Why not? Here's what he said on Kate Clancy tackles Evolutionary Psychology.
I’ve still got plans to post more on this subject, but an unfortunate event has blocked me. I was going to make my next post on evolutionary psychology one that focused on some of the papers, and in particular, I wanted to discuss a good paper or two, so that I could start off on the right tone. And people sent me links and papers.I understand his pain. I've often asked for good examples of evolutionary psychology and gotten nothing but garbage. For example, an evolutionary psychologist named Gad Saad once sent me a list of The Great, Profound, and Valuable Works of Evolutionary Psychology. At some point we have to question the value of an entire field if it can't come up with even a handful of high quality papers.
Only problem: they were all awful. Every one. I couldn’t believe that even these papers that some people were telling me were the best of the bunch were so lacking in rigor and so rife with unjustified assumptions. I read through about a dozen before I gave up in disgust and decided that there were better things to do in my time.
I’d ask again, but I was burned so badly on that last go-round that I’d have a jaundiced view of any recommendation now.
I had the same problem looking for good astrobiology papers...
ReplyDelete(http://rrresearch.fieldofscience.com/2011/05/examples-of-good-astrobiology-please.html)
That one made me shower my keyboard with a mouthful of my morning coffee. (But it's OK!).
DeleteIt is hard to do research with N=0 samples ;-)
Someday Larry perhaps you'll realize that evolutionary psychology is just a particularly unsightly pustule on the whole rotten Darwinian enterprise.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to talk about rotten how about that ex nazi paedophile who is jumping ship before he gets hauled up in front of the International criminal court for running a multi-national kiddy raping ring.
Delete@steve:
DeleteA little anti-Catholic bigotry leavens the combox.
Do you hate Jews too? Do they all have crook noses and drink the blood of goyim babies?
Actually Catholicism is defined in terms of anti-semitism.
DeleteAnd it's one of the core values that the Protestant reformation kept, for a fun read check out Luther's "The Jews and Their Lies", it's straight out of the catlick playbook.
And if you want to see an actual example of Jew hating you need go no further than the recently reinstated by Herr Ratfucker himself, the holocaust denying bishop Richard Williamson, whose claim to fame is to publicly deny that six million Jews had been killed in the Nazi Holocaust.
But given that you're a kiddy fucker enabler I think that a little catlick sanctioned Jew baiting isn't going to bother you too much, is it ?
Joseph Ratzinger was a teenager in Nazi Germany who was conscripted and then deserted the Wehrmacht. His family, like he, was virulently anti-Nazi. He has fought totalitarianism-- of the National and International Socialist type-- all of his adult life.
DeleteNot so for the largest and most politically successful infestation of atheists the world has known. Stalin and your other atheist comrades weren't conscripted teenagers. This vanguard of State Atheism signed a mutual cooperation pact in 1939 with comrade Schicklgruber to trade arms, cede the Baltics to atheist enlightenment, carve up Poland, free the Wehrmacht to enjoy extended vacations in Western Europe and generally collaborate in European conquest. The Nazi-Atheist Pact was voided only when the Nazi boy-toy reneged on the deal and invaded his atheist suitor.
State atheism has such a lovely history. One wonders why you don't invoke it more often.
Good to see you finally talking about something you appear to know a lot, namely catlick revisionist history and not talking about something about which you know nothing, that is evolutionary biology.
DeleteIt is truly ironic that that you are flinging the turds of rotten philosophical systems, anti-semitism and fascist appeasement from the glass house of an organization that exemplifies all of the above.
And that's not even getting into the kiddy fucking and pedophile enablement, homophobia, misogyny and concerted program of genocide in sub-Saharan Africa via the truly vile policy against sexual prophylaxis and birth control.
Yes indeed, wherever there is strife, poverty and ignorance, just look for the catlick church in action.
@steve:
Delete[concerted program of genocide in sub-Saharan Africa via the truly vile policy against sexual prophylaxis and birth control.]
The Church teaching on sexual morality is succinct: sexual acts are moral only between a man and a woman in marriage.
Non-Catholic teaching (ie your view) is a bit more... promiscuous.
Which teaching facilitates the spread of AIDS?
Smegnor:
DeleteWhich teaching facilitates the spread of AIDS?
The Catholic teaching facilitates the spread of AIDS. There is no comparison.
If a woman has a husband with AIDS, the official Catholic doctrine is "Take AIDS in the snatch, bitch." Admittedly, it sounds better in Latin.
I don't know if Oberski is a liberal, but I am, and the liberal doctrine is: use a condom with strangers or anyone who might have AIDS or if you don't want to get pregnant. This applies even if your husband/spouse has AIDS. If your husband/spouse has AIDS, the liberal doctrine is have safe sex or divorce him. If society makes it difficult to divorce him, we must restructure society.
In contrast, it is the Catholic doctrine that spreads AIDS and kills people. Furthermore, Catholics have encouraged Africans in believing primitive superstitions about condoms.
Non-Catholic teaching (ie your view) is a bit more... promiscuous.
Egnor, I know you're not a scientist, but do you understand the difference between "i.e." and "e.g."? You talk exactly like the stupid gangster in the movie Get Shorty.
Chinese and Hindus are less promiscuous than Catholics. I went to Catholic school, so don't bullshit me.
Smegnor:
DeleteAnd on the topic of Nazism, do you really want to bring up that subject?
The Nazi Reich was state anti-atheism. Anti-atheism was central to its ideology, its popularity, and its implementation. The official Nazi doctrine was that Jews were closet atheists, materialists just pretending to have a religion, and all Christians know that atheism will destroy civilization.
Thus, Nazi Jew-hatred was rationalized as self-defense: all Christians know that atheism will destroy civilization, and Jews are closet atheists, so killing Jews is legal and moral as justifiable self-defense according to Christian doctrine. No anti-atheism, no Holocaust.
Conservative Christians in Nazi Germany enthusiastically supported Nazism, especially the Protestants, the authorities, the bishops, the theologians, and the rank and file.
Conservative Christians in America also enthusiastically defended Nazism, and many promoted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The Protocols was popularized by the book The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, attributed to carmaker Henry Ford, in fact written by his employee, creationist William Cameron.
The Protocols says clearly that Jews are to blame for the spread of Darwinism and Communism. This point, that the Jews are to blame for Darwinism and Communism, was emphasized by The International Jew.
Hitler, of course, loved The International Jew and had many copies of the German translation handed out to Party members-- a reporter who visited him in the 1920's reported that Hitler had a table stacked high with the book, and a picture of Henry Ford behind his desk. Many Nazis said that book converted them to anti-Semitism.
The American theologian Arno C. Gaebelein in 1933 wrote The Conflict of the Ages, a super-anti-Semitic book that quoted from The Protocols at length, particularly the part about Jews being to blame for Darwinism and Communism. Gaebelein was an important theologian who, perhaps more than any other American, popularized Darby's post-millenial eschatology among fundamentalists (he was the key editor of the influential Scofield Reference Bible.) The Conflict of the Ages, besides citing The Protocols, also praised Hitler's takeover of Germany (happened that year) and cited many other anti-Semitic conspiracists like Nesta Webster etc.
The founder of fundamentalism as a political movement, William Bell Riley, who arranged for WJ Bryan to prosecute Scopes at Dayton in the 1920's, and by the 1930's was a super-anti-Semitic defender of Hitler. Only Hitler, Riley taught, had the courage to stand up to the "international Jewish-Bolshevik Darwinist conspiracy."
Gerald Burton Winrod and Riley fought together to have Darwinism banned from several US states. By the 1930's both were supporting Hitler, especially his treatment of the Jews, and promoting The Protocols.
