Aquinas wrote that God is "ipsum esse subsistens," translated by Bishop Robert Barron as "the shear act of 'to be' itself." So the idea of God not simply as a noun but as an action (i.e., verb) can be found at least as early as the 13th century.
I'm glad you brought this up. The so-called existential Thomists are strong on this point. Frederick Wilhelmsen's "The Paradoxical Structure of Existence" [0] was my first encounter with this understanding of God. I strongly recommend this book for those whose interest was piqued by God-as-verb (in place of the God-as-teapot canard). The book offers a great interpretation of Parmenides and Heraclitus as having been closer to one another than the way in which they are typically presented in philosophical texts. For example, Parmenides correctly intuited Be-ing but failed as soon as he attempted to conceptualize and crystalize it into a noun (and also accounts for this curious silence on the plurality of beings in this regard). It is only then that he and Heraclitus part ways. The book continues with Avicenna's discovery of existence as something distinct from essence, then onto Averroes' error of demoting existence to the accidental order (understandable once to understand that the epistemic order is the reverse of the metaphysical order). Ultimately, we come to the understanding of God as the very act of existence, an act that precedes the essential order of things and cannot itself be conceptualized because it is not a thing, but precedes all things and causes them to be at every instant. That is a far more satisfying account of God than the caricaturish and anemic view of some ghastly thing floating about the universe performing magic tricks. It also makes God impossible to ignore as an unnecessary being-among-many.
Another book that touches on this subject is Etienne Gilson's "God and Philosophy"[1]. One of the most interesting bits for me is where he draws attention to the Old Testament where God reveals himself to Moses as "I am He who is". I always thought that was a rather curiously mysterious way of revealing oneself. But on this understanding of God as the act of existence, it makes perfect sense. God is, or God is Is, so to speak. So really, we trace this understanding of God -- albeit not a philosophical one -- to at least the second millenium BC.
Ghazali and Ibn al-Arabi asserted a related concept known as "wahdat al-Wujud" in Sufi literature. Often translated as "unity of Being" and confused with pantheism (which it is not), it could encompass what Aquinas said, "the sheer act of 'to be' itself", but with the additional restrictive clause that "nothing else 'is' itself". Which is a significantly more precise predicate than "God is a verb".
Interesting. In my reading of the Dao De Jing and other Taoist texts I've only seen the affirmative side "the unity of being" which has sometimes been dismissed as "monism", but not necessarily the negative side: "nothing else truly 'is'". These might sound like logically equivalent statements but there is a subtle rhetorical and practical difference.
There's the idea that everything is defined in relation to something else, except the Dao, which is itself. As a corollary, anything you can name, i.e. define, isn't the Dao. In the ddj it's not said explicitly like this but it's something that can be pieced together from various chapters.
Might you need both? From what I've seen, dig deep enough in a particular hole, be it theoretical physics, statements about God, etc. and you get the paradox that two different things imply each other mutually. You can't have one without the concept of none, and you can't have none without the concept of one. See Godel's incompleteness theorem, the particle vs. wave situation, etc.
Are you saying that this concept is mostly absent from the Taoist texts you've read?
Not too far removed (philosophically), from 'theological noncognitivism ' [0]: the idea that 'god' is more of a concept like 'hope' or 'love', not a thing like 'milk', and a poorly understood & undefined one at that.
"Theological noncognitivism" is not too far removed from "ignosticism", according to your link. Ignosticism states: the question of the existence of God is meaningless because the term "god" has no coherent and unambiguous definition. Totally valid, to the extent that saying that something that we can't bottle and stopper must be irrelevant helps anyone sleep at night.
I suppose my one point of disagreement is that the poem is philosophically aligned with Questions of God-ness being pointless...the poem doesn't strike me that way (totally subjective of course). And Buckminster Fuller was well known to have undergone a pretty profound mystical experience (whatever that means) that shaped the rest of his life.
I’m a regular Church-going Christian, and could definitely go along with that theory. As a gross over-simplification Jesus is a noun, the Holy Sprit is a verb, God is an entire language.
Within the Christian tradition as I understand it, you could read every single word ever expressed about God and you still wouldn't understand. It's like an ant trying to understand a black hole by crawling around a library.
>It's like an ant trying to understand a black hole by crawling around a library.
Your analagy is akin to The Cloud of Unknowing, a spiritual guide to becoming closer to god by "unknowing", written by a 14th century christian mystic.
