X-Message-Number: 20087 Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 12:00:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Dani Kollin <> Subject: Mr. Dee's Challenge Round 4 Mr Dee's aguments, while well stated, unfortunately concluded with a derision. Apparently, and "historically speaking" he stated, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Let's just see about that shall we? I have taken the liberty of putting Mr. Dee's and my quotes atop the statements. Mr. Dee: Ireland. Afghanistan. Palestine .. Must I go on? You will most likely counter with Stalin. But Stalin did not get his justification for genocide from secularism. Those engaging in religious violence in Ireland, Afghanistan and Palestine DO get their justification from their belief system. Mr. Kollin: Palestine: Arafat and Fatah are a secular part of the PLO, to think that their acts of terrorism are not as horrible as the ones committed by Hamas is interesting, but wrong. Yes I know you secular types hate those moral judgements, deal with it. Afghanistan: If I remember correctly the country, though not perfect, did not become the living hell that we all know and fear until the, ready, here it comes, SOVIET invasion of 1979. So the ideologically non-religious Soviets started this mess. An interesting reverse of the situation would be the religiously motivated United States invading Cambodia in the 1970 s. This led to the Khmer Rouge, a secular, Marxist whacked out group to murder 1/3 of their population to create a perfect communist state. Ireland: Gotta agree with you, religion has screwed that place up for years. But let s be honest. If the English had stayed Catholic the Irish probably would have gone Protestant because these people hate each other for reasons that religion exacerbates but is not the sole cause of. Stalin: What on earth are you talking about? Stalin did not get his justification from secularism? (your quote) Just because you do not like a fact does not mean you can simply dismiss it. This is the man who said, A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Stalin justified all that he did from his understanding of the doctrine of communism and the material dialectic. I did not say, believe , who the hell knows what a mass murderer believes? But he justified his doctrine using a non-religious viewpoint, pseudo-scientific belief system. He and his followers believed in the triumph of the dialectic as a scientific certainty. It was a secular belief and it was used to excuse the murder of seven million Ukrainians in the winter of 1937 alone. It happened, secularly and historically speaking that is. Mr. Dee: It is fairer to say that many of the world's most vital precepts were arrived at while religion was dominant. This is no big surprise, since religion has dominated human culture throughout recorded history. The question is, do those precepts require religion in order to make them valid? No. Religion has simply taken credit for ideas such as "it's a bad idea to kill", "it's a bad idea to lie", and so on when those ideas are equally obvious to anyone coming from a rational, rather than religion, perspective. Mr. Kollin: Not religion, monotheistic religion. Humans as we know them have been around for 40-50 thousand years. Recorded history only covers the last five thousand and monotheism as a guiding principle for the last 1800-2000 years. If they are obvious coming from a rational perspective why did the Greeks and the Romans have such a difficult time making them work? Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics did have a rational belief system very similar to the precepts of a modern monotheism. But only a tiny fraction of the population would follow such a system. I am not sure if you need religion to make such precepts valid. But we have yet to develop a better system to make sure they are followed for more then a generation or two. Mr. Dee: There's that irrelevant Stalin reference. And Hitler was not a secularist. By all accounts, Hitler used Christian rhetoric to motivate the German people into war and atrocity, while personally holding some weird sort of Nordic religious views. Mr. Kollin: I have already said what I am going to say on Stalin. You may be right on Hitler. In researching his belief system it would appear that for the media he often times played the part of dutiful Christian. That stated, most of his justification was pseudo-scientific and not religious. He expressed a desire to eliminate the morality that Judaism and Christianity had created. Here s one of his quotes: Night of 11th-12th July, 1941: National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... 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.... