christian.
Historian Paul Johnson wrote that Hitler hated Christianity with a passion, adding that shortly after assuming power in 1933, Hitler told Hermann Rauschnig that he intended "to stamp out Christianity root and branch."
As Hitler grew in power, he made other anti-Christian statements. For example, he was quoted in Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, by Allan Bullock, as saying: "I'll make these damned parsons feel the power of the state in a way they would have never believed possible. For the moment, I am just keeping my eye upon them: if I ever have the slightest suspicion that they are getting dangerous, I will shoot the lot of them. This filthy reptile raises its head whenever there is a sign of weakness in the State, and therefore it must be stamped on. We have no sort of use for a fairy story invented by the Jews."
But in contrast to these quotes, some of Hitler's speeches definitely seem to put him in the Christian camp as a fighter against atheism. For example, he said, on signing the Nazi-Vatican Concordat, April 26, 1933: "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without religious foundation is built on air; consequently all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . ." [WRP: Ontario and the Roman Catholic Church carry on the tradition of state sponsorship of religious indoctrination in schools, contrary to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hitler, who undoubtedly was a Christian, would have approved!]
An Associated Press article from the Lansing State Journal, February 23, 1933, is headlined, "Hitler Aims Blow at 'Godless' Move," and talks about how Hitler was campaigning against atheist communists and wanted support from Catholic Nazis. One line in the article specifically says, "Hitler, himself, is a Catholic." (You can see the entire article at http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/unknown/hitler.html.) In addition, in 1941, Hitler told General Gerhart Engel: "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so." He never left the church. He was baptized a Roman Catholic as an infant and was a communicant and altar boy in his youth.
In a speech at Koblenz, August 26, 1934, Hitler said: "National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity . . . For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of today, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life . . . These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles!"
Related to the above, the "Religion" article in The Oxford Companion to World War II notes that early on in his career, Hitler sponsored something called "practical Christianity," and that "German Christians emerged who claimed to be able to synthesize the best of National Socialism [Nazism] and the best of Christianity. Many Christians seemed to be able to reconcile themselves to at least certain aspects of anti-Semitic legislation. Those who could not . . . often ended up in concentration camps . . . Many anguished Christians serving in the Wehrmacht began to feel a little more comfortable about supporting a war that now included the overthrow of godless communism."
Getting back to quotes, on October 24, 1933, in a speech in Berlin, Hitler said: "We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: "I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews. I am doing the Lord's work." In 1938, he quoted those same words in a Reichstag speech.
In a speech delivered April 12, 1922, published in "My New Order," and quoted in Freethought Today (April 1990), Hitler said:
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.
In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. [WRP: Most Popes and Martin Luther would heartily agree!]
Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross.
As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice . . .
And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery.
When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exploited.""
I could probably find more speeches in which Hitler claims himself to be a Christian, but I think the point has been made. He said it. Now, what did it mean?
It seems Hitler, like many modern-day politicians, spoke out of both sides of his mouth. And when he didn't, his lackeys did. It may have been political pandering, just like many of our current politicians who invoke God's name to gain support.
Also, it seems probable that Hitler, being the great manipulator, knew that he couldn't fight the Christian churches and their members right off the bat. So he made statements to put the church at ease and may have patronized religion as a way to prevent having to fight the Christian-based church. [WRP: Hitler would not have had to fight very hard against the churches; he had their almost unanimous support!]
In fact, Anton Gil notes in his book, An Honourable Defeat: A History of German Resistance to Hitler, 1933-1945: "For his part, Hitler naturally wanted to bring the church into line with everything else in his scheme of things. He knew he dare not simply eradicate it: that would not have been possible with such an international organization, and he would have lost many Christian supporters had he tried to. His principal aim was to unify the German Evangelical Church under a pro-Nazi banner, and to come to an accommodation with the Catholics."
In other words, while he was certainly evil, he also usually knew which wars he could win (at least until 1941) and only fought those. He knew he could beat the Polish, French, and British armies and he allegedly counseled the Japanese against attacking the U.S.; he also requested that they open up a front against Russia. He couldn't beat the church in open warfare--so he took control and then attacked them piecemeal while making statements to put them at ease. Think about it--how many other times did Hitler break his word or ignore a treaty? He said whatever would make things easiest, and then ignored it later.
Author Doug Krueger notes that "so many Germans were religious believers that Hitler, if not religious himself, at least had to pretend to be a believer in order to gain support." He adds, "If the [Christian] message won converts, it would seem that most Nazis were probably [Christians] too. After all, would appeal to divine mandate win more theists or atheists to the cause?" He also points out that "Even if Hitler was not a [Christian], he could still have been a theist. Or a deist" (www.infidels.org/library /modern/doug_krueger/copin.html ??). Remember that being a non-Christian is not equal to being an atheist.
When all is said and done, Krueger says that anecdotal evidence from those close to him near the end of his life suggests that he was a at least a deist, if not a theist. Krueger concludes: "So here's what evidence we have. There is a certain worldview, Nazism. Its leader, Hitler, professes on many occasions to be religious, and he often states that he's doing the will of god. The majority of his followers are openly religious. There is no evidence anywhere that this leader ever professed to anyone that he is an atheist. He and his followers actively campaign against atheism, even to the point of physical force, and this leader allies himself with religious organizations and churches. This is the evidence. So where does atheism fit in?" As Krueger notes, there seems to be no real evidence that Hitler was an atheist. On the other hand, since one could never be sure when he was speaking his real thoughts and when he was simply riling up the masses, it's difficult to say for certain.
