Fighting words from Bishop Walter Mixa, the Bishop of Augsburg.
It has caused a bit of an upset in Germany apparently.
"In the last century, the godless regimes of Nazism and Communism, with their penal camps, their secret police and their mass murder, proved in a terrible way the inhumanity of atheism in practice."
It has caused a bit of an upset in Germany apparently.
This conveniently ignores the role of the Lutheran Church in spreading the "gospel" of Nazism.
ReplyDeleteIt also overlooks the capitulation of the Roman Catholic Church, who with a Concordat rendered themselves toothless. Priests flung into Concentration Camps for sure but..
How would Nazism have succeeded without the participation of Christians both Catholic and non-Catholic.
How would it have succeeded without the participation of Germans for that matter?
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't matter if some Christians oppsed them and some supported them, they were not supporting a Christian ideology.
They were supporting a totalitarian ideology founded on Nationalism, founded on racial superiority, founded on the post-war fallout of WWI and the treaty of Versailles, and founded on a reaction to the "privileges" of clerical, feudal and capitalistic directives.
Many pro-Nazi people thought they were supporting a kind of National Socialism that would bring a unified democracy to Europe, and support the common worker from the above evil forces of capitalism and religion.
If you look at the National Socialist Program (the 25 point plan) you can see the attraction to "noble aims" that suckered many people.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn argues that ten of the twenty-five points are pro-labor, claiming that "the program championed the right to employment and called for the institution of profit sharing, confiscation of war profits, prosecution of userers and profiteers, nationalization of trusts, communalization of department stores, extension of the old-age pension system, creation of a national education program of all classes, prohibition of child labor, and an end to the dominance of investment capital." This is not a case of "ignoring" the effect of various supporters, but really of understanding that this is not a case of proving pet theories about religion being the cause of Nazism.
I am thinking that the Catholic Bishop above was speaking to this common meme, and turning it on it's head.
Nazism may not be the beliefs held by atheists, but it is an ideology that could easily be supported by a sub-sect of atheists, as such an ideology has no place for God, other than as a handy rallying cry to justify it's mandate to those of belief, just as National pride was a rally cry to the youth.
Great reply Zen! :-)
ReplyDeleteRevisionist History?
ReplyDeleteYou bet ya!
Wehrmacht Oath:
"I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that I shall at all times be ready, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath".
Hitler Quotes:
"I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator".
"In short, the results of miscegenation are always the following: (a) The level of the superior race becomes lowered; (b) physical and mental degeneration sets in, thus leading slowly but steadily towards a progressive drying up of the vital sap. The act which brings about such a development is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator. And as a sin this act will be avenged"
"We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession. It combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us, and is convinced that our nation can achieve permanent health from within only on the principle: the common interest before self-interest".
"In the Bible we find the text, 'That which is neither hot nor cold will I spew out of my mouth.' This utterance of the great Nazarene has kept its profound validity until the present day".
I could give you another 100 of these 'atheist' quotes, but you get the idea.
Hilter was the worlds most famous Catholic.
Get over it!
Learn from your mistakes and don't try and push him on-to Atheists and re-write history.
See ya.
Paul.
PS: LM told me I was a Christian because my parents baptised me (just not a practising one)Apparently this rule doesn't apply to dictators.
Being an atheist means you don't believe in God - since Hitler and every other senior Nazi believed in God and talked about him at almost every opportunity it's a bit of a reach to describe them as 'atheists'.
ReplyDeletesince Hitler and every other senior Nazi believed in God and talked about him at almost every opportunity debatable it's a bit of a reach to describe them as 'atheists'.
ReplyDeleteI believe the word used by the Bishop was "Godless" as opposed to atheist and "Godless" they most certainly were.
Well, they weren't Godless. They believed very strongly in God. You might have a different conception of God, but they weren't Godless. Despite which the Bishop specifically said that they proved 'the inhumanity of atheism'. I don't really see how they did that, since whatever they were they obviously weren't atheists.
ReplyDeleteThere's a very good article HERE regarding the numbers killed in the name of religion vs the name of Atheism.
ReplyDeletePeople talk about the Crusades all the time and the Inquisition when it comes to attacking religion in general and Christianity in particular, but if you look at the facts the numbers killed in the name of religion pale in comparison to killings by Athiest regimes.
China under Mao Tse Tung, 26.3 million Chinese. According the Walker Report, 63.7 million over the whole period of time of the Communist revolution in China. Solzhenitsyn says the Soviet Union put to death 66.7 million people. Kampuchea destroyed one third of their entire population of eight million Cambodians. The Chinese at two different times in medieval history, somewhere in the vicinity of 35 million and 40 million people. Ladies and gentlemen, make note that these deaths were the result of organizations or points of view or ideologies that had left God out of the equation. None of these involve religion. And all but the very last actually assert atheism.
