Berlinski quote of the Month
I posted a part of this earlier here.
Filed Under: Uncategorized by Mike Godfrey — 14 CommentsMarch 26, 2010
Not unrelated to the film ‘Expelled -no intelligence allowed’-I submit for your thoughts and comments:
‘Dawkins is prepared to acknowledge the facts while denying their significance. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists, he affirms, acted because of their atheism. They were simply keen to kill a great many people. Atheism had nothing to do with it. They might well have been Christian Scientists.
In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe, before the possibility of Soviet retribution even entered their untroubled imagination, Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in eastern Europe , an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.
Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said.
And then he was shot dead.
What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals,Brown shirts, Black shirts,gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.
And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either.
That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.”
(taken from David Berlinski’s book ‘The Devils delusion Atheism and its scientific pretensions’)
fluorescentflicker.wordpress.com
Does it make a difference if one believes one is being watched by a righteous God .... or if there is no God?
It seems obvious it does.
Yes, to not believe in a God is freeing (thus the terms "freethought" and "freethinker" .... freeing from the obligations of morality. |