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things. Mr. Dee s quote from Mr. Kollin: The great religions of the world have done a great deal of good. Babies were left to die of exposure if not physically perfect until the Church decided that all persons have souls and are INDIVIDUALLY valuable. Something that was unheard of before the rise of the monotheistic religions. Mr. Dee: I'd love to see documentation to support this audacious claim. It occurs to me that if this were true, then that practice would still be common everywhere that monotheism wasn't dominant. Is it? I don't think so... Sometimes Mr. Dee you make it too easy. I accept your challenge. A modern nation that is not run on the precepts of monotheism, but is run on the precepts of a secular ideology. A modern nation where babies were killed, because they were not convenient. In fact Mr. Dee that would be our world s largest nation. China passed a rule saying you can only have one child. The Chinese peasants, making a rational, economical choice given their circumstances started killing all the babies who happened to be born female. Why shouldn t they? Nothing morally wrong, no judgment beyond this world to deal with. Not an aberration Mr. Dee, millions upon millions of hard working peasants did this over many years. And it s not something I made up. Just look at a paper the United Nations released in 1997, written by the World Health Organization. The WHO s Regional Committee for the Western Pacific said more than 50 million women were estimated to be missing in China because of the institutionalized killing and neglect of girls due to Beijing s population control program that limits parents to one child. Mr. Dee s quote from Mr. Kollin: Wherever a secular movement becomes dominant, you get hell. Mr. Dee: The people of Britain may be surprised to learn that they are living in hell. In Britain, something like 75% of the population consider themselves ambivalent toward religion at best. The Archbishop of Canterbury recently stated that religion had lost to agnosticism there. Has that turned Britain into a hell? Hardly. Mr. Kollin: But Britain is not a secular culture. Its government and society are steeped in monotheistic values. If the British got rid of the Church of England, the Queen, banned the expression of certain or most monotheistic beliefs like the Communists and to a certain degree the Nazis, we could us it as an example. Now for your last point Mr. Dee you used the arguments of Mr. Madison, Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Franklin and Mr. Paine to show that the founding fathers were against religion and its use in determining the values of a state or society. Now this can be responded to in two ways. The one I find most interesting are that you picked some very telling choices. Mr. Jefferson of course owned slaves including his own children that he sired with the 16-year-old half sister of his dead wife. At best he didn t rape her. By all means claim him as a spokesman for the secular world. Mr. Adams was president of the United States and got the Alien and Sedition acts passed long before the McCarthy Era President Adams was deporting and jailing people not for what they did, but what they said. Actually now that I think about it, he does sound like a modern secularist. Mr. Paine was a brilliant writer. When the French Revolution broke out he was an advocate. He supported the French Revolution when it broke the power of the Catholic Church. He supported it when they killed the royal family, and he continued to excuse it when the guillotines started to murder French women and men in the tens of thousands. After all, some of them must have deserved it, and the goals of the revolution make it excusable and, wait a minute, Mr. Paine is sounding like a modern secularist also. Historically speaking you picked some interesting choices. But let s also refute your use of quotes with some of my own, or some of the founding fathers and mothers own. President George Washington, September 17th, 1796: "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible" Benjamin Franklin Address at the Constitutional Convention Thursday June 28, 1787: "I have lived, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth -- that God Governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that "except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing Governments by Human wisdom and leave it to chance, war and conquest. Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature. JOHN ADAMS Oct. 11, 1798 (Address to the military): "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." June 21, 1776 "Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. ABIGAIL ADAMS "A patriot without religion in my estimation is as great a paradox as an honest Man without the fear of God. Is it possible that he whom no moral obligations bind, can have any real Good Will towards Men? Can he be a patriot who, by an openly vicious conduct, is undermining the very bonds of Society? The Scriptures tell us "righteousness exalteth a Nation." PATRICK HENRY March 23, 1775 It is when people forget God that tyrants forge their chains." THOMAS JEFFERSON (seemed he had more to say on the subject): "The only foundation for useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion." Jefferson declared that religion is: "Deemed in other countries incompatible with good government and yet proved by our experience to be its best support." JAMES MADISON "Religion [is] the basis and Foundation of Government." "We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." Mr. Dee I will repeat what I said before. A monotheistic world is no guarantee of a world I want to live in. But you have said nothing, found anything, or for that matter proved anything to make me think a world based solely on secular ideals would be better. Au contraire there is much to make me think it would be worse historically speaking that is. Eytan Kollin __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! 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