Fundamentalist anti-Semite Gerald L.K. Smith, who built the Christ of the Ozarks (the biggest and ugliest Jesus statue in N. America) like many other conservative Christians, insisted Hitler was a true Christian and Nazi Germany a true Christian country.
Elizabeth Dilling, who was the Ann Coulter of the 1930's, also supported Hitler and travelled to Germany on the Nazi Party's dime, to report back on what a Christian country it was.
Riley, Gaebelein, Winrod, Smith, Dilling and many other creationists agreed that Hitler was a conservative Christian, Nazi Germany was a Christian country, that The Protocols were genuine and described a Jewish conspiracy to spread Darwinism and Communism, etc.
After Hitler declared war on the US, some creationist leaders were arrested by the US government for sedition and providing moral support to Nazi Germany. Riley stopped defending Hitler out of fear of being arrested. Others never changed.
Creationists and other conservative Christians betrayed our country.
@Diogenes:
DeleteAnd then there was that non-aggression pact signed between the Christians and Hitler in August 1939...
oh... wait... atheists were Hitler's principal ally from August 1939 until June 22, 1941. Poland and the Baltics were quite tasty, eh, Diogenes. Wanna have a discussion of State Atheism in the 20th century?
"Creationists and other conservative Christians betrayed our country."
Yea. That explains all of those tens of thousands of crosses in the American cemeteries in France.
@Diogenes:
Delete"Riley, Gaebelein, Winrod, Smith, Dilling and many other creationists agreed..."
We Christians have our wackos.
You atheists have your wackos:
Lenin, Stalin, Beria, Trotsky, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong un,...
I'll show you my wackos, if you'll show me yours.
Egnor:
DeleteWe Christians have our wackos.
This needs correction:
We Christians have our creationists.
Fixed! If you want to say "Wacko", OK, then: how are you and today's creationists not wackos like your most illustrious racist pro-Nazi creationist predecessors?
The question is, aren't you a wacko, and everybody at the Discovery Institute, and Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis, Kent "Jailbird" Hovind, Ray "Banana man" Comfort, etc. etc.? You creationists are Christianity's wackos, then and now.
There is a direct link between anti-atheism, anti-Darwinism and support for Nazism. The first nationwide organization in the US to call for a ban on Darwinism was the Ku Klux Klan.
Let's be clear that Americans Riley, Gaebelein, Winrod, Smith, etc. were not important BECAUSE they were wackos. Rather, they were important BECAUSE they were the leaders of conservative Christianity, at least Protestant American Christianity anyway.
Riley was the founder of fundamentalism as a political movement. He had a megachurch in Minneapolis where he indoctrinated his 3,000 parishioners in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. His biographer called him "the chief executive of fundamentalism" (see "God's Empire" by William Vance Trollinger.)
Riley and Winrod ran the campaigns to ban Darwinism in several US states. They were famous for being the leaders of the anti-Darwinist movement. They were NOT famous for being anti-Semites-- anti-Semitism was so common among Christians, you couldn't get famous just for that.
Gaebelein did more than any other American to popularize Darby's post-mill eschatology among Americans. Most fundamentalists today are fanatically post-mill thanks to Gaebelein.
GLK Smith had about four million American followers (according to his biographer Glen Jeansonne, in Minister of Hate), organized the super-racist super-creationist Christian Identity movement (see Religion and the Racist Right by Michael Barkun) which murdered Jewish talk show host Alan Berg; he built the Christ of the Ozarks in Arkansas and he organized America's largest Passion Play, based on Germany's Oberammergau Passion Play, which Hitler recognized as an excellent tool for promoting anti-Semitism. It took many followers to organize activities like passion plays and giant Jesus statues.
You atheists have your wackos: Lenin, Stalin, Beria, Trotsky, Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong un,...
Strangely, you list non-Americans while I list Americans. You must search the globe to find dangerous atheists; I need go only to Kansas, Arkansas, Minnesota etc. to find racist supporters of Hitler.
The fact that you list non-Americans is significant because the countries you cite (China, Russia etc.) all had a long history of craziness and repression before atheism came along. Centuries of repression (much of it abbetted by religions authorities) makes people irrational. China, Russia, Cambodia etc. have no history of critical thinking. e.g. Chinese may be atheists, but to this day, they don't believe in critical thinking or rationalism.
Wanna have a discussion of State Atheism in the 20th century?
Yes, let's do that. And let's also have a discussion of State Anti-Atheism, which is to say, Nazism.
Nazism IS State Anti-Atheism. No anti-atheism, no Holocaust.
"No state anti-atheism, no holocaust" - except of course for the holocausts in, eg, the USSR and Cambodia. Or was the capital "H" of some vital importance to your argument?
DeleteAnd that's even if your premiss about anti-atheism was correct, which - your revisionist history notwithstanding - it clearly isn't.
even if your premiss about anti-atheism was correct, which - your revisionist history notwithstanding - it clearly isn't.
DeleteDid you just say "clearly." Whenever anyone puts the word "clearly" in a sentence, he is making a statement he cannot back up with evidence.
So let's narrow it down, as to what you're "clearly" asserting.
Are you disputing that:
1. Nazis accused Jews of being philosophical materialists
2. Christians taught that materialism would destroy civilization
3. Nazi propaganda stateed that destroying the Jews was an act of self-defense
Or all of the above?
Just narrow down what you're asserting-- I can prove 1, 2, and 3 with quotes to primary materials. So just tell me which of the above-- 1,2, or 3-- you dispute, I'll prove you're wrong with citations to primary materials. Simple question.
LOL - I see you have now removed all mention of atheism from your revisionist history and are now brazenly going for the 'here's a word which is a bit like this one, which in turn is a bit like this one, which in turn is a bit like something that is something like what I said' argument. The point being that your claim was that Nazism was state anti-atheism, which, of course, is clearly preposterous - as your immediate backtracking, pole-squatting, shilly-shallying, and mincing around the bush, clearly shows. NEHEXT!
DeleteDiogenes:
DeleteThere were several million Nazis (Party members), who accused Jews of all sorts of things. Nazis showed no evidence whatsoever that the philosophical predilections of Jewish victims mattered at all to them. They did not just gas materialist Jews, and spare the Orthodox.
Nazi Jew-hatred wasn't some faculty-lounge disagreement over philosophical materialism.
Nazism was essentially paganism, with a heavy materialist color. Survival of the superior races, all that stuff. Not a lot of spirituality there.
The Nazi-Atheist Pact consummated on August 23 1939 was absolutely essential to Hitler's conquests in Western Europe (Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and the Battle of Britain), as it freed the Werhmacht, the Luftwaffe, and the Kriegsmarine from the need to defend the East.
State Atheists massively collaborated with Hitler, shared his spoils in the Baltic and in Poland, and were his indispensable allies for two years, until he turned on them.
I love discussing Nazi collaboration with atheists.
Nazis showed no evidence whatsoever that the philosophical predilections of Jewish victims mattered at all to them.
DeleteWow, you're stupid. Do you really believe things that stupid? Or you just trolling?
Before you talk about the Third Reich you should at least know a tiny bit about it.
Mein Kampf was filled with endless psychoanalyzing of the Jewish "worldview" and the "philosophical predilections" of Jews as you say. So was the influential book of Hitler's mentor, the fanatical anti-Darwinist anti-Semite Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who wrote Foundations of the Nineteenth Century which spent a whole chapter, the length of a book, analyzing the "philosophical predilections" of Jews. Short version: Jews are materialists; materialists are immoral.
This was also a major theme of Alfred Rosenberg, who was a disciple of Chamberlain's, and most Nazi propaganda.
In this passage, Hitler explains how people who don't believe in an afterlife are dangerous:
From Mein Kampf: "The Jews were always a people with definite racial qualities and never a religion, only their progress made them probably look very early for a means which could divert disagreeable attention from their person. But what would have been more useful and at the same time more harmless than the 'purloining' of the appearance of being a religious community? For here, too, everything is purloined, or rather, stolen. But resulting from his own original nature the Jew cannot possess a religious institution for the very reason that he lacks all idealism in any form and that he also does not recognize any belief in the hereafter. But in the Aryan conception one cannot conceive of a religion which lacks the conviction of the continuation of life after death in some form... The Jewish religious doctrine is primarily a direction for preserving the purity of the blood of Judaism as well as for the regulation of the Jews' intercourse with one another... About the moral value of the Jewish religious instructions there exist today and there have existed at all times rather exhaustive studies... which make this kind of 'religion' appear even odious from Aryan viewpoints. But the best stamp is given by the product of this 'religious' education, the Jew himself.
His life is really only of this world, and his spirit is as alien to true Christianity, for instance, as his nature was two thousand years ago to the Sublime Founder of the new doctrine [Christ]. Of course, the latter made no secret of His disposition towards the Jewish people, and when necessary He even took to the whip in order to drive out of the Lord's temple this adversary of all humanity... But for this, of course, Christ was crucified, while our present party Christianity disgraces itself by begging for Jewish votes in the elections and later tries to conduct political wirepulling with atheistic Jewish parties...
...How far the entire existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown in an incomparable manner and certainty in the 'Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion,'” [Mein Kampf, Reynal & Hitchcock edition, Chapter “Nation and Race”, p.421-3.]
The above passage, accusing Jews of being Christ-killers was frequently cited on the front page of Julius Streicher's Der Sturmer.
Continuing on Egnor's egnorance:
DeleteEgnor pontificates: Nazis showed no evidence whatsoever that the philosophical predilections of Jewish victims mattered at all to them.
How stupid is that?
Here is Hitler's mentor, the anti-Darwinist anti-Semite Houston Stewart Chamberlain:
"These considerations make it our right and our duty to look upon the Jew in our midst as a peculiar and, in fact, alien element. Outwardly his inheritance was the same as ours; inwardly it was not so: he inherited quite a different spirit. One single trait is all that is necessary to reveal in an almost alarming manner to our consciousness the yawning gulf which here separates soul from soul: the revelation of Christ has no significance for the Jew!" – [Chamberlain, Foundations of the 19th Century, v.I, p.336]
Here Chamberlain condemns the Jews as "born rationalists." Rationalism is bad, of course. Note that Chamberlain, like many American creationists, links materialism to a supposed lack of creativity:
Chamberlain: "Now this very tendency, this state of mind, this instinct, “to seek the core of nature in the heart,” the Jews lack to a startling degree. They are born rationalists. Reason is strong in them, the will enormously developed, their imaginative and creative powers, on the other hand, peculiarly limited... the creative element, the real inner life is almost totally wanting in them; at the best it bears, in relation to the infinitely rich religious life of the Aryans, which includes all the highest thought and poetical invention of these peoples, like the lingual sounds referred to above, a ratio of 2 to 7." [Chamberlain, Foundations, v.I, ch. 3 p. 215-6]
Chamberlain: “It is absolutely impossible ever to bring home to such a man [Jew] what we Teutons [Aryans] understand by Godhead, religion, morality. Here lies the hard insoluble kernel of the `Jewish problem’. And this is the reason why an impartial man, without a trace of contempt for the in many respects worthy and excellent Jews, can and must regard the presence of a large number of them in our midst as a danger not to be under-estimated.” [Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century]
This goes on for an interminable length. It is all about "the philosophical predilections" of Jews.
Egnor simply bullshits, making obviously false, infantile statements backed up by NO evidence. He can't even be bothered to even TRY backing up what he writes with evidence.
DeleteI back up what I say with EVIDENCE. Egnor just bullshits!
Egnor: They [Nazis] did not just gas materialist Jews, and spare the Orthodox.
Egnor is too ignorant to know that Nazism conflated Orthodox and free-thinking Jews.
Because the Nazis were Christians and like Christians, they believed in the #1 rule of Christian epistemology: You get to lie about other people.
Lie about Jews, lie about atheists, lie about witches, like about communists, like about Muslims, lie about other Christian sects, blah blah. So Nazis just lied and said:
Lie #1: All Jews are materialists
Lie #2: Materialism is destructive to society.
Since Egnor brought up Orthodoxy, let's see how Nazis like Chamberlain follow Rule #1 of Christian epistemology and lie about Orthodox Jews. Nazism conflated Orthodox and free-thinking Jews.
Chamberlain: "The power of the idea triumphs here in an alarming fashion; in a people [the Jews] with good capacities but not pre-eminent physically or mentally it produces the delusive idea of a particular selectness, of a special pleasantness in the sight of God... it isolates them in an insane pride from all the nations of the earth... it nourishes them with lying memories and lulls them with criminal hopes; — and, while it thus raises this people in its own conceit to giddy Babel-like heights, it in truth depresses their souls deeply... confirming them hopelessly in the most unfortunate fixed ideas, and making them in every form (from the extremest orthodoxy to outspoken free-thinking) so inevitably the enemy, open or secret, of every other human being, and a danger to every culture, that at all times and places it has inspired the deepest mistrust in the most highly gifted, and horror in the unerring instincts of the common people.
I said just now that orthodoxy and free-thinking could be regarded by us as equivalents here, in fact the question to-day is not so much what a Jew believes as what, to use a paradoxical antithesis, he can believe or is capable of believing. ...there is something which is not individual, namely, les plis de la pensée, as the Frenchman says, the inborn tendencies of thought and action... which the mind takes from the habits of generations."
Continuing with this passage, note that by "senseless hypotheses or mere makeshift conceptions of science", Chamberlain in the next paragraph is attacking Jews for believing in Darwinism and possibly Marxism as well; his book is an attack on both Jews and Darwinists:
"And thus we see to-day Jewish atheists of the most modern type who, by their tendency to regard senseless hypotheses or mere makeshift conceptions of science as material, actual facts... by their talent for planning impossible socialistic and economic Messianic empires without inquiring whether they thereby destroy the whole of the civilisation and culture... by their lack of understanding for everything genuinely great.. end by their ridiculous overestimation of every Lilliputian intellectual work which has a Jew for its author — we see, I say, such so-called free-thinkers who prove themselves to be genuine children of the religion of the Thora [Torah] and the Talmud in a much more thorough and striking fashion than many a pious Rabbi... [Chamberlain, Foundations, vol. I, ch. 5 p. 481-3]
Egnor: Nazism was essentially paganism, with a heavy materialist color.
DeleteBy writing this, you betray yourself as being not just ignorant, but sharing the Nazi worldview. The Nazis, like you and other Intelligent Design proponents, regarded materialism as immoral and destructive to civlization.
No major Nazi was "pagan" except Himmler, and no major Nazi was atheist. The Nazis who were Christians far outnumbered the pagans, and as for atheist Nazis, there weren't any.
You essentially agree with Hitler and Chamberlain that materialism is destructive to civilization.
