The Eric Hoffman letter to the Editor of the Philadelphia INQUIRER was forwarded by Jane (thanks). Also sending a pertinent reminder sent by "Birchantiq", whose real name seems to have temporarily gone astray:

"The national government will maintain and defend the foundations on which the power of our nation rests. It will offer strong protection to Christianity as the very basis of our collective morality. Today Christians stand at the head of our country. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press-- in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past years." -- Adolf Hitler

As the spin doctors and their pet marketing psychologists know, it's all in the semantics. Hitler was FAR more a Germanic pagan than a Catholic, worshiping blood and iron, yet his manipulation of words fooled a lot of people and he was never excommunicated--nor were any of his henchmen, who were almost all (nominal) Catholics, with a couple of (nominal) Lutherans. To those of us who take our religious faith seriously, one of the tragedies when religion shows its ugly, bullying side is the ensuing disillusion and rejection. I know, for I experienced it myself when I discarded Southern Protestantism more than fifty years ago The bit of Hitlerian hypocrisy, above, helps to explain why so few people in Europe have bothered to attend church since WWII, and why I predict a HUGE drop-off in this country within the next 10 years, once people wake up disgusted with the stench of phoniness and realize the harm it has caused to our society.

Thank you, Eric, for a letter that may help to define the word "moral" for a few readers of the INQUIRER.

For those who wish to pursue a fuller discussion of this subject, I'd recommend Charles Kimball's When Religion Becomes Evil. I've mentioned it before, more than once, and am attaching a copy of my Amazon book review of it.

Great post! It really scares me to see how those words are the same being used today and noone seems to want to do anything to stop this. Are we going to repeat the past????? All I can say is GOD HELP US!

Yup.....very scary!!!

I wasn't finished reading the quote when I thought to myself, "This could be viewed as anti-semetic"...and whaddya know?

great post, my neighbor who is religious nut voted for bush that is exactly what she was saying how scary

How about if everyone tries to get that quote into a letter to the editor of whatever newspaper you can reach?