Conversations: Evil Atheists?

Lysandra
If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. Are they?

Helena
No. Do members of atheist organizations in the United States commit more than their fair share of violent crimes? Do the members of the National Academy of Sciences, 93 percent of whom reject the idea of God, lie and cheat and steal with abandon? We can be reasonably confident that these groups are at least as well behaved as the general population. And yet, atheists are the most reviled minority in the United States.

The Little Red Book is Non-secular

In order for institutions based on Lyotardian grand narratives to flourish, such as totalitarian regimes and organised religions, a certain amount of unquestioned belief is needed. Consider the following excerpts out of the preface to Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, published in China as the Red Treasure Book in 1964:[1]

‘Study the writings of chairman Mao, obey the words of chairman Mao and act according to the words of chairman Mao.’
– Lin Biao, Vice Chairman of the Communist Party of China 1958-1971 and Marshal of the People’s Republic of China (p. 5)

‘Over the past few years, the ‘Thinking of Mao Zedong’ has been dressed in the aura of the one and only universal truth. More so than the explicitly confessed Marxist-Leninism are the sayings and writings of Mao Zedong that are revered and studied, and are used by everyone from the professor to the melon salesman, and the marine engineer to the table tennis champion to achieve greater accomplishments.’
– Cornelis Schepel, Institute of Sinology, Leiden (p. 7)

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[1] These citations were not featured in the original Chinese publication of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book, but have been translated to English from a Dutch translation of Zedong’s most famous work, first published as Het Rode Boekje in 1967 by A.W. Bruna & Zonen and reprinted in 2005 by Forum.

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Under Chairman Mao, every Chinese family was obliged to kill a sparrow a week to stop them eating all the rice. The project was ineffective because sparrows don’t eat rice.

The word lethologica describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want.

When the novelist, poet, designer, translator, and social activist William Morris died in 1896, his doctor attributed his demise to ‘his simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men’.

The striped mittenfish, a deep sea species recently discovered in the Java Sea, can change its sex at will by turning its entire body inside out.

There is evidence to suggest that the fable writer Aesop, who married and divorced at least fifty women, was fond of non-traditional unions. He wed his daughter, his sister and his own mother.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

Did Hitler Chew The Carpets?

A lot of gossip, nonsense and hearsay is often spoken about people with great historical significance. Adolf Hitler is no exception.

Stamp of Nazi Germany, depicting Adolf Hitler as the Führer of the Reich

Contrary to uneducated popular belief, Hitler was not a homosexual, communist, socialist, atheist, or vegetarian (Reichsführer-SS Himmler was a strict vegetarian; he also believed in astrology and homoeopathy, and claimed to speak with the dead), Hitler never tortured animals, he did not only play White in chess, nor is there any evidence to suggest that he had only one descended testicle (a phenomenon known as cryptorchidism – Mao Zedong suffered from this condition).

The Führer was however, a bit unstable. In fact, there is strong evidence to suggest that the Führer was a paranoid rageaholic.

In his novel HhhH (Himmler’s brains are called Heydrich), Laurent Binet examines the historical evidence whether, once or twice during a meeting, Hitler leaped onto the floor and started chewing the carpet in a blind fit of rage.

‘During the Sudeten crisis the first signs of madness of the Führer were revealed. In those days, the mere mention of Beneš and the Czechs made him so livid he would lose his self-control completely. People have witnessed him throwing himself to the floor and chewing the carpet out of sheer anger. Those fits of madness gave him the nickname Teppichfresser (carpet-eater) among his enemies. I do not know whether he made a habit of chewing the carpets when he completely lost his temper, or whether the symptom disappeared after the Munich agreement.[*]

* Some argue that ‘carpet-eating’ is a German expression which is comparable to the French ‘eating one’s hat’ (to change one’s opinion) and that foreign correspondents have interpreted the expression too literally, which would explain how Hitler got sullied with this legend. However, I have examined the evidence and found no trace of the idiomatic use of the expression.’

– Binet. L. 2010. HhhH [Hitler’s Brains are called Heydrich] Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Meulenhoff (2013) p. 82