Adolf Hitler: "The fact is, we are weak-willed creatures; but nevertheless there is a Creative Power [schöpferische Kraft]. Wanting to deny that is stupidity. He who believes something false still stands higher than he who believes nothing at all. Thus a Communist professor imagines himself to triumph over Creation! Compared against such people, we will be Masters: whether we now draw from the Catechism or from philosophy, we have the choice to go back, while they, with their merely materialistic worldview, in the end just eat each other." [Adolf Hitler, Table Talk (Monologe im Führer Hauptquarier, 1941–1944), Oct. 24, 1941, evening; my translation]
Adolf Hitler: "National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity... For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life... These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles! And I believe that if we should fail to follow these principles then we should to be able to point to our successes, for the result of our political battle is surely not unblest by God.” – [Adolf Hitler, in his speech at Koblenz, to the Germans of the Saar, 26 Aug. 1934]
"It is Christians and not international atheists who now stand at the head of Germany." [Adolf Hitler, My New Order, 1941, p.148]
"The advantages of a personal and political nature that might arise from compromising with atheistic organizations would not outweigh the consequences which would become apparent in the destruction of general moral basic values. The national Government regards the two Christian confessions as the weightiest factors for the maintenance of our nationality." — Adolph Hitler, 23 March 1933 Reichstag speech
Rapey:
DeleteThe point being that your claim was that Nazism was state anti-atheism, which, of course, is clearly preposterous
You simply bullshit and have no evidence. I presented evidence from PRIMARY sources in my last three comments, showing that Nazism was state anti-atheism, and furthermore, no anti-atheism, no Holocaust.
@Paedo
DeleteThere's about the same evidence that Nazism wasn't state anti-atheism as there is that Nazism wasn't state anti-gorgonzola. It doesn't come up because the idea is ridiculous - that simply isn't what it was. And it is no less ridiculous even if you know of some dinner party where Goering voiced his disapproval of various Italian veined cheeses. You live in a fantasy world.
Exhibit Z
Delete@piotr
DeleteNice of you to share some of your personal memorabilia with us, but what does that have to do with anything? the claim here is not that the Nazism is an atheistic movement, but that they it is not primarily, or even significantly, an anti-atheist movement. That is, that dodgyknees' claim that Nazism is state anti-atheism is lunacy. It's made up rubbish. Fantasy. Wishful thinking on the paedo's part. Wild uncontrolled nonsense. So take your silly badge and wear it with pride, it has SFA to do with anything I've said. And remember, arbeit macht frei.
Rapey: There's about the same evidence that Nazism wasn't state anti-atheism as there is that Nazism wasn't state anti-gorgonzola.
DeleteBut I have presented a great deal of evidence that Nazism was anti-atheist as official state policy, while Luther and Egnor have presented NO evidence that it wasn't-- they present merely bullshit and bluster.
Where is your evidence?
Evidence talks and bullshit walks.
Rapey: dodgyknees' claim that Nazism is state anti-atheism is lunacy. It's made up rubbish. Fantasy. Wishful thinking on the paedo's part. Wild uncontrolled nonsense.
Rapey restates his hypothesis as his ONLY evidence for his hypothesis.
Where is your evidence? I cite primary sources.
Shortly after Hitler's Seizure of Power, the Nazi Party closed down all atheist organizations and handed their property over to the Church to be used for Christian proselytizing.
New York Times, 1933: "In Freethinkers Hall, which before the Nazi resurgence was the national headquarters of the German Freethinkers League, the Berlin Protestant church authorities have opened a bureau for advice to the public in church matters. Its chief object is to win back former churchgoers and assist those who have not previously belonged to any religious congregation in obtaining church membership. The German Freethinkers League, which was swept away by the national revolution, was the largest of such organizations in Germany. It had about 500,000 members..." [The New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 2, on Hitler's outlawing atheistic and freethinking groups in the Spring of 1933, after the Enabling Act authorizing Hitler to rule by decree.]
Associated Press: "A campaign against the 'godless movement' and an appeal for Catholic support were launched by Chancellor Adolf Hitler's forces." [Associated Press story, February 23, 1933]
Hitler, speech of 1933: “[W]here, I would ask, was Christianity for them [the Center Party] in these fourteen years [of the Weimar Republic] when they went arm in arm with atheism? No, never and at no time was greater internal damage done to Christianity than in these fourteen years when a party, theoretically Christian, sat with those who denied God in one and the same Government.... I do not merely talk of Christianity, no, I also profess that I will never ally myself with the parties which destroy Christianity.” [Hitler, speech of February 15, 1933; Hitler’s emphasis on "talk". My New Order (1941) p.148–9, cited by Thomas Lackey, The Modernist God State p.272]
Rapey: dodgyknees' claim that Nazism is state anti-atheism is lunacy. It's made up rubbish. Fantasy. Wishful thinking on the paedo's part. Wild uncontrolled nonsense.
DeleteThis is from Hitler's Second Book, his unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf. In this passage, Hitler attacks the Catholic Center Party as not truly Christian because and not patriotic to the German state because they go "arm in arm" with atheists, "blasphemers of religion", and "Jewish God denying Marxists"!.
Note Hitler calls Nazi Germany "the major bulwark of a real Christian worldview."
Hitler: “But for the Centre [Party, of Austria], German viewpoints were not a standard, indeed not even in Germany proper. The gentlemen were fonder of any Pole, any Alsatian traitor and Francophile than they were of the German who did not want to join such a criminal organisation. Under the pretext of representing catholic interests, this party even in peacetime had lent a helping hand to harm and ruin the major bulwark of a real Christian world view, Germany, in all possible ways. And this most mendacious party did not even shrink from going arm in arm, in the closest friendship, with avowed deniers of god, atheists, blasphemers of religion, as long as they believed they could thereby harm the German National State and the German Folk.
Thus in the establishment of the insane German foreign policy, the Centre, the Christian catholic pious Centre, had Jewish god denying Marxists as loving allies at its side.” -- [Hitler’s Second Book, English version, p.34 ]
@Paedo
DeleteLook, paedo, Nazism isn't state anti-atheism. It never was. Nobody believes such lunacy. It's just your fantasy revisionist history and silly interpretation of documents you don't understand.
Egnor: I love discussing Nazi collaboration with atheists.
DeleteOh really? OK Egnor, since you love it so much, let's do that.
LET'S DISCUSS NAZI COLLABORATION WITH ATHEISTS.
The Christian regimes and Christian fascist movements who collaborated with Hitler far outnumber the atheist regimes who collaborated with Hitler-- and the atheist regimes weren't bent on killing all the Jews.
In contrast, the Christian regimes and Christian fascist movements who collaborated with Hitler were more numerous and collaborated because they wanted to kill Jews. In fact they did help out the Nazis by shipping the Jews in their territories off to death camps.
The fascist movements in all the countries around Germany were explicitly Catholic and they collaborated in the murder of Jews. The only exception if the Nazi Party in Germany itself, which pretended to be generically Christian but was implicitly Protestant, as Steigmann-Gall has shown in The Holy Reich.
In Croatia, the Ustasha in Croatia were fascist, fanatically Catholic, engaged in mass murder or enforced conversion of Serbs to Catholicism, and assisted the deportation of Jews.
In Slovakia, the fascist government was headed by a Catholic priest named Father Tiso, who assisted in the deportation of Jews to death camps, as Hitler himself expressed gratitude for in private:
Hitler: "We must undertake a campaign of cleaning-up [of anti-Nazi resistance], square meter by square meter, and this will compel us to have recourse to summary justice. The struggle with the terrorists will be savage warfare in the real sense... until Jewry, which is the bandits' Intelligence Service, is exterminated, we shall not have accomplished our task.
It is interesting to note the way in which this little Catholic priest who calls himself Tiso sends the Jews into our hands." [Hitler, Table Talk, 30 August 1942]
In Hungary, the right-wing military coup led by Admiral Horthy was supported by the Catholic Church.
In Austria, Cardinal Innitzer cooperated with the pro-Catholic Austro-fascist government of Engelbert Dollfuß and Kurt Schuschnigg from 1934 to 1938. The Austro-fascist government was endorsed by the Church.
