"You will sooner or later be confronted by the enigma of God’s action in history.”
--- Elie Wiesel “One Generation After”
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“Given the classical theological positions of both Judaism and Christianity, the fundamental question posed by the Holocaust is not whether the existence of a just, omnipotent God can be reconciled with radical evil. That is a philosophical question. The religious question is the following: ‘Did God use Adolf Hitler and the Nazis as his agents to inflict terrible sufferings and death upon six million Jews, including more than one million children?’”
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If God acts in history then God is the ultimate Author of the Holocaust.
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If God chose Israel, then “Chosen for what? --- for Majdaneck and Auschwitz?” And all the other extermination camps?
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As Richard L. Rubenstein wrote in 1966 in his book “After Auschwitz”:
“I believe the greatest single challenge to modern Judaism [and Paul includes Christianity] arises out of the question of God and the death camps.... How can Jews believe in an omnipotent, beneficent God after Auschwitz? Traditional Jewish [and Christian] theology maintains that God is the ultimate, omnipotent actor in the historical drama. It has interpreted every major catastrophe in Jewish history as God’s punishment of a sinful Israel. I fail to see how this position can be maintained without regarding Hitler and the SS as instruments of God’s will. The agony of European Jewry cannot be likened to the testing of Job. To see any purpose in the death camp, the traditional believer is forced to regard the most demonic, anti-human explosion of all history as a meaningful expression of God’s purposes. The idea is simply too obscene for me to accept.”
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Martin Buber from his essay “The Dialogue between Heaven and Earth” (1952):
“How is life with God still possible in a time in which there is an Auschwitz? ... Dare we recommend to the survivors of Auschwitz and the Job of the gas chambers” ‘Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good; for His mercy endureth forever’”?
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As Zachary Braiterman wrote “a God so involved in the world and its attendant suffering becomes deeply complicit and can only invite the wrath and enmity of her aggrieved children.”
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The German Evangelical Church, meeting in Darmstadt in 1948—yes, 1948 and German—asserted that the Holocaust was a divine punishment visited upon the Jews.
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Extracts from “Approaches to Auschwitz” by Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth (2003 revised paperback edition)—pages 327, 338, 339, 340, 341, and 348 from a 525 page book.
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“If I told you that I believed in God, I would be lying; if I told you I did not believe in God, I would be lying.”
Elie Wiesel - a survivor of the Holocaust, the author of “Night” and many other books. He entered into the death camp and the Holocaust at age twelve.
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A story about a shammes. A shammes means, in English, a beadle, someone who performs certain tasks in the synagogue. Usually the shammes, the beadle, was a poor man, often hunchbacked, usually taciturn.
Somewhere in Russia, in a ghetto, a shammes called Moishe went mad; day after day he would come to the synagogue, ascent the bima, a kind of podium, bang his fist on the pulpit, and say to God, “Ribbono shel Olam, Master of the Universe, I want you to know that we are still here.”
Day after day. Then began the transports. The ghetto was decimated; it had fewer and fewer Jews.
Still the beadle came, mad as he was, and with anger or was it laughter, he would pound his fist on the table, saying, “Master of the Universe, I want you to know, we are still here.”
Finally came the last transport, and he was the only Jew who remained in the ghetto. For some reason, the madmen were left behind, as they remained behind in my own town.
He was alone in the ghetto. He came to the synagogue, again ascended the bima, opened the sanctuary, and hammered his fist against the sanctuary, “Master of the Universe, I want you to know, I am still here.”
And then he stopped, only to murmur: “But you --- where are you?”
From “Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications”, edited by John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum, (1989)—an article titled: “Richard L. Rubenstein and Elie Wiesel: An Exchange”, pages 349 to 370, paperback version.
