Letter published in the Atlanta Journal/Constitution on December 28, 2001 (with such drastic edititing that I rdesolved never to permit any future publication of my letters with any editing without my permission).

Hitler was not moved by any hope of heaven. The German was to love his fellow German as a matter of duty. Bin Laden is moved by a hope of heaven, and loves his fellow Muslim only because God has commanded him to do so in order to gain access to certain “unspeakable” delights. Each is totally committed to his vision, and so any actual mischief depends entirely on the availability of resources and the sighting of opportunities for action, i.e., hang the cost!

The final solution to this was enunciated by Kant 200 years ago: moral duty extends beyond race equally to all humans (and even beyond that!), and so Hitler was wrong in limiting the scope of moral duty just to Germans; and the moral law of duty is the only truly valid reason we have for even imagining the existence of a God, and so Bin Laden is wrong in believing that God desires the destruction of any person. -- The conveyance of that truth to Bin Laden will require education for him and exemplification by us; it is too late to convey that to Hitler.
--
Philip McPherson Rudisill