"By your own standard, you should be arguing for Jefferson the Christian with the same force that you do for Hitler the Christian."
That is incorrect. They both claimed off center versions of Christianity...WAAAAAY off center! I consider that Jefferson had no choice but to claim a Christian Faith or have his career ruined and his life savaged. So he said he followed the "moral" doctrines of Christ and was therefore a Christian. Nothing Holy or supernatural. Just fancy word play. Now you may think that cutting and pasting self-serving parts of a text into your scrap book makes you a "Christian". But I think Jefferson knew he was using sophistry in order to weather the religious climate he necessarily had to live and survive in. Just my well considered opinion.
Now take Hitler and his "Positive Christianity". Hitler was no Jefferson. Hitler was no philosopher. Hitler was an ideologue whose first premises derived from myth and nonsense--an "Aryan Race" that never existed. In Hitler's "Christianity" we find myth. We find ritual. We find ceremony. We find MAGICAL THINKING.
Now I am quite comfortable that neither Jefferson nor Hitler represented anything like mainstream Christianity as explicated in the core thousand or so varieties. But insomuch as I see nothing outside of the natural and materialistic world in Jefferson's profession of being a "Christian"...I am of the opinion that his "Christianity" was self-serving and contrived. Any knowledgeable Christian can tell you that believing (say) in helping the poor does not make one a true Christian in and of itself. A lot of ideologies believe in many of the moral values of the mythic Christ man.
On the other hand, although I recognise the bizarre nature of Hitler's "Positive Christianity", it is nonetheless supernatural in scope and is not different in spirit from the Christian Identity slew of churches for Christ. And then, as well, we have such Christian sects as The Family, The Unification Church, The Watchtower Society, The Twelve Tribes, Mormonism, etc. etc. etc. After all, religions are invented...and the authors write their own bylaws.
The point of the matter though is to prevent people such as yourself from pretending that atheism is ideological or requires blood purification or other rituals. Atheism requires only an open mind that reaches an opinion that the evidence for a supernatural creator is non existent. |
