Wednesday 6 June 2007

Reasonable!

Sam Harris writes:

"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 your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma.... The problem with religion--as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology--is the problem of dogma itself. 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."

If he had seen "Conspiracy", the dramatic realisation of the conference which set the seal on the "Final Solution", he would see no mad wild eyed fanatics, but reasonable people, sorting out a reasonable means of removing a peoples who by their reasonable eugenic standards were a problem needing a reasonable solution. They had little in the way of fanatical core beliefs except those of the pen-pushing bureaucrat, just doing their job. It is one of the most chilling films I have ever seen, and the banality of evil is quite shocking.

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