Secular Europe's Merits

Craig forward an article by Dennis Prager discussing the merits of Europe's embrace of Secularism. After reading the piece, I felt that the author made some assumptions with which I disagree. The columnist that was interviewed, Roger Cohen, might share some of the blame for using a poor analogy for Communism and Fascism. I didn't get to read Mr. Cohen's original article so I'll limit myself to examining Mr. Prager's response.

Using the total amount of people abused or killed by a regime as a metric makes as much sense as keeping the top-grossing movies list by the amount of money brought in using current dollars - it ignores inflationary effects. Just as ticket prices go up over time, so does the total population of Earth. Does that make Communism or Fascism off the hook, not a chance. It just means it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

I'd also like to take issue with the contention that labeling communism and Nazism as religion avoids the issue. Those movements may not have been deity-centered but they still had common values and followers. I almost want to think that Mr. Prager didn't want the atrocities of those two regimes to be considered a religion because he doesn't want religion to be tainted by association. If anything, I'd say that considering them as religions brings some of humanities dirty little secrets out into the light of examination. Unless you accept that God spoke to every one of the Christians sent to the Crusades and told them to retake the holy land, it becomes easy to accept that all or the vast majority of all violence in history associated with a religion was actually motivated by a more human desire (politically, economic, or otherwise) and religion was the guise used to justify it.

In using G.K. Chesterton's quote "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything." might imply that only the godless propagate violence and that communism/Nazism are not religions. Is Mr. Prager trying to say that a Christian state has never slaughtered, tortured or ensalved people?

At the heart of the matter is that human nature has a dark-side full of greed, averice, lust, and hate. This is true regardless of what belief system controls the halls of government. Chesterton's quote is a statement of fact about human nature, not a glorification of religion. There are plenty of people who will believe 'anything', in Chesterton's terms, about 'God'. I've known people who believed that drinking wine was a sin; when it pointed out that Jesus turned water into wine, the response was "Brother (x) taught us differently!" It is not an indictment of religion that humans want to believe in something just as calling communism or Nazism religions does not make them guilty by association.

I'll put any further reply to this article in a new post, this one has already become longer than I intended.