From “Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications”, edited by John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum, (1989) from the article “Excremental Assault” by Terrence Des Pres, paperback version, from within pages 203-220:
In the locked transport boxcars with 80 to 100 people per car - crossing Europe to the death camps in Poland:
“The temperature started to rise, as the freight car was enclosed and body heat had no outlet.... The only place to urinate was through a slot in the skylight, though whoever tried this usually missed, spilling urine on the floor.... When dawn finally rose...we were all quite ill and shattered, crushed not only by the weight of fatigue but by the stifling, moist atmosphere and the foul odor of excrement.... There was no latrine, no provision.... On top of everything else, a lot of people had vomited on the floor. We were to live for days on end breathing these foul smells, and soon we lived in the foulness itself.”
The latrines at the camps:
“There was one latrine for 30,000 to 32,000 women and we were permitted to use it only at certain hours of the day. We stood in line to get into this tiny building, knee-deep in human excrement. As we all suffered from dysentery, we could hardly wait until our time came, and soiled our ragged clothes, which never came off our bodies, thus adding to the horror of our existence by the terrible smell which surrounded us like a cloud. The latrine consisted of a deep ditch with planks thrown across it at certain intervals. We squatted on these planks like birds perched on a telegraph wire, so close together that we could not help soiling one another.”
In the article are more examples of the “excremental assault”.
The Nazis goal was “The death of the soul.... It was to be accomplished by terror and privation, but first of all by a relentless assault on the survivor’s sense of purity and worth. Excremental attack, the physical inducement of disgust and self-loathing, was the principal weapon.”
“Within the camp world all signs of human beauty, bodily pride and spiritual radiance, were thereby to be eliminated from the ranks of the inmates. The prisoner was made to feel subhuman, to see his self-image only in the dirt and stink of his neighbor.”
“And here is a final, vastly significant reason why in the camps the prisoners were so degraded. This made it easier for the SS to do their job. It made mass murder less terrible to the murderers, because the victims appeared less than human. They looked inferior.”
“By passing through the degradation of the camps, survivors discovered that in extremity a sense of dignity is something which men and women cannot afford to lose.... They learned, furthermore, that when conditions of filth are enforced, befoulment of the body is experienced as befoulment of the soul. And they came to recognize, finally, that when this particular feeling - of something inwardly untouchable - is ruined beyond repair, the will to live dies. To care for one’s appearance thus becomes an act of resistance....”
To better understand the hell that the Nazis and God wrought in the Holocaust:
Excremental assault—more examples from the death camps:
By Gisella Perl from her book “I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz” (1948):
“Everyone in the block had typhus...it came to Belsen Bergen in its most violent, most painful, deadliest form. The diarrhea caused by it became uncontrollable. It flooded the bottom of the cages, dripping through the cracks into the faces of the women lying in the cages below, and mixed blood, pus and urine, formed a slimy, fetid mud on the floor of the barracks.” At page 171
Excremental Assault—another example:
“The favorite pastime of one Kapo was to stop prisoners just before they reached the latrine. He would force an inmate to stand at attention for questioning; then make him “squat in deep knee-bends until the poor man could no longer control his sphincter and “‘exploded’”; then beat him; and only then, “‘covered with his own excrement, the victim would be allowed to drag himself to the latrine.’”
From Alexander Donat, “The Holocaust Kingdom” (1965), page 178.
Another example of Excremental Assault:
In Buchenwald latrines consisted of open pits 25 feet long, 12 feet deep and 12 feet wide. There were railings along the edge to squat on, and “one of the favorite games of the SS, engaged for many years,” was to catch men in the act of relieving themselves and throw them into the pit: “In Buckenwald then prisoners suffocated in excrement in this fashion in October 1937 alone.”
From the book by Eugen Kogon, “The Theory and Practice of Hell” (1953), page 56.
Another example of Excremental Assault:
The new prisoner’s initiation into camp life was complete when he “realized that there was no toilet paper—that there was no paper in the whole of Auschwitz, and that I would have to ‘find another way out’. I tore off a piece of my scarf and washed it after use. I retained this little piece throughout my days in Auschwitz; others did likewise.”
From S. B. Unsdorfer’s book “The Yellow Star” (1961), page 102.
