One wonders what the logistics of that would entail:
Paraphrasing Pareto, 80 percent of our religious problems come from 20 percent of those who consider themselves religious. Get rid of them, and 80 percent of our headaches are gone.Can you imagine what the reaction would be if a conservative had said that? As for this:
Maybe we find it embarrassing for kids to know that Christians systematically slaughtered 11 million Native American men, women and children? That Germany was a Christian country during the Holocaust? That Christianity was the seed for Heaven's Gate and the Jonestown Kool-Aid Klub? It's never been about religious faith but about the loons that hijack that faith, whichever faith it may be.We'd only find it embarrassing for kids to know from the perspective of religion because, well...
A. The slaughter of the Native Americans had almost everything to do with territorial acquisition and nothing to do with religion, which makes the fact that their killers were Christian irrelevant.
B. WWII Germany's status as a Christian nation was also irrelevant because Hitler saw Jews as a threat to the Aryan race, not the Christian religion. In fact, from what I've read, Hitler actually opposed anti-Semitism on religious grounds before he came to see Jews as a threat to the Aryans.
C. Although it incorporated elements of the Christian faith, Heaven's Gate was not rooted in Christianity. In fact, it was more of a New Age faith, incorporating elements of many faiths and influences from many other fields, including psychology.
D. The Jonestown massacre also was not rooted in Christianity. In fact, the people of Jonestown went there to create a community of socialists who eschewed religion completely because they viewed it just as Karl Marx did, the "opium of the people," and they saw socialism as a path to enlightenment -- not Christianity.
Does the San Antonio Express-News have ANY standards as to what it will publish? Or is this some plot by the secretly conservative editorial page editor to make leftists look stupid and/or ignorant? If it's the latter, it's brilliant -- and WORKING.
UPDATE: From my lovely wife, in comments:
Re B: Nazi Germany was not a Christian nation. (You live with me for six months and still don't know this?) Nazi = National Socialist. Socialism, by definition, is atheistic. Faith should be in the State, not in God. "Gott mit uns" on SS belt buckles--the most common "evidence" I come across from the dumber atheists out there as to Nazism's Christianity--was no more meaningful than "In God We Trust" on US currency.That would have been a better way of putting it, yes. I was putting more of the emphasis on the fact that from a religious perspective it didn't matter what religion was predominant in Germany -- but when you consider that socialism is atheistic by definition, it makes the letter-writer look even MORE ignorant and/or stupid. ;-)
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