When Hitler annexed Austria, Innitzer and the other Austrian Catholic bishops signed a declaration endorsing the annexation, signed by the Cardinal with “Heil Hitler!”
In Spain and Portugal, the fascist movements were explicitly pro-Catholic (Franco called his movement to destroy democracy "The Crusade") and official Catholic policy supported fascist movements like those in Spain whenever they were pro-Catholic. The Nazis, of course, assisted Franco in Spain by sending the Luftwaffe to bomb civilians at Guernica; but the Catholic Church still supported Franco anyway.
In Italy, Pope Pius XI described Mussolini as "a man sent by Providence." As soon as Mussolini seized control, the Church signed the Lateran Pact of 1929 with the fascist regime, a pact that made Catholicism the only recognized religion,with a total monopoly over education (no secular education, natch), a monopoly over marriage laws, birth and death.
When Mussolini conquered Ethiopia, using poison gas and other brutal methods, he gave as one of his justifications that Ethiopian Christians allegedly believed in Monophysitism, declared a heretical form of Christology by a church council in 451 (Catholics and Protestants are dyophysite.)
In France, fascist movements like the Action Francaise and the Croix de Feu [Cross of Fire] were explicitly Catholic and anti-Semitic. After Hitler conquered France, these Catholic organizations collaborated in deporting Jews to death camps. The head of the eugenics program of the French Vichy government was a conservative Catholic, Alexis Carroll, who wrote a book about miracle cures at Lourdes.
Egnor: I love discussing Nazi collaboration with atheists.
Do you still enjoy it, Egnor?
Egnor: I love discussing Nazi collaboration with atheists.
DeleteIn my last comment I showed that all the fascist movements and collaborators around Germany were explicitly pro-Christian.
Now let's consider a negative control: What if they hadn't been Christian? What then?
This is surprisingly easy to answer.
First, the only country conquered by Nazis that didn't collaborate in deporting Jews was Albania, run by Muslims. Muslim Albania was conquered by Germans but did not cooperate in murdering Jews.
Second, many Jews escaped to Shanghai, then controlled by the non-Christian Japanese. When the Nazi regime demanded that their Japanese allies deport the Jews of Shanghai, the non-Christian Japanese could not understand why anyone would want to kill Jews.
So there is a simple correlation:
Fascists and Nazi collaborators are overwhelmingly likely to be explicitly Christian, to be motivated by Christianity, and certain to collaborate in the murder of Jews.
Non-Christians allied with or conquered by Nazis cannot understand why Jews need to be killed and did not cooperate in the deportation of Jews to death camps.
Egnor: I love discussing Nazi collaboration with atheists.
How do you like how that discussion turned out?
Rapey: Look, paedo, Nazism isn't state anti-atheism.
DeleteBullshit walks, evidence talks.
Luther, if you want to argue that Nazism is not state anti-atheism, then you go argue with Adolf Hitler who himself proves you wrong. I think Hitler knows more about the Third Reich.
Adolf Hitler: "We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out." [Hitler, speech of 24 Oct. 1933, Berlin]
New York Times, 1933: "In Freethinkers Hall, which before the Nazi resurgence was the national headquarters of the German Freethinkers League, the Berlin Protestant church authorities have opened a bureau for advice to the public in church matters. Its chief object is to win back former churchgoers and assist those who have not previously belonged to any religious congregation in obtaining church membership. The German Freethinkers League, which was swept away by the national revolution, was the largest of such organizations in Germany. It had about 500,000 members..." [The New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 2, on Hitler's outlawing atheistic and freethinking groups in the Spring of 1933, after the Enabling Act authorizing Hitler to rule by decree.]
Associated Press: "A campaign against the 'godless movement' and an appeal for Catholic support were launched by Chancellor Adolf Hitler's forces." [Associated Press story, February 23, 1933]
@paedo
DeleteMartin Bormann, there you go, now fuck off!
Luther: there you go, now fuck off!
DeleteHere's Dr. Gerhard Wagner speaking at the Nuremberg Rally of 1936.
Isn't Luther sorry he missed that party? How he would have cheered! Especially when Wagner says that materialists oppose Nazism BECAUSE they are materialists!
Gerhard Wagner: "We can only say to these learned critics that our genetic and racial thinking stems in the end not from our scientific, but rather from our National Socialist convictions, and that it was not learned scientists, but rather our Führer Adolf Hitler, and he alone, who made genetic and racial thinking the center of our National Socialist worldview and the foundation of the rebuilding of our people's state...
More important than these two groups, however, are those who reject or oppose us because they hold to another worldview.
...Those who base their materialist image of the world on the doctrines of a liberal or Marxist era cannot understand how we can have dethroned their idols of "the economy and Mammon," replacing them at the center of our National Socialist process of construction and renewal with the German man, with the German people.” [Gerhard Wagner, Nazi Party Nuremberg rally, 1936]
@paedo
DeleteLol - you've already been pwned and you don't even know it. Your revisionist history would be funny if it wasn't so sad. And, since you've started making insinuations, let's be clear: if psychos like you ever got into power it would take about 15 minutes before you reached for the zyklon-B. You're not well in the head.
Luther,
Deleteif psychos like you ever got into power it would take about 15 minutes before you reached for the zyklon-B
No Luther, Christians killed Jews for 1,900 years because they were trained by God to recognize the Messiah. When Jesus came along, Jews said he wasn't the Messiah, thus making Christianity logically incoherent. Christians killed Jews for 1900 years in the hopes of making Christianity PLAUSIBLE. The Holocaust followed logically from Christian epistemology.
The most common culture-hero cited by Nazis was Martin Luther the anti-Semite. Luther said of Jews, "We are at fault in not slaying them."
Hitler called Jews Christ-killers in Mein Kampf in the passage I already cited above. Most major Nazis called Jews Christ-killers, and in "Der Sturmer" Julius Streicher called Jews Christ-killers and often featured cartoons of the crucifixion.
In the 1930's you would've been cheering at Nazi book-burnings, like when they burned the books of the Jew Magnus Hirschfeld.
Conservative Christians supported Nazism in both Germany and in the United States and they did so because they hated the Jews. If fascism comes back, it will be because of conservative Christians, who will once again, as they did in the 1930's, both in Germany and in America, give the stiff-armed salute and sing the "Horst Wessel song."
@Diogenes
DeleteThe point was that when power is attained by fanatics (eg, you) who have absolute certainty in the truth of their worldview and foaming-at-the-mouth hatred for anyone who doesn't buy it (look at your posts), you tend to adopt fanatical measures either to "convince" disbelievers of your correctness or to dispense with the disbelievers altogether.
luther said:
Delete"The point was that when power is attained by fanatics (eg, you) who have absolute certainty in the truth of their worldview and foaming-at-the-mouth hatred for anyone who doesn't buy it (look at your posts), you tend to adopt fanatical measures either to "convince" disbelievers of your correctness or to dispense with the disbelievers altogether."
Actually, luther, it's you and other religious zealots "who have absolute certainty in the truth of" your and "their worldview and foaming-at-the-mouth hatred for anyone who doesn't buy it" and who adopt "fanatical measures either to "convince" disbelievers of your" and their "correctness or to dispense with the disbelievers altogether."
@TWT
DeleteThe problem being, of course, that I don't have any particular religious views, nor any overarching worldview, let alone one that I am absolutely convinced of the truth of. And the fact that, despite having been told this straightforwardly about 20 times, you are so fanatical in your views about religion and are so absolutely certain that your worldview is right, that you have to pretend all those who have any doubts at all, or who differ in any way, (eg, me) are religious zealots. That's what makes fanatics like you dangerous.
luther dishonestly said:
Delete"...I don't have any particular religious views, nor any overarching worldview, let alone one that I am absolutely convinced of the truth of..."