Similar to something I read in a Jack Kornfield book the other day, about a Zen tradition called "just sitting" where you dispense with any goals or concepts of enlightenment and, well, just sit. Presumably it gets you somewhere...or nowhere :)
That depends on how we define god. Which is what this whole thread seems to be about :) Needless to say, yes, getting people to agree on whether they're talking about the same thing takes a lot of patience. For a certain type of person, definitely worth the effort.
Personally I didn't care at all until I had a direct experience that I couldn't explain without "spiritual" vocabulary. And now I'm embroiled in these sorts of debates for fun...
If god is only known as a personal experience that is impossible to fully express; if it is invisible, unexplainable, unprovable, then it has all the properties of things that only exist in our imagination. Believers can give whatever name they want (as they did over the centuries), it doesn't make any difference.
Hmm. "Subjective experience" doesn't feel the same to me as "imagination," but they're related I suppose. My experience of the world is real, as you would probably categorize yours. Invisible and unexplainable, not at all...see the many suggestions on this page. "Unprovable"; 1) if you've experienced it directly, your proof is there but it's limited to one person, 2) all mathematical systems break down when pushed to a limit (Godel's incompleteness theorem, the necessity of different physics/math under different conditions, etc.); we're talking about a way to encompass all of these things while adhering to a concise definition, it's hard.
I actually think these academic discussions of "what is god precisely" and "how does it work" only really sway a small subset of people. IMO it's "try these techniques out for yourself and decide for yourself," not "surely this explanation of the entirety of existence will sway you!" I'm with you, I don't think there's a formal text definition of god that ever would have convinced me to "believe." Either you have a notion of a higher power or unitive/connective force and have experienced it, or you haven't and you're working with the evidence you've got (math, the Bible, whatever). Take a few psychedelics or do a bunch of meditation and you'll end up feeling like most practitioners do, which is that you have a strong ineffable experience that doesn't translate well into words. Or don't! God's just a made-up word anyway for an aspect of the universe / human experience that we have a hard time defining (one of my definitions).
I mean, it'd be malicious if that's what I was after. I don't engage in these discussions because I'm a troll, I engage because I think they're important. It's possible that every "believer" throughout history is delusional and yanking your chain...seems like too much work though.
It is funny that god is a language, but he lived alone for the eternity. Was he communicating with himself alone?... Just another "mystery" that believers will sweep under the rug.
What's truly interesting about this is your assumption that God is an individual, a single person.
What's more interesting is the comment you're replying to actually describes the super-personal nature of God - what Christians call the Trinity. Writings expounding on the Trinity have filled many volumes of Christian theology - it's something far from being "swept under the rug".
I think you're applying our concept of time to God. Time is a human construct.
As for believers, you can see from this thread that there are many interpretations of God, but on HN they do lean toward the fairly abstract.
Personally, I see our mere existence as proof of God. We can observe God because we are God.
The only thing I've ever really been hung up on is the question of whether God can observe himself to validate his own existence. It's fairly paradoxical.
This is the god of Spinoza. A god that is everything and everywhere is, at the same time, nothing. It is nothing more than the worshiping of the universe.
For whatever it's worth, at least as that wiki page described it, 'god' isn't cognitively meaningful. Most Christian philosophers I've read fall into a camp that would say that "hope" and "love" are real and cognitively meaningful, but also metaphysical and therefore something that we can know partially but not completely (and, as you say, understood poorly as a result of the incomplete knowledge).
yes. God is love, and God is hope, but those do not constitute the entirety of what God is
It corresponds with God's name of himself in the OT as well as Jesus's name of Himself as well:
“If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”.
“Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’"
then in John's Gospel, Jesus says, "before Abraham was, I AM"
While persecution is expected and desired by that particular faith, I think you're awful quick hopping to a visceral reaction to religious sources instead of HNs visceral reaction to factual inaccuracy.
> yes. God is love, and God is hope, but those do not constitute the entirety of what God is
This is a reply in the context of an epistemological argument that that word you are using simply cannot mean things if you keep using it like that, and very much not the things you quoted... Not "yes": "NaN" or "undefined symbol" or "mu".
How many liters of god can I pour into my bathtub? How many liters of Coca-cola? ... We used to, but we no longer talk about god as a 'thing'.