It is true that it's possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the detail it produces evil because the individual people are actually living in a rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it can produce it, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We're talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God.
I think the Bishop was talking about a Godless Regime, in the sense that extreme totalitarian ideologies do not display the tenets of Christianity.
ReplyDelete"Godless" in the sense that being stripped of respect for the value of life, is stripped of all humanity.
The Bishop was not saying the people were not believers in God (or a God), but rather, a totalitarian state is how he sees the end result of atheism in practice.
The message he wanted to deliver was that atheism is on the increase in society and therefore we will see (in his opinion) an increase in more extremist, "godless" behaviour.
He is obviously working from a framework that sees a denial of a Christian God as the path to a mindset where "everything is permitted".
He is trying to convey the sense of an issue, with fiery rhetoric, and has little chance in communicating this because of a difference in interpretation of his meaning, and that there is already a certain amount of bias against Christianity.
Technically (and this is how many are choosing to interpret it), his analogy fails because "godless" allows people to argue other Gods, and "atheists" allow people to argue other ideologies, even if the regimes essentially require a rejection of Christianity.
The Bishop needs to choose his words more carefully if he wants to accurately communicate his idea to atheists and the anti-Christians.
I think the statement interesting though, because the criticism leveled at him becomes hypocritical when the same people try to explain fascism or communism as being based in Catholicism (or in Christianity).
Any serious consideration would conclude that it would be just as weak to make fascism a "male" issue, or a "German" issue, although there seemed to be a large number of German males that went along with Hitler.
Again I say, power mad dictators will use any belief to justify their ambition.
Hitler can genuinely believe that he is JFK, he might call his actions "Christian", and that God wants him to start a war and kill millions.
It doesn't actually mean he is JFK, it doesn't mean his actions are Christian, and it doesn't mean God wanted him to do this.
Why you want to believe Hitler on this is another issue.
As far as the Catholic Bishop is concerned Hitler created a "godless" regime in every sense of his understanding of what godless entails, and the actions speak louder than the propaganda some are willing to swallow.
Let's try it another way.
If we described Fascism as "inhuman" and yet said "Hitler was a human, therefore his regime is humanist" we would obviously reject such logic.
Especially humanists, who are currently carving out the term "humanism" to mean something along the lines of a set of ethics and morals derived solely from human reason.
So how Hitler and Stalin viewed God is somewhat irrelevant to the main point.
The fascist and communist regimes under Hitler and Stalin were demonstrably "godless" in the sense that the Bishop argues.
A secularist or humanist would perhaps prefer the term "inhuman".
Isn't it funny how morons like that Canterbury wanker say that hitler was a christian because he said he was. Yet when jihadists bomb and murder in the name of Islam, screaming allah akbar and such, the useful idiots scream shrilly that, that is not the real Islam!
ReplyDeleteI will say this about atheists though, not all of them are evil SOBs. They're the ones who choose not to believe and leave it at that, they don't go around screaming and ranting at those who do and they even recognize the good that Christianity brings.
The ones you can never take your eye off are the leftie ones, not only do they not believe, they want to make everyone else like them too, by force if necessary, they are not completely anti-religion, they just hate Christianity and they are the ones that will he happy to line us all up next to a ditch somewhere and be done with us, if given the chance. They are the ones fascinated by evil ideologies like communism and want to give it another chance.
Zen - your effort to redefine and contextualise the Bishop's words (how post-modern of you) are about twenty times longer than his original statement. Let me offer a more simple explanation: the man was a fool who didn't know what he was talking about.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with Mao and Stalin is not that they were atheists, but that they were mass murderers. Since there have been many atheist leaders who were not mass murderers and many religious leaders who were mass murderers it's pretty obvious there is no causal link between atheism and mass murder.
No mksviews;
ReplyDeleteCanterbury Atheists is neither a moron nor a wanker.
He is spiritually blind that is all.
Sometimes as we struggle through life in a fallen world we loose sight of our Lord and Creator. This has been described by some Mystics as "the long dark night of the soul".
The thing is that those who most vehemently argue against the Lord sometimes in later life become one of his most ardent advocates.
Paul himself is named after one such.
Danyl, can you name a few religious leaders (Catholic, I presume) who were mass murderers.To suggest that there is no link between mass murder and atheism is foolhardy in the extreme.Mao and Stalin, not mass atheists is a blatant lie. True, not every atheist is a mass-murderer (self-evident). However it is far easier for mass murder to occur when atheists (who obviously do not see any human made in the image and likeness of God) are in positions of power.
ReplyDeleteP.S. A Christian is NOT an individual who identifies themselves by their words (I am a....) Rather it is the deeds that reflect and reveal their belief obviously whilst professing their faith.