Oh really? Then why do you have such a big problem with the ToE, and atheists, and why do you argue in favor of the existence of "God"?
Oh, by the way, lame try with the "particular" and "overarching" insertions.
@TWT
Delete1. I don't subscribe to any religious views (particular or otherwise) and I don't have any worldview (overarching or otherwise) I am absolutely convinced is true - although there are some, eg, materialism, which I know to be either false or meaningless. The best/worst that could be said for me is that I appreciate that there is a mystery at the heart of existence. I sometimes call this mystery God because it's not a bad name and it drives fanatics like you crazy. I also sometimes argue in favour of God in a sort of devil's avocado basis in order to: a) show that your rejections of the arguments are laughable; b) because it drives fanatics like you crazy; and c) because I dislike your absolute certainty and the way it is matched only by your absolute ignorance.
2. I dislike atheists like those who post here because they won't even come clean about their views. For example, they refuse to acknowledge that they are a very particular type of atheist far removed from someone who merely lacks a belief in God(s). That spurious nonsense - mere lack of belief - being only adopted by said atheists for deceptive rhetorical purposes.
3. I have a problem with the ToE because it's largely a metaphysical worldview masquerading as a scientific theory. It is also completely misrepresented as being nearly complete when in fact it consists of little more than vague hand-waving from a highly questionable pseudoscientific starting point.
That spurious nonsense - mere lack of belief - being only adopted by said atheists for deceptive rhetorical purposes.
DeleteThis appears to be a bit of a hobby-horse for you. People cannot hold and honestly express that as their their worldview? If they insist, they are being disengenuous, or you know them better than they know themselves?
In like manner, I surmise that you are deeply religious, and are merely bullshitting people that you ain't for deceptive rhetorical purposes.
@Miller
DeleteBut in my case you have to surmise (falsely as it happens), whereas in the case of the atheists here it is clear they have all: a) heard of God; b) considered the issue (albeit in a very childlike way); and c) have a lack of belief/disbelief as a fairly important aspect of their worldview. In that respect, then, they are clearly very different from someone who has never heard of God and so merely lacks the belief. And their failure to even acknowledge the possibility of such a distinction is disingenuous in the extreme.
This isn't a matter of opinion but simply a very obvious fact. And the fact you (choose to pretend you) can't understand is all the evidence we really need to see that it is true in your case. NEXT!
@miller
DeleteAnd, fwiw, you can't, in good faith, hold that your attitude/considered opinion is indistinguishable from the attitude/opinion of someone who has never even heard of what you have considered. And yet you do just that. Thus, you are not acting in good faith. Which was my point.
luther, look who's talkin' about good faith. You're a god/religion pusher who won't admit to being a god/religion pusher. And if you're so concerned with good faith, why don't you point that out to all of the lying IDiots who say that ID has nothing to do with religious beliefs and that it isn't a religious/political agenda?
Delete@TWT
DeleteI'm not a religion/God pusher - as you've now been told more than twenty times. Re ID, not really my concern since it's a low profile movement that doesn't really impact all that much on anything that interests me except inasmuch as they critique evolution. This is in contrast to the kind of nihilistic/atheistic scientism (bad philosophy) that is already becoming a kind of state religion in the UK and which is taught to all by the state from early childhood under the guise of science. I think we need to be very open about, and re-emphasize, the Mystery.
@Diogenes:
ReplyDeleteVox Day has pointed out that during the 20th century if your head of state was an atheist, there was a 58% chance that he would murder a substantial portion of his citizens.
Your observation that the atheist mass-murderers I cited were all non-Americans is indeed true. The reason we Americans haven't had an atheist leader-mass-murderer is that we are a Christian country, and we intelligently don't tend to trust atheists in positions of power. Which is a fine synopsis of the central lesson of the 20th century.
I find it amusing to discuss genocide and totalitarianism with atheists.
@Diogenes:
DeleteHere's the reference on that 58% atheist-leader-genocide statistic:
http://egnorance.blogspot.com/2012/11/there-is-is-58-percent-chance-that.html
I love discussing State Atheism.
Egnor has dodged my evidence that conservative Christians in America supported Hitler because of his treatment of Jews, and sought to betray our country.
DeleteInstead we get:
The reason we Americans haven't had an atheist leader-mass-murderer is that we are a Christian country, and we intelligently don't tend to trust atheists in positions of power.
First: we clearly trust non-Christians in places of power: the first six presidents of the United States were deists or Unitarians. The most influential founding fathers were almost entirely non-Christian: Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, George Washington, Ben Franklin; add to that Abraham Lincoln, John Q. Adams, Taft, Fillmore.
The United States did not have a Christian President until 1829 with Andrew Jackson, and he immediately set about mass murdering the Indians.
We have had Christian mass murderers as leaders. From the moment the Puritans set foot in New England, they interpreted themselves as the Israelites and Native Americans as the Canaanites, due for extermination to free up the Promised Land. Conservative Christians in America interpreted the extermination of Native Americans as a re-enactment of Biblical genocide. The Song of Hiawatha and The Last of the Mohicans are about Indians doomed to die.
America's conservative Christians in this century armed and encouraged one mass murderer after another. The Family aka the Fellowship, the organization that runs the Presidential Prayer Breakfast since the 1940's, used the Prayer Breakfast to connect right-wing mass murderers with American politicians and arms dealers.
Suharto's US-supported anti-communist crusade killed maybe two million people. The Family and Gerald Ford (who was a member of the Family while president) armed Suharto in Indonesia and sent him to commit genocide in East Timor. The genocide started within 24 hours after Gerald Ford flew out of Jakarta. (See The Family by Jeff Sharlet.)
Most non-Christian peoples governed by Christian nations were systematically murdered in large numbers: the Caribs, Aztecs, Incas, most of South America, Guanches, Tasmanians, Bushmen / Hottentots, etc.
Granted, they're brown people, they didn't count according to Christian standards.
The consequences of State Anti-atheism are clear:
Adolf Hitler: "National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity... For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life... These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles! And I believe that if we should fail to follow these principles then we should to be able to point to our successes, for the result of our political battle is surely not unblest by God.” – [Adolf Hitler, in his speech at Koblenz, to the Germans of the Saar, 26 Aug. 1934]
Hitler knew that the way to absolute power is to tell people atheism leads to immorality.
Communist regimes were not a random sample of nations of the world, or nations of the West. They were a non-random sample: they were all nations with a long pre-communist history of brutal repression and non-rationalism. Any correlation between atheism and repression is due to the repressive pre-revolutionary culture of those nations.
DeleteThe nations taken over by Communist leaders were not a random sample; all had no history of rationalism.
China, Cambodia, Russia, etc. had no cultural emphasis on critical thinking before or after the Revolution. They were, and are, subject to swings of superstition and irrationalism.
Egnor: Here's the reference on that 58% atheist-leader-genocide statistic:
Deletehttp://egnorance.blogspot.com/2012/11/there-is-is-58-percent-chance-that.html
Egnor here is citing, not a peer-reviewed article in a historical journal or peer-reviewed book, but the ignorant and dishonest blogger Vox Day!
Notice that above, I cited primary documents written by historical actors themselves.
Egnor cites the opinions of dishonest right-wing bloggers who could never get published in historical journals.
So let's see what Vox Day has to say.
Vox Day: "The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists...
The historical record of collective atheism is thus 182,716 times worse on an annual basis than Christianity’s worst and most infamous misdeed, the Spanish Inquisition."
So, this ignoramus believes that
1. Communists killed 148 million people
2. The worst crime committed by Christianity is the Spanish Inquisition
3. The Spanish Inquisition killed 9 people a year.
So what's the point arguing with this moron?