"Coca-cola is love, coca-cola is hope, but coca-cola is so much more"...? Sure. Things respond well to metaphor, and simile.
"Hate is love, hate is hope, but hate is so much more"...? No, doesn't work, because hate is a meaningful concept. Meaningful concepts cannot arbitrarily be ascribed other meaningful concepts while retaining their meaning. "God" can though. Despite its framing, like in your post, as something that should not be able to arbitrarily be ascribed to other concepts.
God is itchiness, god is morning sunrises, god is monkey brains covered in dew. God is all, god is nothing, alpha and omega...? That "god" cannot be a god, or GOD. That "god" is both an abstract and meaningless notion. That god is awesome for selling subscription services, tho.
In any case, I wasn't responding to your comment about theological noncognitivism, I was commenting on parent's reference to apophatic theology (theology which emphasizes our inability to know God with our minds) by merely driving the point home with some traits or characteristics commonly used to refer to God but also saying these things are not the entirety of God's being or character. The rest of your silliness doesn't really apply since I was not arguing "God is everything"
I've got some gripes with Jordan Peterson's popularity but everyone needs to hear this (paraphrasing): "OK, you're going to disregard all of Christianity because there are literal untruths in the Bible? We have a word for people who insist on the literal truth of sacred texts: fundamentalists. I'm sorry, it was probably never meant to be literally true, it's describing stuff that's better understood as story/myth. You're going to have to try a little harder."
"God" has so many definitions it's completely useless as word to be used for conversation, even between 2 people of the same faith, maybe even for a single person to have internal thoughts about. It's amazing how much conflict arises just because everyone wants to use the same word for an intangible thing.
Maybe we can start a database and every person creates a unique id for their current definition of intangible things. Even if they copy the exact definition for an intangible thing from someone elses intangible thing, it gets a new id. If they want to modify a definition of their own intangible thing, new id. Then every recorded use of the word requires a link to the definition that individual was using at the time of the conversation. In the case of "God", I don't think UUIDs will be big enough. The db will, of course, have to be decentralized and blockchain based.
Buckminster Fuller was the architect who envisioned a new kind of house, called the Dymaxion House. Fortunately it didn’t pick up. It was a great engineering exercise, as the house was quite simple and efficient, but on the other hand it had no soul. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house
While no doubt an eccentric genius and early advocate of systems theory, I can't really give him a pass after coining the term "synergetics" [0]. The common form of the word used today is - synergy. He also coined the terms "cloud nine", "tensegrity", and "dymaxion".
"Experience with synergetics encourages a new way of approaching and solving problems." - R. Buckminster Fuller
Reader beware: much of his writings are either math heavy or word salad. Or both.
Not having a "soul" seems like a poor reason to rejoice in the failure of such an affordable and efficient home, especially considering how many people live in "cookie cutter" houses, bland apartments, not to mention outrageous prices, and the effect on the environment of building such inefficient homes.
"The severest blow of all was that both the national electricians and plumber's organizations said they would have to be paid to take apart all the prefabricated and pre-installed wiring and plumbing, and put it together again, else they would not connect the otherwise "ready to live in" house to the town's or city's electrical lines and water mains. They held exclusively the official license to do this by long-time politically enacted laws."
God is a point in an uncertain future. The more uncertain the future the bigger God wil be. This also explains the friction between science and religion,because science makes the future less uncertain and thus god smaller.
I'd say science makes the future more uncertain, not less, by giving us more tools to change it. It's easier to figure out how to change things than to understand the impact of those changes.
I think this must be true. The greater our understanding of the world, and the greater our ability to manipulate the world, the greater the options available to humans and the more complex their interaction. The world has been significantly less predictable since the Enlightenment, and the rejection of the fixed socio-theological order that preceded it. Life in pre-modern Europe was very predictable - almost everyone was a peasant who followed the same seasonal cycle, and stood in deference to the same feudal and religious system.
If one's understanding of _part_ of a system increases to enable manipulation of that part of the system, but one's ignorance of the effects of that change in the broader system remains, meaning that the increase in understanding has led to an increase in unexpected effects in the broader system, has one's overall understanding increased, or decreased?
Not sure if that's too abstract, but your statement that "the world has been significantly less predictable since the Enlightenment" made me wonder, because you'd think "less predictable" means that understanding has gone down.
