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Do liberals and atheists honestly think Hitler represents Christianity?
- Thread starter ronki23
- Start date
PruePhillip
Well-Known Member
Liked your point. Pol Pot and Mao are to Buddhism what Hitler was to Catholicism.
And also, what Stalin was to the Russian Orthodox church (of which he was a member)
A complete abrogation.
But there IS a connection with atheism. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky both wrote about
what will replace Christianity - Nietzche said it would be nihilism and Dostoevsky said
it would be totalitarianism. Both philosophies played their part in the mass killings of the
20th Century - a lot of it within what was the old Christendom of Europe.
HonestJoe
Well-Known Member
Exactly as stupid as thinking Mao and Pol Pot represent all non-religious people as your thread about them clearly implied.
Bob the Unbeliever
Well-Known Member
No. The subject only ever comes up, when christians try to claim Mao, or Stalin created "atheist" governments.
But I have even read comments from christians, claiming Hitler was also an atheist as well, that his government was "atheistic".
None of these statements are accurate, of course. All three of the ones I mentioned? Dictators who had extreme personality disorders, including narcissism, paranoia and worse. Oh, and not a little bit of sadism to wash it all down with.
But to make matters worse? All were very charismatic, and managed to get huge numbers of sheep-like followers to put them into power.
I used to think so as well. But it becomes increasingly harder to be so sure.
Particularly in these times of ever increasingly surrender to authoritarianism and dogmaticism.
In any case, I think that there is a considerable distance between pointing out that Hitler was probably a Christian and seeing him as a representative of Christianity as a whole. A warning call, an example of its worse tendencies running amok, sure. But hardly a representative.
That said, I still fail to understand why people even try to criticize atheism by raising the names of Mao and Pol Pot. It is just about as straightforward a strawman as they come.
ronki23
Well-Known Member
Saying it's a 'strawman' argument that Mao and Pol Pot killed in the name of anti-theism also means that you can't blame Christianity on Hitler
You can blame 4 things on Adolf: PTSD, amphetamines, cocaine and opoids. Those 4 things are what made him responsible for the death of over 10 million people directly and a further 70 million indirectly. Drugs are bad
Who the hell is blaming Christianity on Hitler?
I've only ever seen it as a direct response to Pol Pot or Mao being athiesm. Pointing out the idiocy of blaming one guy for religious or anti religious sentiments.
Btw didn't Hitler once express disappointment in the apparent "timidness" of Christianity?
I'll see if I can find a link, but I swear there's some correspondence he has where he's all upset that they're not as aggressive as Islam or whatever. (Not that I agree with anything Hitler so much as whispered in his life. I'm just relaying what I remember from History class.)
If we're considering the relationship between Hitler and Christianity, then I think there are things that reflect much more on Christianity than Hitler's personal beliefs do:
- the way he drew inspiration for much of his anti-Semitism from writings of Martin Luther that also informed Protestantism at a deep level.
- the way that countless Christians - and Christian leaders - followed him and proclaimed that the ideals of National Socialism were consistent with their faith.
Cooky
Veteran Member
Above all, methamphetamines or "crystal meth".
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.history.com/.amp/news/inside-the-drug-use-that-fueled-nazi-germany
Dekrikos Augustine
Life Person Thing
I didn't intend to imply that, I merely was referencing all the support and affection he got from the Catholic church.
I agree. He seemed to care about a different kind of big picture, one where religion only mattered halfway.
I don’t think Hitler represented Christianity, but he certainly didn’t represent liberalism either
dfnj
Well-Known Member
It doesn't matter what type of government you have. It doesn't matter if you are left wing or right wing. It doesn't matter if you are a Republican or a Democrat. All power corrupts. People who attain power undergo a psychology transformation in which they have nothing but contempt and hatred for the people they have power over. Once the corruption takes hold or is complete, the person in power does not see the people they have power over as human beings. Instead they see the people they have power over not has human beings but as insects or mindless automaton machines. And there is no moral consequence for stepping on an ant or destroying a mindless machine.
Don't discount communism. Marx had some very interesting criticisms of laissez faire capitalism:
That is exactly wrong, sorry. And a serious mistake it is.
Christianity literally purports to tell people that it knows what is best for all due to divinity-backed privilege.
Most people know better than to fully trust such a promise most of the time, but the end result is still the misplacement of theism into a role of certainty and motivation that ill suits that belief, with manifestations that include anti-vaccination movements, political irresponsibilty, and mass suicides.
