On Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:24:57 -0400, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> It always makes me laugh (because the other option is to cry) when
>> Christian fundamentalist Republicans invoke the names of Jefferson,
>> Adams, and Franklin in a religious context - because obviously they
>> have no grasp of history.
> 
>   It's sad when using argument from authority by referencing famous
>   people
> who really were believers is not enough, but they have to fabricate
> faith even on outspoken atheists, just because they are well known. (I
> have seen several times people seriously claiming that Einstein believed
> in the Christian God, completely disregarding and ignoring the fact that
> Einstein explicitly and expressly stated several times that he did not.
> He used the word "God" sometimes in the pantheistic sense, meaning the
> same as "universe".)
> 
>   (It often also works in the other direction: Historical people who
>   were
> religious are claimed to have been atheists, for the sole reason that
> they did bad things.)

You'll get no disagreement on either of those points.  The best example 
of that (at the risk of Godwinning the thread) is Hitler - some claim 
that Hitler was an atheist because he did things; others claim that he 
did bad things because he was an atheist.

But most of the people who *actually* did the bad things (not that Hitler 
didn't) were undeniably Christians who were following Hitler.  Hitler's 
actual choice of beliefs really is a minor detail in the Holocaust.

Jim

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