Saturday, September 27, 2014

Did Adolf get right with God?

Let's talk about Hitler again, shall we? That's always a fun topic, right?

Here's the thing. The God-botherers keep trying to avoid the sad truth - that Hitler was, in fact, a Christian. I've just had a 3-day argument with a guy on Twitter who doesn't want to admit it, and he had two different arguments. The first is just to lie about the subject, and the second is to claim that Hitler wasn't a Christian because he didn't follow the proper "Christian virtues."

Here's the problem: Hitler was an amazingly private man. He didn't share his private thoughts with a lot of people, and that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. On the one hand, we have the writings of Goebbels and Bormann, who claimed he spoke badly of Christianity to them. Unfortunately, these were private conversations with no way to verify them, and both men were open, contemptuous atheists, who wanted Hitler to believe the way they did.

And then you get books like Hitler's Cross, written by Erwin Lutzer, an evangelical pastor, who desperately wanted Hitler not to have believed in the same things he did.

But on the other hand, we have his extensive use of Christian themes in his writings and speeches. We also have the fact that the Wehrmacht had the motto "God is with us," which seems fairly straightforward.

We also have the fact that Hitler was raised Catholic, and went to a monastary school; he was even an altar boy. The Vatican had an agreement with the Nazis called the Reichconcordat. Hitler never left the Catholic church, and (unlike Goebbels), was never excommunicated. But, to be honest, he wasn't Catholic. What he actually was, was a member of the religion he sponsored and supported, the Deutsche Christen (German Christian) movement.

See, the problem with standard Christian doctrine was that it was a little too Jewy for Adolph and his party boys. So, back in 1907, a guy named Max Bewer wrote a book called Der Deutsche Christus ("The German Christ"), where his theory was that Jesus was a product of Mary cuckolding Joseph with some German soldiers from the Roman Garrison (that's the body - the whole "spirit" thing still comes from God).

Philosophically, they ignored (and in some cases, removed) the Old Testament (you know, what some people even today call "the Hebrew Bible"), and pushed what they called "positive Christianity" (Positives Christentum) - less stress on that Lutheran "sinfulness" thing, more on redemption (in fact, if you strip away the Nazi overtones, it's similar to what mega-churches preach today).

Was Hitler a "good Christian"? Well, that's where you have to define your terms. Was he raised a Christian? Yes, he was. Did he go to church? Why, yes. He did. He also prayed with his troops, and insisted that chaplains travel with his troops, too.

Did he attend church every Sunday? Probably not. He was a busy man: had a country to run, other countries to invade, people to oppress. Kind of like Donald Trump.

An argument can be made that "Hitler was more of an opportunist than a good church-goer." But that doesn't negate his Christianity: my grandfather, an Army chaplain, used to talk about "Et Cetera Christians" (ETC - Easter Thanksgiving Christmas).

Most Christians go to church out of habit, mouthing the words because that's expected. And then they go about their daily lives, slandering people, ignoring the sick and the hungry, and generally ignoring all the good things that Jesus Christ supported ("Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Matthew 25:31-46)

And remember: For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2:8-10) And while you may not agree with him, Hitler always thought he was doing good works
So the basic argument against Hitler being a Christian boils down to "Some people who hated Christianity said he hated Christianity too!" and "Some of his writings opposed the other churches and he didn't like the Jewish parts of Christianity! I'm going to ignore all the pro-Christian things he said!"

Once you strip those away, you're left with "Well, he did un-Christian things," which would certainly be an effective argument to make, if you were likewise going to say that nobody can be a Christian: Hitler may have done more horrific acts than most, but who actually lives up to the words of Jesus?

For example, even if you're lying about Hitler, you're still lying.

10 comments:

  1. Well, I think you would have trouble finding much evidence that Hitler actually believed in Christian doctrine. He was, like almost everyone in Austria at the time, born and brought up as a Catholic, but he seems to have abandoned his religious belief in the course of rejecting everything that had anything to do with his father. He tolerated the Church during most of his rule because it was too much trouble to wipe it out, but it seems likely that it was his eventual intention to replace it with a sort of state-worship with himself as the chief figure of adulation.

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    1. It's actually difficult to determine if anyone believes anything, since mind-reading is a questionable hobby these days. And "it seems likely that..." isn't really an argument that holds water either. Not only did he never "wipe out" the church, but he helped establish one. (Their Reichsbishop turned out to be a good Nazi, but a terrible politician, so they never got much traction, but they kept him on anyway.)

      The problem is in definition: what makes somebody a Christian? For most of America, the answer is "Well, I go to church. I pray. And that's pretty much all I do." Are you going to say they aren't Christian after all? After they've invested so much time in church socials? That seems kind of rude.

      Do any of them really believe everything in the Bible? Many have admitted publicly that they don't; social pressure being what it is, a lot of others won't admit (for example) that they might not believe what their spouse so loudly professes.