I would draw a sharp distinction between 'understanding' and 'predictability'. Understanding is about our knowledge of and ability to manipulate the world. Predictability is our ability to reliably forecast the future of the social world.
Of course our understanding has increased. But that has generated rapid and accelerating changes in society and a monumental increase in its complexity, which together, make it significantly harder to predict the future of the social world.
I am not saying that we don't have a better predictive grasp of the natural world. We obviously do.
Fundamental research or purely scientific research is not intended to solve a predetermined practical problem, but in the long run fundamental research eventually also results in practical applications. Like for example the internet and the weather report.
Given that God is omnipotent, you can always build a narrative where God is responsible for science and whatever future. You can't make the concept of God smaller. At best you can make a religious narrative irrelevant.
But you also don't need a religion to play with the concept of God. And you certainly don't even need God to have a religion.
If he(?!?) is omnipotent, he's a massive douche.
Or as Epicurus put it:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
One of the many problems with this argument is it presumes that your personal moral compass is objectively and universally true.
I don't mean this to argue otherwise - it is my personal belief that it is not possible to prove or disprove the existence of God with reason alone, thus why the argument has lasted for millenia. The mass of texts written to do one or the other are worth, in my opinion, for nothing much besides exercising your mind.
Or you're just asking the wrong question. "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?"; "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Our language has the ability to frame nonsensical dichotomies.
Or to put it another way, perhaps you're asking for a three dimensional array, but you want its contents to only have two-dimensional qualities. Or you want force and acceleration, but no mass.
You assume God's goal is human pleasure. What if it was human growth? A person never grows more than in the struggle of life. What if it was human freedom? Freedom means that evil must sometimes be permitted in the face of overwhelming power. What if it was something outside of human imagination?
You want a God that hands out straightjackets and drugs. I think he has a higher goal than that.
Epicurus doesn't assume anything here. If the 'higher goal' involved human suffering, then why would you condone that and worship the originator of suffering?
If your god would be a real person, you would not just accept 'oh, but I have a plan!'
If you really believe what you're saying, I hope you don't eat fish, or own jewelry, or use coal or oil derived power, or watch sports that have a non-zero rate of player injury, or eat at restaurants that use grease friers or knives, or any number of other commodities that are directly or indirectly the product of human suffering.
I can't really empathize with someone who sees no value in suffering. Suffering is not the ultimate evil, and pleasure is not the ultimate good. Go read some Cicero. He tears Epicurus a new one in much better language than I can muster.
Many believe God does not have the power to be other than what God is. If God is existence itself, then evil, as humans understand evil, seems to be within God, just as it is within each of us.
I despise the idea of the God of the gaps. I don't believe in a supernatural God, but in one who presides over nature. Not one who defies science, but even allows himself to be known by personal experiment. Why should a miracle be wrought by magic, when physics would suffice?
My God is never so small as to hide in the cracks in reality.
AH! I immediately googled "My God is never so small as to hide in the cracks of reality" because it sounds so much like something Bonhoeffer would say. Well done.
Also, excellent point, I might disagree with your disbelieving in a supernatural God, especially in terms of design and origin, but yes, physics is an incredible canvas. "For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." Romans 1:20
God of the gaps is rejected by most well-educated theologians, especially in the Catholic Thomist tradition. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, God is the foundation of existence, like a substrate underlying reality, but distinct from all other things. God maintains the existence of all things, including the laws of physics. Although God does not have to operate the universe in a consistent manner, he does so for at least two reasons. 1) a well ordered universe operating according to consistent laws has a beauty that reflects the nature of God, who is not arbitrary, but faithfully keeps his word. 2) It provides a predictable and stable place in which life can develop and thrive.
However, since God operates physics, he certainly could "violate" it, but we believe he has done so only in very rare cases to get peoples' attention.
I think that there's a few semantics we could quibble about, "wouldn't anything God did be natural by definition," and so on.
But I wholeheartedly agree with your first statement, and I find it profoundly frustrating that atheist tracts immediately assume that you do believe in a God of the gaps.
Yeah, to me the miraculous existence of anything at all, the ability to enjoy pure wonder, and a fully "unitive" experience once in a while...is more than enough for me. That God certainly lives up to its name.
Your comment history suggests that your beef with the Mormon faith has only a little to do with the subjectivity of experience. If you really want to talk about it, I will, but it might be a better discussion for another thread or forum.