An interesting side note: Two of my sources, both of whom are well-versed in WWII history, said something to the effect that Hitler acted as if he had a messianic complex and perhaps believed himself to essentially be a god or the messiah. As one put it, you could certainly make the argument that he was a firm believer in God, if by "God" you mean "Adolf Hitler."
As for your chat-room experiences, well, my friend and source David Gehrig noted that Hitler still sets the gold standard for "easiest rhetorical cheap shot." He related a comment from Usenet that there is an empirical law: As a Usenet discussion gets longer, the probability that someone in it will compare someone else in it to Hitler asymptotically approaches 1. In other words, atheists looking for a quick cheap-shot may claim Hitler was a Christian; similarly, Christians looking for a quick shot may claim he was an atheist. Know what? Hitler was a vegetarian! Oooh, those evil vegetarians! He also recommended that parents give their children milk to drink instead of beer and started the first anti-smoking campaign. (So by the "reasoning" used in these types of arguments, if you are truly anti-Hitler, you should smoke heavily and only give your baby beer!) Better watch out, though he was an oxygen-breather, too! In other words, does it really matter whether Hitler was an atheist or a Christian or whatever? Just because somebody may hold a particular worldview (along with other views) doesn't make him a spokesman for that view, or even remotely representative of others who hold that view. No matter how his madness is painted, he was still evil incarnate.
I have one more quote to share on this topic. This, again, from David Gehrig: "Let's save the rhetorical comparisons to Hitler and Nazis for those who really deserve them--hate groups who proudly assume the Nazi mantle, and 'Holocaust revisionists' who would fantasize away Hitler's genocidal crimes."
--SDSTAFF David
Straight Dope Science Advisory Board
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One must also ask why, having been baptized and grown up as a member of the Roman Catholic Church, Hitler was never excommunicated by the Vatican.
It is unfortunate that more Christians are not very aware of such ideas and facts, and of the "glorious" traditions of, and havoc wrought, by their religion. It is not very reassuring of the hope that the equivalent of the Holocaust could not happen again. In fact, one did happen recently. Have you heard of Rwanda? Religious and ethnic differences played a key role there.
End of Article Was Hitler a Christian?
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Can Science Prove that Prayer Works?
My comments here relate to the article Can Science Prove that Prayer Works? http://www.freeinquirynetwork.com/Prayer.html by Hector Avalos, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University, Executive Director of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, and a former faith-healer.Reprinted from the Summer 1997 issue of Free Inquiry.
Extracts: . . . But is there scientific evidence that prayer really works? Can you ever know that a prayer was answered by the Christian god? Does even the notion of prayer make sense? I approach these questions as a professional biblical scholar, as an anthropologist trained in scientific methodologies, and as a former Pentecostal faith-healer. I must conclude that there are fatal flaws with the so-called scientific experiments used by supporters of prayer, and there are even greater philosophical and theological problems with verifying scientifically that the Christian god answers prayers.
One might accept the idea that prayer works, but only in the limited sense that, if one prays and one believes in the power of prayer, then one might feel better (release of endorphins?), but that is the extent that I am willing to accept the idea that prayer works in any sense whatever. Could it boost the immune system? Show me the measurements. Otherwise, even if there were a God, the whole concept and utility of prayer seems to me to be ridiculous.
Consider that God is supposed to be all loving, all powerful, and all knowing. A son prays for God's will to be done in relation to his cancer-ridden father. The boy's sister, believing that she has suffered years of sexual abuse by that same father, prays that he should suffer a painful death, and soon. The father dies a miserable death wracked with pain a week later. Have both prayers been answered? The boy and the girl might say yes. It is realized by the girl two weeks later that her belief that she was being abused was a figment of her imagination. Being a devout Christian, she consequently suffers a lifetime of guilt for conspiring with God to murder her father. Such is the power of faith, presumably. But, one might ask, if God created all things, that must include cancer. Why did he create cancer? In order that people agrandize Him by praying for its cure? Maybe He is also all-prideful?
One would think that, given the attributes of God listed above, God is doing what is best and knows what is best. To pray to God to remind him or beseech him to do His best would seem to be redundant. He already knows what is best. Are we assuming that He might have forgotten what is best (maybe alzheimer's in His old age?), or is mistaken as to what is best? It would seem so. Or are we assuming that He is a capricious dictator who only acts on the whim of being praised and having his feet kissed by slave-like adorers prostituting their last shreds of dignity as humans? That would only seem to reinforce the idea that Christians are to be meek slaves of a bizarre dictator. Is not the slave being very presumptuous in asking God to intervene in the world and change its history? If God did not deign to save millions from the Holocausts of Hitler and Christianity (the Crusades and the Inquisitions), why would one be under the deluded impression that he would even care to intervene to save that miserable father wracked with cancer?
I find the practice of praying to be a debasement of human values and dignity -- an obscene superstition fraught with delusion and borderline sado-masochism!
End of part 40 of 60 of Religion Page 40. More articles on Page 410.
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