Arguably, it also includes not only Hitler's self-entitlement and insanity, but also and most decisively the unhealthy attachment to promises of miraculous recovery that enabled him among the German people - perhaps even among his foreign supporters, who were many and varied, including many Americans and religious authorities. The existence of a Hitler - of many people as him at any given time or place - is perhaps inevitable, but we as people ought to aim at a future when those madmen no longer become politically influential.
Even today, even after Jim Jones, Heaven's Gate and Hitler himself, far too many people actually find claims of heavenly support a cause for reassurance when it is exactly the opposite.
The bottom line is that Christianity (among other theistic beliefs, most notably Islaam) aims to be a motivational force, and often succeeds at that, and not so much on accepting the responsibility for the results and the duty of course correcting when necessary.
For good or worse, nothing in the whole spectrum of non-theism can even conceivably offer a comparably inconsequential promise. Whatever motivational promises and hopes are to be found can't be sustained by non-theism itself; it just gets out of the way.
That is no justification of violence or even of sudden political change. And that is exactly the point. Refusal to support or to take seriously theistic beliefs lacks motivational power.
I am not really well informed about the excesses of the Mao and Pol Pot regimes, but I feel certain that blaming either on any form of non-theism is very much a confused view. Whatever motivations that may have been are certainly of an entirely different nature, due to the very fact that they are motivations of some form.
So is reliance on theism over responsiblity and common sense.
QuestioningMind
Well-Known Member
The only times I ever hear anyone mention Hitler's Christianity is in response to someone else attempting to suggest that some brutal communist dictator who tried to abolish religion in order to get people to worship the state in some way represents atheists.
Bob the Unbeliever
Well-Known Member
Well, sure! Isn't that the point?
On the other hand? Since, according to the label, 'Christianity' is supposed to transform and make people be much better people, if they are christians, than if they are not? (whereas atheism makes no such claims). Pointing out that Hitler was, indeed, a Christian In Good Standing does rather prove that just being a christian does nothing to help a person be a better person.
I can also, correctly, blame much of his belief on Christianity. Historically speaking, there was a faction within Catholicism, that taught that the Jews were directly responsible for the death of Jesus (this fell out of favor, once the German atrocities were revealed world-wide). Hitler, in his personal writings, refers to these ideas, and makes much ado of them.
And do not a person's beliefs affect their policy, if they are in a position to make policy?
HonestJoe
Well-Known Member
I don’t blame Christianity for Hitler and I don’t blame atheism for Mao or Pol Pot. You’re the one with the double standard here.
Augustus
…
Do liberals and atheists honestly think Hitler represents Christianity?
No, because he wasn't a Christian.
In early 1937, he was declaring that ‘Christianity was ripe for destruction’, and that the Churches must yield to the ‘primacy of the state’, railing against any compromise with ‘the most horrible institution imaginable’...
Hitler put forward once more his vision of the East as Germany’s ‘future India’, which would become within three or four generations ‘absolutely German’. There would, he made clear, be no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches. For the time being, he ordered slow progression in the ‘Church Question’. ‘But it is clear,’ noted Goebbels, himself among the most aggressive anti-Church radicals, ‘that after the war it has to be generally solved … There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world-view.
Ian Kershaw - Hitler
No, because he wasn't a Christian.
In early 1937, he was declaring that ‘Christianity was ripe for destruction’, and that the Churches must yield to the ‘primacy of the state’, railing against any compromise with ‘the most horrible institution imaginable’...
Hitler put forward once more his vision of the East as Germany’s ‘future India’, which would become within three or four generations ‘absolutely German’. There would, he made clear, be no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches. For the time being, he ordered slow progression in the ‘Church Question’. ‘But it is clear,’ noted Goebbels, himself among the most aggressive anti-Church radicals, ‘that after the war it has to be generally solved … There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world-view.
Ian Kershaw - Hitler
Jumi
Well-Known Member
That's no sin of yours that is if he really was such a thing anywhere except in propaganda. There was a quote that he would become a real vegetarian once he won the war, instead of just faking it like a politician. It was to promote him as some kind of pure guy, which he obviously was not. And remember there's been bad guys who ate meat also, is it a sin of us meat eaters what Stalin did? No.
Jumi
Well-Known Member
You can't win with quotes as there are quite a multiple views on Hitler and even fake stuff that the Nazis and their opponents produced both during and after the war. You read a few books by academics and see the consensus isn't really that.
Jumi
Well-Known Member
Right. There's probably evil folks who believed/disbelieved just about everything and anything. It's a strange idea that some set of beliefs would be a burden on innocents.