I Finished an Incredible Book Today...

"And now they were in number one crematorium...so shaken was I by the situation, about which I was powerless to do anything at all, that I suddenly felt myself spinning close to the edge of madness. By whose will had such evil, such a succession of horrors been made to descend upon our wretched people? Could this be the will of God? No; I could not believe it."

- Dr. Miklos Nyiszli's eyewitness account of genocide at Auschwitz. When I read it, I was reminded of the biblical vision of hell. These people suffered fire and torment for worshiping the wrong God.

How can anyone pray to a God who ensures the existence a second Holocaust in the afterlife? I cannot stand the thought, and I would hope that any individual with the slightest sense of compassion would agree with me, and at least renounce this one tenet that is so widely accepted in our religious culture.

"Standing there alone, on the top step of this, their last brief voyage on earth, I felt it my duty to pause and think of them for a moment with heartfelt compassion..."

"In slow succession the truck rolled up and dumped the women, who had already been stripped of their clothes, at the top of the stairway leading down into the gas chamber. From there they were quickly pushed below. They all knew where they were going, but the rigors of their four months captivity, the corporal punishment they had been made to endure, and the disintegration of their nervous systems, had reduced them to such a point that they were no longer capable of putting up any resistance, or even of feeling pain. They were herded passively into the gas chambers. Weary of being hunted and persecuted, of living in constant fear, they dumbly awaited the hand of the sure physician, Death. For them life had lost all meaning and purpose. To prolong it would merely have prolonged their suffering."

"Mussfeld was today's killer on duty. Standing near the ovens, wearing rubber gloves, he held his weapon with a steady hand. One by one the bodies fell, each yielding his place to the next in line. Within a few minutes he had "tumbled" -that was the term used in general usage- the eighty men. Half an hour later they had all been cremated. Later Mussfeld paid me a visit and asked me to give him a physical check up. He suffered from heart trouble and severe headaches. I checked his blood pressure, took his pulse, listened to his heart with a stethoscope. His pulse was slightly high. I gave him my opinion: his condition was no doubt the result of the little job he had just performed in the furnace room. I had wanted to reassure him, but the result was just the opposite. He became indignant, got up and said: 'Your diagnosis is incorrect. It doesn't bother me any more to kill 100 men than it does to kill 5. If I'm upset, it's merely because I drink too much.'"

For awhile there last summer it seemed like it rained every night. The thunder called out to me, shaking my bed and tearing me from my slumber. I would call out questions in my dreams, and open my eyes a second later to the sound of gentle ripples or angry crackling. It was the only time I ever felt like God was speaking directly with me, but by that point all I could think was "Is that all you can do? Is my soul really worth that little to you?"

And after it was over, the feeling was so strange. It was like I'd been fearfully creeping towards a pit of fire for the past several months, but once I finally fell in, the fire disappeared. Like bracing myself for the worst pain imaginable, but nothing happens. I felt completely unburdened, and free.

The Conservative Attack on Education

Rick Santorum recently voiced his opinion that Obama's encouragement of higher education is a tactic to brainwash children into becoming liberals. He accused Universities of being guilty of "indoctrination" and encouraged his followers to stop funding such institutions.

I find it astounding that there is a portion of our population that genuinely believes this conspiracy theory. To these individuals, it makes more sense to believe that experts in various academic fields arbitrarily decided to doctor their research so that it would consistently support left wing perspectives.

The true source of their anger at education is sparked by their frustration with the fact that issues which are examined objectively with honesty and rigor tend to agree with a progressive perspective rather than traditional conservative perspectives.

If ultra conservatives had it their way, Universities would uphold traditional claims-even though these claims cannot be substantiated by evidence or research. But if this were the case, wouldn't the purpose of Universities as truth finders become obsolete?

Also, accusing Universities of indoctrination while you parade your own religion around as unquestionable truth reeks of hypocrisy and ignorance. But for some reason, conservatives love it.

Happy Martin Luther King Day

But it seems that I can hear the God of the universe saying, "even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. The children of my sons and daughters were in need of economic security, and you didn't provide for them. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness." This may well be the indictment on America that says in Memphis to the mayor, to the power structure, "If you do it unto the least of these my brethren, you do it unto me."...Martin Luther King, 3/18/68

"As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. "Get out of here, baldy!" they said. "Get out of here, baldy!" He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty two of the boys.

....And then he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria."

2 Kings 2:23

Obviously, those boys had it coming. Just another day in the Old Testament.

"Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath at the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy." -Wuthering Heights

"Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians stop pretending that a rational rejection of faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea...I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

While you believe that bringing an end to religion is an impossible goal, it is important to realize that much of the developed world has nearly accomplished it. Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the UN Human Development Report they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France's jails, for instance, are Muslim...conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' human development index are unwaveringly religious.

Other analyses paint the same picture: the US is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the US itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by the above indicators of social dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms.

...Of course, correlational data of this sort do not resolve questions of causality- belief in God may or may not lead to societal dysfunction; societal dysfunction may foster a belief in God; each factor may enable the other; or both may spring from some deeper source of mischief. Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, however, these statistics prove that atheism is compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil society; they also prove, conclusively, that widespread belief in God does not ensure a society's health."

-Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation