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FAQ: Hitler the "Good Christian"
« on: 2002-03-15 05:01:18 » |
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This will become properly FAQified when there is time In the meantime, it is a question which has arisen repeatedly in this forum and so is included here without editing.
[Sodom] I dare say that without Christianity, Hitler would have had no reference from which to hate the Jewish people.
[David Heighton] Your statement is without proof, reason or support of any kind.
[Hermit] Not at all. Sodom made the (valid point) that Hitler hated the Jews (at least partly) because of their role in Christianity, as he grew up in the same mind-set that lead Martin Luther to issue his diatribes against the Jewish. If you want to see really virulent anti-Semitism, try "On the Jews and their lies" by Martin Luther - this according to Julius Streicher (the ninth child of a Roman Catholic primary school teacher who also became a school teacher in Nuremberg) was one of Hitler's inspirational sources. As Sodom said, this background provided his reference for UTism.
[Hermit] I imagine that the following is sufficient proof, reason and support for Sodom's statement: "My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people." -Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)
[David Heighton] People all over the world have often hated "outsiders" (see the Atheist-Chinese Cultural Revolution with its book burning anti-intellectualism). English even gets one of its insults from the Greek word for outsider: "barbarian." On the other hand, Jesus was a Jew, Paul was a Jew. In fact the only Writer in the Bible (that I know of) not a Jew was Luke.
[Hermit] Err, you show how little you know of the bible and language in this paragraph. Barbarian referred to the way that strangers sounded to some ancient peoples. They went "Bar-Bar-Bar". A very ancient word indeed, as upper Egyptian used ba-ba-ba, the Greeks used barbarikos (m) to mean non-Greek, and the Romans used barbaricus (m) for a barbarian or foreigner. Russian uses "Barbaros" and Georgian (not from Greek stems) uses "Barbarosi". It is much older than Greek, and the insult too predates the Greeks. According to Robert Eisenman, Paul was not a Jew, and certainly much of the anti-semite sentiment in the NT dates from post aramaic writings i.e. they were first written in Greek. "Luke" is by no means the worst offender, and much of this material almost certainly is post 200CE revisionism as it matches the anti-Semitism of Rome in that period.
[David Heighton] However, Hitler's beliefs and actions were supported by the so-called "science of evolution". Evolution teaches that those individuals or groups that have some advantage over another competing group use that advantage to increase their access to the limited natural resources, thus increasing their progeny. This is what Hitler and Nazism did. Have you looked into the Atheists and Evolutionsits that joined the Nazi party?
[Hermit] Who the hell said this? Please quote sources. Evolution is not a science, not even a "so called science" except possibly by you. Evolution is an observed reality, a number of theories exist to explain these facts. Evolution is an area of study within the natural sciences. To indicate that the Nazi party was made up of "Atheists and Evolutionsits" (sic) is as vile a calumny as I have read lately. Has David Heighton not realized that the Nazi party was firmly against the "godless communists" and as such against atheism and atheists? Has the author not read Mein Kampf? "... I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews. I am doing the Lord's work." Adolf Hitler. Years later, when in power, he quoted those same words in a Reichstag speech in 1938.
[Hermit] Hitler's Germany amalgamated state with church. Soldiers of the vermacht wore belt buckles inscribed with the following: "Gott mit uns" (God is with us). His troops were often sprinkled with holy water by the priests. It was a real Christian country whose citizens were indoctrinated by both state and church and blindly followed all authority figures, political and ecclesiastical.
[Hermit] Hitler, like some of the today's politicians and preachers, politicized "family values." He liked corporeal punishment in home and school. Under his administration, Jesus prayers became mandatory in all schools. This sounds more like something a member of the "Religious Wrong" would propose than an atheist stance to me.
[David Heighton] If you would care to look a little deeper into the confrontation between Christianity and Nazism, you would learn a great deal.
[Hermit] I have looked very deeply into it. My father's (humanist, socialist, atheist) family fled Germany and escaped through occupied Europe during the 1940s, so it is of no little interest to me. You presume too much upon our ignorance. And I much doubt that I will learn anything new from your references if they are a piece with this letter.
[David Heighton] My suggestions are below:
[David Heighton] -(I can't remember the exact title) Martin Gardner's (an atheist for all intents and purposes) book "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" declares that anyone who links the teachings of Jesus [and Paul for that matter] with those of Nazism are committing blasphemy. What does blasphemy mean to Mr. Gardner? I take it to mean blasphemy against THE TRUTH. Remember, this is the scholarly conclusion of an *Atheist*, so you cannot write it off as Christian verbal maneuvering.