My disaffection has a lot of facets, but the unreliability of "personal revelation" is a pretty large one. To be honest, I would actually love to talk to you about it. I wish I could teleport to where you are and have a friendly discussion over coffee and hot chocolate or whatever :). I enjoy the topic, and especially enjoy discussing it with thoughtful believers like yourself. The willingness to discuss these things is extremely asymmetric in my experience, and only a small handful of people have ever expressed interest.
That being said, it's a pretty involved discussion, and I agree that a Hacker News thread is an odd place for it, though a rare thread like this is the closest it ever gets.
If y'all are taking this offline, may I join, at least to read? (Not sure if I'll have input or not, really just looking to learn) Reply with forum/ contact if you don't mind.
It's acting as a universal delimiter, like commas. Even though it would be technically correct to put commas everywhere for creating emphasis, it would be ugly, and wouldn't cover all the cases for emphasis that Fuller is trying to create. My guess is that he's trying to communicate how he would pace the poem in his own speech.
I'm an atheist and I believe in God. I also believe in Up and North and Clockwise rotation.
Let me clarify. In my view what we have now with these religions and dogma is a big centuries long game of telephone across generations and languages.
If you've done something good you've done something in the spirit of god. There's no reward, it's just a direction. But see that there, the missing "o"? God, Good, same word. See? No mystery, just a linguistic error.
IMHO God is not an object or actor or creature or person, none of that. God doesn't want anything, takes no action, has no dreams. God is the moral direction of most good. A direction, you know, just like the direction North. North doesn't want you to be more North, North doesn't hate south or East.
I cry over the thousands of years of wasted time where humanity has tried to figure out the demands of an entity that simply doesn't exist.
Instead, we got dragged into wars, instigated by rulers who manipulated followers of so-called 'holy books' into killing their brethren. We denied education to large parts of the population. We suppressed anything resembling science&progress because it might offend an imaginary being.
It's a frigging disaster.
Imagine a world where we would have followed science and reason early. Where we didn't destroy libraries, but gradually improved their wisdom.
All those years down the drain. Sigh.
> Imagine a world where we would have followed science and reason early.
Having seen the history of tribalism fused with areligious and antireligious ideologies and empowered by applied science in the modern era, I can't see it as particularly better than the results of tribalism fused with religious ideology but without systematic science earlier in history.
Science is a powerful multiplier, but inherently value-free; the values to which it is applied necessarily come from elsewhere
> You can use science to verify ethical statements
No, you can't. (And not just in the sense that science falsifies rather than verifies.)
Ethical/moral statements always have a value component that is empirically unfalsifiable. They sometimes also have a falsifiable factual premise that, along with a set of value premises, supports a conclusion. Science can falsify the fact component, and sufficient failute to falsify can justify belief in the false component, but cannot falsify or (by failing to falsify) justify the value component, and therefore cannot justify the statement as a whole.
Not only wasted time, but also wasted intellectual energy. Many theologians and apologetics are often smart people that could use their intellect to more useful (i.e. right direction) domains.
Moral questions are religious questions. Can suffering be scientifically observed and quantified? The "right direction" is a fairly large, old, and subtle debate without an easy or obvious answer. While I'm totally on board with the idea that furthering scientific knowledge is a net positive, we're definitely suffering these days from an overabundance of powerful technology and a deficit of "right direction" for that technology. Thinking deeply about what exactly the right direction is in no way strikes me as wasted intellectual effort.
Organized religion would like you to think that 'Moral questions are religious questions.'
That's just flat our wrong.
Morality is fluid and has been re-defined by people living in tribes or larger societies.
One can argue fairly well that we would already live in a more just world if we would have skipped that non-sense of believing in a higher being.
For example, we now agree slavery is kinda bad. Yet, not too long ago the bible was used to justify slavery around the world.
Who's to thank for this progress? Certainly not religion.
> For example, we now agree slavery is kinda bad. Yet, not too long ago the bible was used to justify slavery around the world. Who's to thank for this progress? Certainly not religion.
The Christian religion (including the Bible, but not always by the subset of Christianity which holds that the former is entirely contained in the latter) was likewise used to justify abolition, and this, like justification of slavery, goes back to the fairly early days of organized Christianity.
What does it say that it was actively used with authority (and horrifyingly is still being used) by both sides of the slavery debate? Shouldn't the literal word of the most moral being in the universe be clear regarding slavery, at the very least?