Another example of Exremental Assaut:
“The fact is that prisoners were systematically subjected to filth. They were the deliberate target of excremental assault. Defilement was a constant threat, a condition of life from day to day, and at any moment it was liable to take abruptly vicious and sometimes fatal forms.”
“There was no end to this kind of degradation. The stench of excrement mingled with the smoke of the crematoria and the rancid decay of flesh.”
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Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka—his fearful insight to questions by Gitta Sereny’s series of interviews with him:
“Why, if they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?”
Stangl’s response: “To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did.”
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“When cleanliness becomes impossible and human beings are forced to live in their own excrement, their pain becomes intense to the point of agony. The shock of physical defilement causes spiritual concussion, and, simply to judge from the reports of those who have suffered it, subjection to filth seems often to cause greater anguish than hunger or fear of death.”
As Reska Weiss wrote in “Journey Through Hell” (1961): “This aspect of camp life was the most dreadful and the most horrible ordeal to which we were subjected.” (page 69)
“For the survivor the immersion in excrement marks the nadir of his/her passage through extremity. No worse assault on moral being seems possible.”
As one survivor of the sewers stated: “Only our feverish eyes still showed that we were living human beings.”—From Philip Friedman’s “Martyrs and Fighters” (1954), page 289.
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These excremental assault examples are from the article “Excremental Assault” by Terrence Des Pres in “The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps” (1976). The article was published in “Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications” edited by John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum (1989).
you can also read President Truman’s diary on-line, it will tell you the same thing with a little more about how he didn’t want to let in the Jewish refugees after the war because he knew they would take over the U.S.
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/diary/
if you could’ i would recommend reading Secretary of Defence James Forrestalls diary, it also tells about the Holohaox lie and even more about the deal with the Japanese after the war about unit 714 the germ warfare unit. unfortunately his diary is still classified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Forrestal
have fun, open your eyes and read the TRUTH.
Dave
To paraphrase Jack Nicholson “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” Nazi Boy.
second, all Jew’s were asked, then told to leave Germany between 1934 and 1942.
third, the actual death figures are in dispute.
the International Red Cross released a document in 1979 stating that only 271,307 people died in the camps.
i have a copy but it will not post here, band limit.
the I.R.C. refuses to re-release this document. although they do acknowledge is dose exist.
Dave
Dave,
Then you have never spoken with a survivor nor have you read the thousands upon thousands of heavily documented books and articles. Even the Nazi archives proves the facts.
More extractions from “Religion and the Origins of the Death Camps: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation” by Professor Richard L. Rubenstein in the 1992 edition of his book “After Auschwitz”.
“In one area the Nazis took Christianity very seriously. They did not invent a new villain, but took over the ancient Christian tradition of the Jew as villain and epitome of the darkest evil....
[German] folk hatred of the Jews is at least as old as Christianity. Creating very little de novo, the Nazis intensified what they found.....
They transformed a theological conflict, normally limited in its overt destructiveness by religious and moral considerations, into a biological struggle in which only one conclusion was thinkable - the total extermination of every living Jew....
[W]ithin a hundred years, the split between Judaism and Christianity had become bitter and irrevocable. Historical events exacerbated theological differences.
The Jews fought two wars against the Romans in 66-70 and 131-135 C.E. As a result of the first war, the Jerusalem Temple, the center of Jewish life, was destroyed. The young Church took this as double confirmation of Christian truth....
The development of the bitter religious antagonisms is plainly visible in the writings of Justin Martyr (ca. 100 - ca. 165 C.E.), a Palestinian Christian apologist who flourished in the second Christian century....
In Justin’s writings an old Jewish idea - God’s punishment of sinful Israel - has been combined with a new sin, the murder of Christ. This murder was soon regarded as the murder of God. As we shall see, the Christian conception of the Jew as deicide is a most significant component of the religious origins of the death camps.
In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin frequently expressed the conviction that Jewish disaster is nothing more than what the Jews deserve. A frequently quoted passage indicates how violent these feelings had become.
