About Kant’s categorical imperative, according to theWikipediaentry Kant argued in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that what he is saying his is not the same as the Golden Rule. However I’m not educated enough on Kant’s ideas to debate this, but I’ll work on reading some more for a later time.

As for the Nietzsche example, not sure it proves or disproves a link between secularism and morals (and I spent today reading The Genealogy of Morals, which is why it took me so long to reply–you can’t say I’m not trying). But this stuck to me: “The symbol of this struggle [good versus evil], inscribed in letters legible across all human history, is “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome”: —there has hitherto been no greater event than this struggle, this question, this deadly contradiction. Rome felt the Jew to be something like anti-nature itself, its antipodal monstrosity as it were: in Rome the Jew stood “convicted of hatred for the whole human race”; and rightly, provided one has a right to link the salvation and future of the human race with the unconditional dominance of aristocratic values, Roman values.” What I see here is Nietzsche rooting for Roman morals (not Greek), for the strong and noble, and supporting the idea that Jews are to blame for hatred for human race. Being a child of Rome (as a Romania I can claim the title) I should be flattered by his writing. But it wasn’t the Jews who raped the women of my people into Romanization.

Nietzsche must pardon me, but humanism started much earlier than biblical times. Oh I forget, he also blames Buddhism for European nihilism. “I saw the beginning of the end, the dead stop, a retrospective weariness, the will turning against life, the tender and sorrowful signs of the ultimate illness: I understood the ever spreading morality of pity that had seized even on philosophers and made them ill, as the most sinister symptom of a European culture that had itself become sinister, perhaps as its by-pass to a new Buddhism? to a Buddhism for Europeans? to—nihilism?” But my question referred to Christian writings, so this is irrelevant.

Lockean natural rights were an extension of the natural law tradition of Thomas Acquinas and the invioability that rights were supposed to guarantee people were were a secularized version of having a soul. Further, Kant’s categorical imperative is a secular form of the golden rule, which was had in other cultures, but had its most egalitarian expression in Christianity. The moral philosophy of the enlightenment codified people’s intuitions in secular terms. Since the Europe of the enlightenment was primarily Christian they codified the Christian virtues in secular garb. Neitzsche makes this point many times, most forcefully in the Geneology of Morals, where he contrasts the Greek ethos with European ethics derived historically from Christianity.

I am just stating what I take to be a historical fact, that enlightenment liberalism had its historical roots in Judeo-Christian morality.

You said Hitchens pulled a fast one when approached with this question. My take was that he answered the question and my previous post explains how.

Can you pls give examples of secular morals that seculars stole from Christians? And you know, Christians weren’t the first to have morals. And today’s atheists aren’t the first to be atheists.

No, I am saying that the statement, “holy books steal their morals from us” is false. It is just a historical fact that Western secular morality arose from the Christian tradition. If anyone is going to be accused of “stealing” it is secularists.

So Hitchen’s point is that in dictatorships there is no separation of church and state.

And what does this have to do with religion? The reason that there is no seperation of church and state is because that is based on liberal rights, but totalitiarian regimes reject liberal rights, so there is no such seperation. In totalitarian states there is no seperation of state and anything.

The second point I interpreted differently. What Hitchens said about dictators is that most dictators made themselves head of state in the Christian tradition of king over people, king over all aspects of society, rulers of church, state and military. Most dictator’s approach to religion has been of complete dominance where the head of the state is the head of the church. To Stalin religion was something he manipulated according to his whims, at one point he closed the churches and then later on in life he reinstated them. So no the Soviet Union was not a secular state. It might have gone through stages were religion was seen as an enemy but the heads of state were the ultimate leaders of the church. So Hitchen’s point is that in dictatorships there is no separation of church and state.

False. False. False. Anyone who knows the history of moral thought in Europe realizes that contemporary secular rights were derived from a Christian theology. Locke, Rousseau, and Kant all secularized the Christian doctrines like the soul. Instead of being valued as god’s creation people are now believed to posses autonomy and human rights, the secularized version of the soul. Even Neitzsche, the vitriolic atheist that he was, realized this.

Now no society that we know of — and I’ll challenge you directly on it — has ever been accused of falling into totalitarian habits by following the examples of Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Payne, Epicurus, Spinoza — the tradition of doubt and separation of church and state — that I can think of. And I’ve tried. I don’t think you can find one, either.

Hitchens pulls a fast one here also. The question was whether or not there was an example of a secular totalitarian state, and the Soviet Union is such an example. And Marx and Engels, on orthodox readings, reject liberal autonomy as a result of capitalism and want to replace it with a totalizing and secular state.

Hitchens is trying to appeal to Jefferson, Franklin etc. in order to show that secularism has some sort of built in anti-totalitarian function. This is just not true. The concept of secularization does not entail demoracy. It is completely conceiveable to have a totalitarian secular state. It is the emphasis on liberal conceptions of justice that entail the rejection of a totalitarian state, not securalism itself.