[Hermit] First addressing your assertion about Martin Gardner, a respected skeptic and scientific author whom I greatly respect, I suggest you read "The Flight of Peter Fromm" by Martin Gardner. This is a semi-autobiographical work and he leaves us in no confusion that while he rejected much of his original beliefs (he started off a fundamentalist born of religious parents), at the time that he wrote the book that I think you are thinking of (Gardner, Martin. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1957), he still accepted the idea of gods.
[Hermit] To any atheist, "blasphemy" is a meaningless term. Blasphemy is defined as "a : the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence for God b : the act of claiming the attributes of deity". As atheists accept that there are no gods to insult, I find it exceptionally strange that you should claim that Martin Gardner wrote this. Particularly as I do not remember it, and the word does not appear in the index. I will try to reread my copy next week.
[Hermit] What is the "truth", and why is it capitalized? It seems to me that you may well lack education as well as manners. Certainly the more of this letter I read, the more I am reminded of "Christian verbal maneuvering".
[David Heighton] http://answering-islam.org/Q-A-panel/hitler.html
[Hermit] You need to add something to this URL. If it ever worked, it no longer does so.
[David Heighton] http://www.conservative-digest.com/christian/apologetics/apologetics.html (see: "Hitler Was Not a Christian" )
[Hermit This link too is broken, like so much of the other ideas espoused at this site.
[Hermit] Here are some accurate historical works:
Helmreich, Ernst Christian, "The German Churches Under Hitler," Wayne State University Press, 1979
Hitler, Adolf, "Mein Kampf," translated by Ralph Manheim, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971
Laffin, John "Hitler Warned Us: THe Nazis' Master Plan for a Master Race," Brasseys Inc., 1995
Scholder, Klaus, "The Churches and the Third Reich, Vol 1" Fortress Press, 1977
Scholder, Klaus, "The Churches and the Third Reich, Vol 2" Fortress Press, 1977
Snyder, Louis L., "Hitler's Elite, Shocking Profiles of the Reich's Most Notorious Henchmen," Berkley Books, 1990
Toland, John, "Adolf Hitler," Anchor Books Doubleday, 1976
Macfarland, Charles S., "The New Church and the New Germany," Macmillan Co.
[David Heighton] -Speech on Christian-Jewish Relations Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts (United States ID: 111939 - 09/17/1998 - 0:39 By: O'Connor, John, Cardinal, Catholic Church, New York, NY Cardinal O'Connor talked about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. He said that Christian-Jewish relations today depend on understanding that Hitler used the Holocaust to destroy both Judaism and Christianity and in this way to destroy God. He read an essay he wrote for the 50th anniversary of Krystalnacht, when synagogues and Jewish businesses were destroyed and many persons killed.
[Hermit] Hitler was a Roman Catholic, baptized into that religio-political institution as an infant in Austria. He became a communicant and an altar boy in his youth and was confirmed as a "soldier of Christ" in that church. Its worst doctrines never left him. He was steeped in its liturgy, which contained the worlds "perfidious Jew." This hateful statement was not removed until 1961. "Perfidy" means treachery. It took the Roman Catholic Church 50 years to weasely apologize for the role they played in the "glorious" 3rd Reich while attempting to minimize their role often attempting (as does the good bishop) to portray themselves as fellow victims. In 1941 he said to General Gerhart Engel, "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so." Hitler never left his church, and his church never left him. The Pope in fact, contracted with Hitler and his fascist friends Franco and Mussolini, giving them veto power over whom the pope could appoint as a bishop in Germany, Spain, and Italy. The three thugs agreed to surtax the Catholics of these countries and send the money to Rome in exchange for making sure the state could control the church. Acclaimed Hitler biographer John Toland explains his heartlessness as follows: "Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite the detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within him its teaching that the Jews was the killer of god. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god. ..." I find it highly offensive that you should quote a bishop in that church as a source of apologetica for Nazism.
<snip of further obscure and unfollowable Christian references and jottings.>
[David Heighton] There are others on the net. Try being less joyfully willing to believe only evil about Christians; THAT is how anti-semitism got started, which lead to Nazism and the Holocaust.What will your antichristian words lead to?
[Hermit] Perhaps a measure of balance for revisionist Christian apologists. Why don't you do some research yourself, instead of blathering about things you self-evidently know nothing about.
[Hermit] Perhaps dheighto@hotmail had never heard of Israel Zangwill before. He will at least not have the excuse next time around of not having heard what Zangwill said, "The Jews are a frightened people. Nineteen centuries of Christian love have broken down their nerves." I guess "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt..." (Stuart Smalley)
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