Referring to circumcision, Justin declared that it ‘was given for a sign ... that you alone suffer that which you now justly suffer; and that strangers may eat your fruit in your presence, and not one of you may go up to Jerusalem.’
Justin understood that Judaism and Christianity are religions of history and that a principal validation of their claims must be the evidence of history....
The Romans were God’s retributive instruments against a sinful Israel. They played the same role in Justin’s interpretation of history as the Babylonians in the theology of the prophets....
In the extermination camps Jews were murdered, not for what they did, but who they were.”
I am on my umpteenth reading of “Religion and the Origins of the Death Camps: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation” by Professor Richard L. Rubenstein in the 1992 edition of his book “After Auschwitz”.
The original book was published in 1966. He made revisions between the two editions. For those who would like to read the entire article, the pages in the paperback edition are 29 - 61. The book is readily available at Amazon and other websites.
Although I am certainly no Freudian, Rubenstein’s insights are most interesting using a Freudian frame of view. For awhile I’ll be quoting extracts from the article, leaving out most of the Freudian conclusions as the other content in the article I find more significant.
Much of the following is nothing new to Holocaust and Nazi scholars, but may be new to others.
The Nazis: “Had their first priority been to win the war, they would never have made the extermination camps so central a concern. They would have used every available talent, Jewish or gentile, in the war effort....
The sheer need for a compliant labor force in wartime should have dictated an entirely different approach, not only to the Jews but to the subject nations as well. Had final victory really been the Nazi aim, their whole conduct of the war would have been different....
The Nazis often seemed far more intent upon achieving irrational victories over defenseless Jews and Gypsies than a real victory over their military opponents.
They won the war that really counted for them, the war against the Jews. Eichmann’s alleged statement that, though all else fail, he would go to his grave content in the knowledge that he had helped to kill more than five million Jews is very much to the point.
Absent normal motives and given the mystique and ritual of National Socialism, it is impossible to avoid the question of religious origins.
Although the Nazis have been called pagans, they were never genuine pagans like the ancient Greeks. They were satanic anti-Christians, saying no to much that Christianity affirmed and saying yes to much that was absolutely forbidden by Christianity.... The Nazis were religious rebels rather than genuine unbelievers.
In one area the Nazis took Christianity very seriously. They did not invent a new villain, but took over the ancient Christian tradition of the Jew as villain and epitome of the darkest evil. Nor did the Nazis create a new hatred. Folk hatred of the Jews is at least as old as Christianity.... The Nazis intensified what they found.”
the number of people who say they are a “survivor” of the death camps is now greater than the number who were supposedly killed in the camps.
amazing.
and yes, i have read the book [s] and in 1987 and 1994 i was in Germany and visited Auschwitz and Sobibor. it is amazing at how much new interpretive construction has been taking place at these camps.
Dave
Dave (aka Bavaria Land):
You obviously don’t know what you are writing about.
You are clearly a member of the National Socialists Party.
You don’t even know which country Auschwitz and Sobibor are located in.
Can you provide what is your primary text on the Holocaust?
"Why is the Holocaust myth so important to ZOG? Why are we told that me must ‘never forget’? Why is Jewish suffering presented as being more unique and terrible than the suffering of any other people?
The answer is simple.
The Holohoax has become the most effective propaganda tool of World Jewry. It provides the Jew with a stick to beat the Goyim into submission with. It legitimises the bandit state of Israel and places the Jew on a moral pedestal so that no matter what crimes he may commit his position is unassailable.”
The Holohoax is also a huge moneymaking enterprise, an endless gravy train of “reparations” and Government grants to museums, foundations and ‘tolerance’ centres.
In an increasing number of European countries debate about the historical facts of the Holohoax has been criminalised - and this is a pointer to how important the myth is to ZOG. Without it the whole rotten pack of cards would collapse within seconds.”
