Breath-taking honesty from a dishonest man.

I attended a talk at CSU Fresno given by this guy. His thesis was that secular atheism was better than Christianity because - I kid you not - Denmark had a lower crime rate than Jamaica.  As I recall I was cut off before I could I ask him if he really expected there to be more crimes in an old age home or a high school?  Given the negative birth rate of Denmark and the growing population of Jamaica, that seemed like an apt comparison.  

However, he did put up the picture of a young Ratzinger apparently giving a Nazi salute in his priestly robes as a kind of "hit and run" shot at Catholicism.  So, I asked him if he was aware that that the picture he used cut off the other arm, which showed that Ratzinger was raising his arms in a priestly blessing. He said he didn't know that and thanked me.  I also asked if he knew that Ratzinger became a priest after the fall of the Third Reich. He said he didn't know that and thanked me.  I asked him if he knew that Catholic bishops had excommunicated Nazis before they came to power and had urged the Catholic faithful to vote against the Nazis. He said he didn't know that and thanked me.

Obviously, I think he knew the picture he used was cropped to promote a fraud.  Beyond that, his lack of knowledge about an area that he had ventured into as part of his talk shows that he is supremely untrustworthy.

This corroborates my sense that he fundamentally dishonest. 

Zuckerman is an example of the academic who is less interested in truth and knowledge than in scoring ideological points.

//Zuckerman admits fear is what keeps him from critiquing Islam in his writing on blogs and in books. "I can say anything about Christianity and Mormonism and I'm not living in fear."

He added a statement of thanks that he was able to speak and write negatively about these religions without worrying for his life or that of his three children.

"I would never write the same kind of stuff that I do about certain religions—Judaism, Christianity, LDS—that I would about Islam because of just straight up fear," Zuckerman said.//

Hah! Good night last night!

I went to a lecture sponsored by Fresno State's philosophy department with Mike Michael Stannard.   The talk was by atheist secularist sociologist Phil Zuckerman and featured Zuckerman comparing Jamaica to Denmark in an effort to show that secular, non-religious countries are so much better than religious countries (conveniently ignoring the fact that Denmark has a declining population which is the second oldest in the world.)

It was a target rich environment for questioning.

Because Zuckerman put up this classic atheist cropped picture of "Benedict saluting Hitler" as part of his effort to show that religious people supported tyranny, I asked him if he knew that the full picture presented an entirely different picture?  He didn't.





Here it is.



He also said that Hitler was never excommunicated, and I asked him if he knew that (a) all Catholics who belonged to the Nazis were excommunicated in 1930, (b) Catholics were forbidden from voting for Nazis in 1932 and (c) Catholics were kicked out of the German bureaucracy in 1934.  He didn't.

I was about to get into the demographic decline of secular Denmark when I was cut off.

It was like a day on Facebook!