      Going off the evidence, Hitler attended church, prayed with his troops, and ran a remarkably Christian army for somebody who the Religious Right want to declare an atheist. By any unbiased definition of the term, he was a Christian.

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    2. The problem for me is that I don't know how to separate the term from bias. I don't think Jesus or his followers would have understood the concept and Christians have been murdering each other over that definition for a long time. Anyway, in my opinion he was no less Christian than Alexander VI and no more. As far as I'm concerned there is no real definition of what it means nor any single authority to be consulted and so I have to agree. Hitler was a Christian and having been baptized and never excommunicated, a Roman Catholic.

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  2. I often smile when I'm told that Islam has nothing to do with cutting off heads and blowing up buildings and all that stuff. Religions are good at excusing themselves and pretending to disown parts of their doctrines or the people who take such doctrines seriously. Does it matter whether Osama bin Laden was or was not a Muslim or a good or bad Muslim? What he did was saturated with Islamic motivation and ideas he gained from being a Muslim and how many Islamic men of importance praised him with faint damnation or simply looked the other way and refused to get involved?. I think the same goes for Hitler. He didn't get his antisemitism from the Rig Veda, he got it from the slander and libel and hate preaching of Christianity since the day Christianity became a Roman religion. A certain attitude toward "the Jews" lies at the core of Christian doctrine no matter how it's packaged as something else. Hitler was more than willing to use this traditional hate to his own advantage and with all the passion plays and pogroms and punitive laws against Jews in Europe he found willing allies nearly everywhere. Jews were rounded up in full view of the Vatican which took blood money to keep quiet. Judas? Yeah right. The pope took a million times more pieces of silver and let millions die while mumbling about not getting involved. "The Jews" didn't kill Jesus, the Romans did and they have been doing it ever since.

    I there's damnation to be assigned here, I think more about how the Church didn't excommunicate him much less denounce him and even cooperated with him several quid pro quo ways. What the hell is a "good christian" anyway? It depends on whom you listen to. Which side of the many deadly and interminable wars between sects and denominations and churches were the "right" and "good" ones?

    Hell, Jesus did unchristian things and the very idea that certain things are essentially or intrinsically Christian is a shabby and hard to support bit of propaganda. Hitler was as much a Christian as Tomas de Torquemada and any number of Popes.

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    1. Capt, I think we are in agreement, religion is the root of all evil. Atrocities committed against others is always proclaimed in the name of God, Allah or whoever is the central figure of a particular religion. Personally I'm hoping the Rapture comes soon and removes these vile Christians from the Earth so the rest of us can live in peace and I REALLY hope Islam has a Rapture equivalent so they can leave too.

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    2. I'd say faith -- the adherence without reason to doctrine -- would be a better root. Some faith's aren't really religions, but I'm nitpicking. The idea that one can do all sorts of otherwise evil things and get right with god by saying magic words or performing a ritual is almost sure to inspire evil. Who would have the courage to be a suicide bomber without the promise of heaven -- and then there's the famous quote from the Albegensian Crusade "kill them all, God will know his own."

      I've heard so many sermons based on the idea that criminals can join Jesus in heaven if only they believe and people suck it up because religion makes them feel guilty. How many ever see the insult to God in this? How it reduces him to a mechanism? That it requires God to obey limitations and rules administrated by men?

      It's often observed that religions teach ethics and morality and far less often observed that those things are expressed mostly in terms of obedience and drastic punishment. Virtue as its own reward is more akin to secular humanism. A couple of years ago the Secular Humanists ran an ad campaign: "Be Good for Goodness Sake" and any number of churches blasted this as heresy and satanism. I think that alone tells quite a story. Organized religion is about power and protecting and projecting power and nothing else.

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  3. Martin Luther, who broke away from the corrupt RCC, carried on the tradition of antisemitism with his unrelenting attacks and slanders on the Jews. The Reformation marinated in antisemitism and Luther was its most ardent mouthpiece. Capt. Fogg is correct, the Holocaust was facilitated by Christianity.

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  4. Luther! When I was young and studying German, the story told was that he chased the devil out of his privy by throwing an ink pot at him. Turns out it was actually a fistful of his own shit, but they wanted to clean up the story. Brother Martin has indeed been sanitized for mass consumption.

    He wrote Von den Juden und ihren Lügen or Of The Jews and their Lies in 1543, after seeing that German Jews weren't going to convert because they could now read the gospels in German. He advocated burning them alive.
    .
    At the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade in the 13th century., one of the charges leveled by the Church against the Gnostic Cathars is that they refused to persecute Jews. As a result a good part of France was brutally exterminated for heresy.

    Anti-Semitism doesn't entirely explain Hitler, but it explains why I feel sick when people talk about "christian values" Really, what is there so good about Christianity that wouldn't be just as good in a secular society?

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    1. Nothing really to add, Captain, but I agree completely.

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