*****Oh yeah, talk to survivors....they tell such stories as:
“Jews were variously steamed to death, gassed by non poisonous diesel exhaust fumes,beaten to death by pedal powered clubbing machines, electrocuted 25,000 at a time on giant metal plates and vaporised by a ‘death ray’.
http://www.skrewdriver.net/sfhoax.html
Submariner and others...can you just look at the evidence and use a little logic. Are you afraid that the illusion of this “holocaust” may vanish?
Few people know the facts about the singular event that helped spark what ultimately became known as World War II - the international Jewish declaration of war on Germany shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power and well before any official German government sanctions or reprisals against Jews were carried out.
The March 24, 1933 issue of The Daily Express of London (shown above) described how Jewish leaders, in combination with powerful international Jewish financial interests, had launched a boycott of Germany for the express purpose of crippling her already precarious economy in the hope of bringing down the new Hitler regime.
It was only then that Germany struck back in response. Thus, if truth be told, it was the worldwide Jewish leadership - not the Third Reich - that effectively fired the first shot in the Second World War. Prominent New York attorney Samuel Untermyer (above right) was one of the leading agitators in the war against Germany, describing the Jewish campaign as nothing less than a “holy war.”
Long before the Hitler government began restricting the rights of the German Jews, the leaders of the worldwide Jewish community formally declared war on the “New Germany” at a time when the U.S. government and even the Jewish leaders in Germany were urging caution in dealing with the new Hitler regime.
The war by the international Jewish leadership on Germany not only sparked definite reprisals by the German government but also set the stage for a little-known economic and political alliance between the Hitler government and the leaders of the Zionist movement who hoped that the tension between the Germans and the Jews would lead to massive emigration to Palestine. In short, the result was a tactical alliance between the Nazis and the founders of the modern-day state of Israel - a fact that many today would prefer be forgotten.
To this day, it is generally (although incorrectly) believed that when Adolf Hitler was appointed German chancellor in January of 1933, the German government began policies to suppress the Jews of Germany, including rounding up of Jews and putting them in concentration camps and launching campaigns of terror and violence against the domestic Jewish population.
the number of people who say they are a “survivor” of the death camps is now greater than the number who were supposedly killed in the camps.
amazing.
and yes, i have read the book [s] and in 1987 and 1994 i was in Germany and visited Auschwitz and Sobibor. it is amazing at how much new interpretive construction has been taking place at these camps.
Dave
Dave (aka Bavaria Land):
You obviously don’t know what you are writing about.
You are clearly a member of the National Socialists Party.
You don’t even know which country Auschwitz and Sobibor are located in.
Can you provide what is your primary text on the Holocaust?
Paul
yes, i know they are in Poland.
bus tours from Germany, 1987 still part of iron curtain thank god for the U.S. Navy.
the rise and fall of the third Reich - William l. shire.
the center for holocaust studies, they will mail you pamphlets if you ask.
also the Simon wiesenthal center.
now, i am not a idiot. i do know that some people were systematically killed.
i just don’t agree on the total number, i also do not think all the camps were “Death” camps. most were factories. and it is also a fact that most of the prisoners starved to death as a result of allied bombing.
it is amazing at how the world fixates on Adolf for the 6 million but at the same time they ignore the U.S.S.R. that has admitted to killing 20+ million in the gulag camps.
Dave.
Dave,
You are indeed in part accurate on much that you wrote above.
It is generally accepted by all the data made available since the fall of Nazi Germany that some five to six million Jews were exterminated by various means, including gassing, shooting, starvation, exposure to the elements. That is far more than “some” people. Most though did not starve to death according to all the scholarly works done—especially as more data comes forward from the Nazi archives, e.g. when East Germany became part of Germany due to the Soviet failure as a nation.
There were death camps and concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Some were in part factories—if one includes the many small camps, then even more factories attached to the camps. Yet the plan conceived and executed was to determine how much nutrition a human being needs for a specific period of time. And then feed that little until one’s essentially free slave labor dies of malnutrition or they are exterminated by gassing and shooting before they die of starvation. Even in the midst of oncoming defeat, rather than keep the slave labor alive and working, they were exterminated by the thousands a day in the various camps.