(I got 9 people a year as follows: Vox day says 148 million killed by communists in 90 years = 1,644,000 killed per year, he says this is 182,716 worse than the Inquisition on an annual basis, that's 9 people a year killed by the Inquisition.)
As for the notion that the Inquisition is the worst thing ever done by Christians-- not even close. There goes the Holocaust, the Conquistadores, the Crusades, the Thirty Year's War, the massacres committed by right-wing dictators funded by the United States, etc.
But anyway, let's consider Vox Day's point #1, 148 million killed by communists. The Black Book of Communism made up the round number of 100 million killed by communists, which even the authors of the articles therein disputed, because the editors wanted to fabricate a high, round number.
Since then, statist anti-atheists have jacked up the number to whatever they like. Creationist Jerry Bergman jacked it up to several hundred million.
Ellis Washington at WND put it at 260 million-- to get that number, he blamed Charles Darwin for the crimes committed by the Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, and all Muslim regimes.
So modern creationists, like Nazis, make up whatever facts they need to make atheism look destructive to civlization, in the hopes of obtaining total power thereby.
But even in the Black Book of Communism, the number included as "murder" all people who died from any avoidable cause, the 1950's famine in China that happened after the Great Leap Forward. It also included all people killed by communist leaders for political reasons.
If you're going to define "murder" as death caused by any communist leader for political purposes, then for comparison, on the Christian side you have to include all deaths caused by Christian leaders for any political purpose.
Start with the Thirty Years' War, the Hundred Years' War, etc. etc. Eventually we may have time for the Crusades, Conquistadores, decimation of Tasmanians, Bushmen, etc.
If you're going to define "murder" as death from any avoidable cause, then you have to include, in the count of Christendom's "murders", everyone who ever died from an avoidable cause-- notably all children who died in child-birth due to America's appallingly high infant mortality rate, a death rate we deliberately keep high so that poor people will have a disincentive to be poor. Capitalism needs people to have an incentive to work, and your baby dying if you're poor is an incentives essential to the system. If you don't let babies die, the "takers" will outnumber the "takers", right?
But I'm not defending communism, because I don't believe in communism anyway, or any form of state atheism.
Rather, I agree with Karl Barth: anti-communism is as evil as communism.
@Diogenes:
DeleteYou and Barth both chose to live in anti-communist nations. I respect your acts, not your words.
People flee communism whenever they can, and they flock to anti-communist nations.
Anti-communism is not as evil as communism. Don't say stupid things.
People flee communism whenever they can, and they flock to anti-communist nations.
DeleteNo, they don't (and I know what I'm talking about; I spent almost thirty years of my life in a communist country). Those who fled it wanted to escape to a normal free country, not to anti-anything. Incidentally, Poland was both communist and 90+% Roman Catholic at the same time.
@Piotr:
DeleteThe PZPR didn't have the power to destroy the Church, as much as it wanted to.
And people do indeed flee communism when they can. By the millions. The Vietnamese boat people, the Cuban exodus. The Berlin Wall wasn't a decoration.
You seem nostalgic for godless governance. North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba still accept immigrants, when you get that old hunger for State Atheism.
You seem nostalgic for godless governance.
DeleteWhat frigging nonsense. The Polish Church was stronger under communism than it is now. In today's Poland the number of people who declare themselves atheist doubles every five years or so. You should see how scared some of our bishops are as they realise they are losing grip on society. The people who escape from North Korea or Cuba escape from an oppressive political regime, not from atheism. They are sick of a society dominated by an ideology. They'd be equally sick of a Christian theocracy or anti-communism as a state ideology.
Piotr:
DeleteIs State Atheism associated with political repression?
I just want to see what planet you're on.
State atheism was just one of many features of Soviet-style communism, not necessarily the most important one. Do you think that Putin's "religious awakening" and ostentatious church attendance makes him a better man and a less authoritarian figure than he was as a communist apparatchik and a KGB-man? The political opposition in Poland consisted in a large (and important) part of liberat atheists. The Church was not really persecuted here. There was tension between it and the state, of course, but the Church has coexisted with all kinds of repressive regimes and knows how to thrive in such conditions.
DeleteAnything can be associated with political repression if you elevate it to the status of official ideology in a totalitarian state. What makes a state evilk is totalitarianism of any kind. "State atheism" becomes repressive if it means punishing people for leading their private lives (including churchgoing) in a way that does no harm to anyone else. The same goes for state religions, especially if they happen to be militant ones. Tokugawa'a Japan. Isabella's (or Franco's) Spain, Tsarist Russia, Puritan New England, Khomeini's Iran, etc., were as repressive as anything. North Korea is not really atheist -- it has a state-promoted parareligious cult of the Kim dynasty. Nazi Germany was not anti-religious, as Diogenes has tried to explain to you. Its internal enemies (beside the Jews) were any political dissenters, whatever their religion (or its lack). The opposite of totalitarian rule is open society, not a diametrically positioned brand of totalitarianism.
Egnor: Anti-communism is not as evil as communism. Don't say stupid things.
DeleteKarl Barth was stupid? True, he did not say anti-communism was as evil as communism-- he said anti-communism was more evil.
Considering how many mass-murdering right-wing dictators the US has supported and armed in the name of anti-communism, Barth was quite prescient.
Barth's words are aimed straight at the Christian conspiracist right wing and the mass-murdering right-wing dictators they armed and supported.
Barth: "I do not comprehend how either politics or Christianity require or even permit such a disinclination to lead to the conclusions which the West has drawn with increasing sharpness in the past 15 years. I regard anticommunism as a matter of principle an evil even greater than communism itself."
Incidentally: why did I spend 29 years in a country controlled by a pro-Soviet communist regime? Was it because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact? Well, not quite, because it was not that alliance that won the war. It was the new alliance between the Soviets and the Roosevelt/Churchill duo, who had no particular qualms about sacrificing Poland and the rest of Central Europe, and somehow overcame their Christian disgust of the Bolshevik tyranny and state atheism when it suited them to do so. Who was whose ally, and why, are tricky questions.
Delete@Steve:
ReplyDelete[Hitler knew that the way to absolute power is to tell people atheism leads to immorality.]
And the formal military-economic alliance between Bolshevik Atheists and German Nazis signed on August 23 1939 would seem to bear out Hitler's point about atheism and immorality.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Delete@Diogenes:
ReplyDeletePeople do bad things.
You attribute all manner of evil people have done to Christianity. You refuse to allot evil to Atheism.
For every Native American village wiped out by European Christian colonists, I can cite a Cambodian city wiped out by Khmer Rouge atheists. For every Andrew Jackson there's a Lenin. For every Last of the Mohicans there's a Ukrainian Holodomor.
The issue is the balance sheet. Christianity, if it is to be counted complicit in evil, is complicit in much good. Western civilization-- government, literature, music, science, art, law-- is essentially Christian civilization.
State Atheism has a record as well. Jacobean France and the Vendee genocide, Calles' Mexico and the Christeros War, the Bolshevicks, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the Holodomor, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Killing Fields, ...
I look at the balance sheet. Bad things have been done in the name of Christianity, but much-- much more-- good has been done.