"The Enlightenment makes much of the suffering and death caused by the awful things Christians have done--the Crusades and the Inquisition seem to be the standard examples, although if I were to give the Enlightenment advice on how to conduct its case, I would suggest that it pay more attention to the Thirty Years' War. But with whatever justification these things can be ascribed to the Christian religion, such episodes as the Terror of the 1790s, the Great Terror of the 1930s, and Pol Pot's experiment in social engineering in the 1970s can with the same justification be ascribed to the Enlightenment. And these caused thousands of times as many deaths and incomparably greater suffering than all of the pogroms and religious wars in the history of Europe. T he Crusades et al. were quite ordinary episodes in the immemorial string of crimes that mainly compose what the world calls history and what St Paul called this present darkness. The French Revolution was, as Burke was the first to realize, something new, a new kind of horror. The new kind of horror did not, of course, really hit its stride till about seventy years ago. Let no one say that I have blamed the great post-Christian horrors of the last two centuries on the Enlightenment. My claim is this: lay out an argument for the conclusion that responsibility for the crimes of the Crusaders and the Inquisition is to be laid at the door of Christianity, and I will produce a parallel argument of about equal merit--not very great, in my opinion--for the conc lusion that responsibility for the crimes of the Committee of Public Safety, the Soviet Communist Party, and the Khmer Rouge is to be laid at the door of the Enlightenment." Peter Van Inwagen.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting idea.
ReplyDeleteAnd just to make the point obvious - the age of enlightenment is seen as the period where reason alone becomes the source of authority.
Just been watching a doco. on the history channel about the Waffen SS.Makes me further realize how ignorant the comments by Canterbury Atheists (attention-seeking title) and Danyl.Do you not know that Jesus and his mother were Jews? Do you not know how many Catholics were murdered during the reign of Hitler and Stalin? Do you not know how Catholics(loyal to Rome) are presently being persecuted in China? We certainly are living in a time of inverted truth (formerly known as LIES). To suggest that there is no causal link between atheism and mass-murder is deluded thinking. The same deluded thinking that leads to mass murder.
ReplyDeleteNature abhors a vacuum. Any society that removes God from the public sphere and just as bad, denies the existence of God will invite Satan to fill this void.Look at NZ society. It is unraveling at an alarming rate.We are patching up the symptoms with an absolute refusal to examine the causes.
Do you not know that Jesus and his mother were Jews?Funnily enough I did know that. By the end of his life Hitler believed in something he called 'Positive Christianity' in which Jesus was an Aryan superman sent by God to fight against the Jews. So you can make the argument that Hitler was crazy, and that he wasn't a 'real' Christian - depending on your definition of Christianity - but you simply can't claim that he was 'Godless' or an athiest, no matter how desperately Zen tries to redefine those words to mean something else.
ReplyDeleteDanyl, I do not disagree with you on the focus of your comments. Especially the part about Hitler being crazy, and his definition of Christianity is warped, as he saw everything through the prism of race and a hatred of Jews.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I disagree with your assertion that I am redefining the argument.
Let's start from the beginning. The quote was:
In the last century, the godless regimes of Nazism and Communism, with their penal camps, their secret police and their mass murder, proved in a terrible way the inhumanity of atheism in practice."My comments address what made such regimes 'godless'.
Also, it's worth a separate post to discuss the (in my opinion) unbalanced weighting people give to Hitler on Catholicism in terms of his personal beliefs.
ReplyDeleteMy reading of Mein Kampf makes it clear to me that Hitler was very astute and dispassionate in terms of evaluating political situations and turning them to his use. The Catholic Church falls into this category, and whilst he might make frequent exhortations to God to justify his Nationalistic and Ayran supremacy, it wasn't Catholic faith driving his ambition.
His conclusion from Mein Kampf underlines his focus:
If, in the world of our present parliamentary corruption, it becomes more and more aware of the profoundest essence of its struggle, feels itself to be the purest embodiment of the value of race and personality and conducts itself accordingly, it will with almost mathematical certainty some day emerge victorious from its struggle.
Just as Germany must inevitably win her rightful position on this earth if she is led and organized according to the same principles.
A state which in this age of racial poisoning dedicates itself to the care of its best racial elements must some day become lord of the earth.
May the adherents of our movement never forget this if ever the magnitude of the sacrifices should beguile them to an anxious comparison with the possible results.
Speaking of words which can have many meanings, depending upon the context, my take on Clive James discussing humanism is in a cultural sense, even as we see an increasing use of the term Humanist to discuss a political philosophy.
ReplyDeleteMaking civilisation civilised
An Atheist Recants
ReplyDeleteYup, still possible. Any takers?
http://www.ncregister.com/daily/an_atheist_recants/