The world’s “fixation” on the Hilter and the Nazis’ death machinery is that it was the first time that such mass murder occurred on such a scale and in such methods. And that Hitler was focused on the biological extinction of a people, the Jews. Regardless of theological, political, or other forms of assimilation into the German Volk. Of course, he also had in mind the extermination of other peoples too.
The USSR under Stalin is when by far most of the mass murder occurred there. I’ve read that the estimate is more like 30 million human beings. I don’t recall in my readings on these atrocities what the estimates are from mass starvation to mass immediate murder, etc. But Stalin was not nearly as systematic as Hitler. Not to say that Stalin was not systematic. He surely did intend to cause the deaths of millions.
More extractions from “Religion and the Origins of the Death Camps: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation” by Professor Richard L. Rubenstein in the 1992 edition of his book “After Auschwitz”.
Resentment against Christianity and its enforced displacement of the Teutonic gods has been a significant motif in German life and letters since the Napoleonic wars....
Modern German nationalism was first aroused during the War of Liberation against the French, 1806-1813....
Christianity, regarded as a product and imposition of a foreign Latin culture, was resented in influential German circles. Nazism grew in part out of this aspect of German cultural history.
Although Hitler was willing to use the the churches for his own purposes, he was committed to their ultimate elimination.
Shortly after his assumption of power, he revealed his intentions to his associate, Hermann Rauschning: “Neither of the denominations - Catholic or Protestant, they are both the same - has any future left, at least not for the Germans. Fascism may perhaps have its peace with the Church in God’s name. I will do it too. Why not? But that won’t stop me stamping out Christianity in Germany, root and branch. One is either a Christians or a German. You can’t be both”.
Although by no means an anti-Semite, Hegel titled one of his earliest writings, “Is Judea Then the Fatherland of the Teutons?” Hegel complains that Christianity has emptied Valhalla of its gods and forced the German people to accept Jewish gods and fables in place of their own.
This observation presupposes the concept of Volksreligion in which the religion, mythology, and social organization of an ethnic community (Volk) are regarded as a single organic unity. When any element in the constitution of the Volk is displaced or discarded, the unity of the whole is broken.
Such a breach in Volk unity occurred when the indigenous Teutonic gods were displaced by the foreign gods and myths of the Jews. For Hegel, the gods are an objectification of the inner nature of that people. By rejecting their ancestral gods, the Germans were in the deepest sense rejecting themselves.
The young Hegel did not carry his own logic to its ultimate conclusion in action.
He was, however, followed by others, such as Erich Ludendorff and Alfred Rosenberg, who were more prepared than than he to enter that realm.
They concluded that German alienation and self-estrangement could be terminated only by the end of the Jewish gods of Christianity.
Next posting will be regarding the Deicide accusation against the Jews.
“Jewish migration to the Soviet Union, therefore, reduces the number of Jews within the sphere of German occupation to around 3-1/2 million, approximately 3,450,000. From these should be deducted those Jews living in neutral European countries who escaped the consequences of the war.”
There were not 6 million killed, and certainly none by gassing. If extermination was the goal, obviouly starvation & exposure to elements was the cheapest and quickest method, don’t you agree?
Don’t you ever wonder why it is that there were small children among the surivors?
If extermination was the goal wouldn’t it be easy to just take them as fast as they are born and toss them in the trash?
The problem with this is that the media gets people’s emotions so riled up that they fail to use some simple logic. The left brain becomes so overwhelmed that it cannot function.
Paul the article on religion was very interesting. I didn’t know that. I see this as a big part of the reason for the war. The Zionists just could not let religious control get away from them.
For a fuller understaning of this you should watch this 3 part video. (Somewhere I think there is a 4th part) It goes to the roots of Judeo-Christianity, which came out of Egypt with Moses and followers of Pharaoh Akhenaton and his brand of monotheism.
http://www.redicecreations.com/webcast/2009/03mar/RIW-090301.html