> What does it say that it was actively used with authority (and horrifyingly is still being used) by both sides of the slavery debate?
That Christianity isn't a unified hive mind?
> Shouldn't the literal word of the most moral being in the universe be clear regarding slavery, at the very least?
Arguably it should be, but then the idea that the Bible is the literal word of God is not, itself, a doctrine shared by the whole, or even majority, of the Christian community (it's a doctrine primarily of the evangelical and fundamentalist branches of Protestantism.)
If they claim to have direct communication with the creator of the universe, like all christian communities do, they should have at least a minimum standard of congruence. Or is he just having a laugh with some of them?
> If they claim to have direct communication with the creator of the universe, like all christian communities do, they should have at least a minimum standard of congruence.
Well (1) all Christian communities do not claim that all Christian communities have direct communication of that kind (in fact, Christian communities often claim that other such communities are deficient, and perhaps willfully so, in there regard), and (2) I don't even think all Christian communities claim that even they themwelves have communication of the kind that would support any conclusion much stronger than that that community’s authoritative teachings are free from error (certainly not that any subject of a specified degree of material impact should be addressed.)
They would love to claim a whole lot more, and in fact originally and for a long time they did. But I know that with so little to back them up, that is what they've been resorted to claim.
Moral questions are moral questions, and they are hard. Religion has just convinced you, despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, that you should equate religion with morality, when only one look at their 'holy' places and institutions should suffice for any one to conclude they are not in the least related.
Moral questions are (or at a minimum involve subordinate questions which are) outside the scope of empirical science; in this way they are similar to many religious questions (and the categories overlap), but they are not the same as, or a subset of, religious questions.
Moral questions are not outside the scope of empirical science. Religious moral questions are outside the scope of any meaningful questions. (see the various god-related commandments in the 10 commandments, none of those make sense to non-believers)
> Moral questions are not outside the scope of empirical science.
Yes, they are. Science can answer is, it can't answer ought.
(It can help reach practical conclusions from moral axioms applied to concrete facts, but that's not really answering moral questions: the choice of axioms is the thing that answers the moral questions, and science can't help you there.)
> Instead, we got dragged into wars, instigated by rulers who manipulated followers of so-called 'holy books' into killing their brethren. We denied education to large parts of the population. We suppressed anything resembling science&progress because it might offend an imaginary being.
Actually, the biggest and dirtiest wars of at least our recent history were actually driven by men who were atheists (or at least non-theists). Hitler, Pol-pot, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin, Lenin... all atheists with body counts in the tens (hundreds?) of millions.
Furthermore, Some of the biggest advances in the sciences (take for example the scientific method as described by Sir Francis Bacon assumed that the universe itself was ordered by God and therefore science was actually possible) and the institutions of higher learning were started as ways to train people for purposes of theology (thinking here of places like Oxford and Princeton).
Religion has actually been a huge driver in our ability to teach and understand the world.
Hitler was a catholic, he killed atheists and despised the evolutionary theory. After all, Arian people were supposed to be god's chosens not those jews. He wrote this himself in Mein Kampf.
Stalin was a student at a seminary.
Every US president has been at last a theist. How many wars has the US been in? How many deaths?
Wars have many reasons, most of them non religious. Religion is just used as a excuse and it works every time.
> Hitler was a catholic ... Stalin was a student at a seminary
If you can prove to me that these men were actually acting in accordance with the stated doctrines of the institutions that they claimed, then your point might be valid. However, it isn't and it won't be because they were not.
Man corrupts religions to his advantage—that is not religion's fault. It is man's.
First you lie and claim Hitler was an atheist when in fact he was a catholic until the day he died, and then is somehow my fault? Isn't lying in the ten commandments?
I don't know if in his heart he was truly a devout servant of the lord or if he was just pretending, but most importantly, you don't either. All we can be sure is that he claimed to be one, and that the Catholic church embraced him, made treaties with his government, celebrated his birthday officially every year and never excomulgated him. That sounds like a better catholic than most, he made the church a lot of money and, they gladly took it.
Whatever he was, he was not an atheist. And he didn't claim to be one, in fact, he claimed the opposite.
It's a very narrow viewpoint you are having. Dragging out the few instances where churches allowed and protected some science.
Completely disregarding the hundreds of years of oppression of intellectual progress.
