When the Nazis first advanced intoEastern Europe their extermination squads would sweep into Jewish villages and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves would then murder them with machine guns. In one such village an SS man his machine gun at the ready watched as an elderly chassidic Jews laboriously dug what he knew was his own grave.
Having finished he stood up straight and spoke to the Nazi: “G-d is watching what you are doing.” And then he was shot dead.
What Hitler did not believe what Stalin did not believe what the death camp officials did not believe what the Nazi doctors did not believe what the thousands of apparatchiks who carried out the slaughter did not believe what terrorists who shot babies in their cribs did not believe was that G-d was watching what they were doing.
So writes Prof. David Berlinski (not an Orthodox Jew) in his riveting book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions. And he closes this section with a thought worth remembering: that the meaning of being secular is that you don’t believe that G-d is watching what you are doing.
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