Am 12.09.2015 um 10:04 schrieb Cousin Ricky:

> Hitchens was really popular among atheists in the USA.  Perhaps we have a bigger
> problem with fundamentalist Christians than you do in Germany.

That is certainly the case. While we also do have the occasional
fundamentalist Christian sect, they're just a fringe group here, and
they know and acknowledge it; for instance, over here, nobody even in
their sane(?) mind would try to push ID into public school education -
rather, at worst they'd try to get their own children out of public
schools; but even that seems to be pretty rare.

Maybe here in continental Europe we have the questionable benefit of
having suffered from so many wars over religion -- even and especially
between Christians -- that we have become weary of it and turned to a
now deep-rooted secularism.

It may also play a great role that many of the waves of emigration to
America were motivated by religious persecution; such people obviously
belonged to communities with strong religious beliefs. In addition, they
were also more likely to not have had much exposure to secularist ideas
(otherwise their oppressors would have been likely to have been exposed
to those ideas, too, and might have exerted less pressure on the
community in question), or dissent with spreading secularist ideas might
even have been one of the reasons for emigration. Thus, such emigrants
would have brought with them more religious fanatism and less secularism
than what was the typical average at that same time in Europe.

While waves of emigration to America became more and more economically
motivated over time, and certainly also brought with them the secular
ideas that were evolving in Eurpoe, the earlier settlers' asecular
mindset may have persevered comparatively easily based on a "first dibs"
claim of authority to define American culture.

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