Reply #135: Not quite. Germany's immediate post-war aftermath, Ground zero,

[Joe Chi Minh]

referred to the physical rubble of the total defeat and humiliation of a dictator, and the nation whose government he had usurped, yet who is worshipped by numbskulls elsewhere to this very day.

However, after some years when Nazi propaganda increasingly coloured the country's ethos, there was bound to be an accompanying spiritual Ground Zero. Once he felt powerful enough to take on the Christian churches, Hitler did so with a vengeance. Nevertheless, I was horrified to hear from a young German lad that all Germans were obliged by law to pay a tithe to a Christian church. Whether it was technically a tenth of their income I don't know.

However, in recent years, I realise what a shrewd and enlightened measure it was. Imagine if Ayn Rand's finest had had their say. At the very time when the rest of the West was on course to abandon its Christian ethos, the Germans were re-learning it. Of course, the need to renew the country's industrial infrastructure, together with the Germans' general aptitude for matters scientific and technological, soon made them the industrial power-house of Europe, but also it has been notable how, while the rest of the West has been succumbing to corporatism and at least crypto-fascism, the Germans have been in the vanguard of so-called Old Europe, in repudiating economic class warfare, and a return to the values which informed the architects of the Nuremburg Trials, the Geneva Convention, etc.

The problem with atheism is that it is the ultimate privatisation project, the individual is sovereign and everyone's viewpoint, however noxiously repugnant to even natural justice, is of equal value. As Thatcher so eloquently put it, "society stops at my front door." Even a society of regimented myrmidons, such as those of bees and ants seems preferable, with everyone working for the common good - except of course that, since it would be nationalistic in the extreme, it would most certainly not be for the common good, but rather would be an outcome beyond even fascist leaders' wildest dreams.

In fact, the few mysteries which form the axioms of the Christian faith (paradoxes, such as physicists are now discovering proliferate so profusely at the outer limits of physics. How much more supernatural truths), no-one is required to deny the use of their reason. Instead, adherence to these very axioms forms the best springboard for knowledge, as a seemingly endless procession of the most innovative thinkers in the fields of science, alone (that basest of all spheres of knowledge), attest. Enstein did not believe in a pesonal God, but he did believe in a god responsible for the sovereignly intelligent design of the universe, and had clearly been ethically informed by Judaism, though his parents were non-observant, and by a Catholic elementary-school education (i.e. during his most formative years).