What's the upside of State Atheism? Does it mitigate the invariable totalitarianism and the 100 million lives atheism has taken in the 20th century?
mregnor
DeleteDon't confuse atheism with an ideology. Communist ideology, applied in a twisted distortion of Marx to rationalize greed and desire for power, was responsible for the excesses of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others. Atheism does not demand the death of "unbelievers." Only ideologies do that. What you refer to as "state atheism" was born of the historical recognition that religion was and always has been a tool of the wealthy and powerful to keep the serfs in line. Whether you recognize it or not, you are a serf, and you are dutifully toeing the line of defending religion, while ignoring its abuses. Very few people make that mistake with communism, equating atheism with communism is a category error.
mregnor: Yes, atheists have done bad things too, but how many atheists have done bad things explicitly under the name of atheism? A lot of religious killing has been pretty explicitly done under the name of religion, but Stalin did not kill his opponents because they were not atheists. Basically what you are saying is that atheists can be bad people because human beings can be good as well as bad. I doubt anyone would disagree with this, but that's not an argument against atheism.
ReplyDeleteState-level killing involves all sorts of motives. Some are ideological, most are political, ethnic, etc. That is true of State Religion and State Atheism.
DeleteThat said, atheists have targeted Christians for repression and murder on an enormous scale. From the mass murder of priests and nuns and the genocide in the Vendee in the French Revolution, to the repression and extermination of Christians (thousands of priests and religious were killed or gulaged) under the Bolsheviks, to the horrendous murders of Christians in Calles' Mexico in the Cristeros War and the murders of priests in the Spanish Civil War to the murder and repression of Christians in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Eastern Europe, yada yada.
The fact is that State Christianity has been mixed, but nearly all formally Christian nations with established or protected churches are democratic and respect human rights.
All State Atheist nations have been totalitarian hellholes.
Face reality.
Egnor: nearly all formally Christian nations with established or protected churches are democratic and respect human rights.
DeleteThis is patently false. As I demonstrated in my comment above, all fascist movements in countries around Germany were explicitly Catholic. Nazism is itself was officially a generic Christianity, but in private was almost entirely Protestant in outlook, as Steigmann-Gall demonstrated in The Holy Reich.
theists have targeted Christians for repression and murder on an enormous scale. From the mass murder of priests and nuns and the genocide in the Vendee in the French Revolution, to the repression and extermination of Christians (thousands of priests and religious were killed or gulaged) under the Bolsheviks, to the horrendous murders of Christians in Calles' Mexico in the Cristeros War and the murders of priests in the Spanish Civil War
When we ask for citations that these people were killed for teaching religious beliefs, e.g. that Jesus was the Savior or that Bible is inspired, we get nothing. Nada. No citations to peer-reviewed historical literature.
At best we get citations to right-wing blogger Vox Day, who has no Ph.D. and no evidence, and who implies that the Inquistion killed 9 people a year!
Egnor cited Vox Day above. When is Egnor, or someone else, going to explain Vox Day's claim that the Inquisition killed nine, that's 9, people a year?
Getting back to the original topic, I've heard that the real reason that Pope Palpatine is resigning is that he wants to spend more time with his family.
Delete@Diogenes:
DeleteHere's a list of Christian nations with either established Christian churches or with a long history of cultural Christianity:
United States (cultural)
Spain (cultural)
Portugal (cultural)
France (cultural)
Italy (cultural)
Switzerland (cultural)
Denmark (cultural)
Germany (cultural)
Ireland (cultural)
England (Established and cultural)
Scotland (Established and cultural)
Denmark (Established and cultural)
Norway (Established and cultural)
Finland (Established and cultural)
Sweden (Established and cultural)
Greece (Established and cultural)
Costa Rica (Established and cultural)
Liechtenstein (Established and cultural)
Malta (Established and cultural)
Monaco (Established and cultural)
Here's a list of countries with State Atheism at some time in the 20th century:
China
Soviet Union
Cuba
Laos
North Korea
Vietnam
Albania
Angola
Benin
Bulgaria
Czechoslovakia
Ethiopia
East Germany
Hungary
Kampuchea
Mongolia
Mozambique
Poland
Romania
Yugoslavia
Compare and contrast political systems and human rights.
This is stupid. We didn't choose to be a communist country. We became one for several decades despite our Cultural Christian traditions and against our will because our Cultural Christian and Established Cultural Christian allies betrayed us and handed us over to Stalin in the aftermath of WWII after he helped them to defeat Cultural Christian Germany.
DeleteSo Christians handed you over to State Atheism, which I admit was a terrible thing to do.
DeleteIf we in Christendom had been stronger anti-communists, you Poles might not have been slaves to communism for all those years.
Thanks for making my point.
Most of the countries in your list that you deem culturally xtian have jettisoned or are in the process of jettisoning xtianity just as fast as they can. The Scandinavian countries of Sweden, Denmark and Norway are about as close as one can get to state atheism and these are hardly "state-level killing machines" and in fact by any metrics of human well being that you would care to use these countries offer the highest quality of life on our sorry planet.
DeleteThe US is an outlier among developed countries but based on current trends xtians should be a minority in another generation. And to a large extent this can be attributed to fundie wackjobs like mregnor who are driving the current generation out of established religions in droves, so thank you very much for your efforts.
I note that it was exclusively the xtian countries of Germany, Spain, Italy and Greece that adopted the ideology of fascism in collusion with the Catholic church.
And it is the shameful treaty between the fascist government of Italy and the Vatican that provides that child molester Ratzinger protection from the criminal prosecution that he so richly deserves, not that I'm forgetting the rest of the kiddy molesting hierarchy of that rotten child raping cartel.
Don't flatter yourself. It was not your anti-communism or anti-atheism that set us free. It didn't matter at all to us how heroically anti-communist you felt. And as you ought to know, Polish atheists, liberal intellectuals of the kind you probably don't like, were very well represented in the Polish opposition movement.
Delete@Piotr:
DeleteThe opposite is true. For 45 years Americans and other fervent anti-communists paid, bled and died to free your ass. We provided Western Europe and much of the world with a military umbrella to protect them from communist scum, and we died in Korea and Vietnam to hold back the Red Tide.
Two earthly things saved your atheist "democratic" ass from the atheist-communist yoke. The Catholic Church with JPII stood as a pillar of freedom and human rights, and the United States held the USSR in military and economic check until State Atheism rotted out and died. No thanks to you atheist bootlickers.
Don't forget to say thanks to us anti-communist Christians for your freedom, you ungrateful ass.
@steve:
DeleteThe list speaks for itself. You see where freedom and human dignity are (State Christianity), and where totalitarian misery are (State Atheism).
You have no real answer.
And you my poor lost soul are the Cheyne-Stokes respiration of a dying ideology.
DeleteNone of my arguments are addressed to you, you have imbibed far too much of the kool-aid, they are meant for those whose thought processes have not been completely compromised by religious indoctrination.
"Cheyne-Stokes respiration of a dying ideology."
DeletePretty funny, from a commie fellow-traveler. How's that Berlin Wall lookin'?
HIstory is littered with the husks of ideologies that were convinced that the Church was on its last legs. We've been here for 2000 years, there are a billion of us (Catholics alone) and we're just getting started.
You haven't got a chance, in the end.
"The list speaks for itself. You see where freedom and human dignity are (State Christianity), and where totalitarian misery are (State Atheism)."
DeleteSo, is Germany where freedom and human dignity are or is it where totalitarian misery is?
On an ironic note, it seems that Germany can claim to be the home of "freedom and human dignity" only because Dr. Egnor does not classify the Nazi system as state atheism. If Hitler had been just a little more hostile to religion, all of Germany, not only the eastern part, would have fallen to the Dark Side. Apparently the Führer managed to save human rights and values in the Third Reich.
DeleteNazism was a pagan ideology. It entailed the worship of race and soil and the elevation of power above mercy and self-denial.
DeleteIt is the antithesis of Christianity.
Hitler was a politician, and Nazism was a political movement, and the country they expropriated had a long heritage of (protestant) Christianity, so they paid lip service on occassion to Christian sectarianism.
But Nazism is obviously the antithesis of Christianity, understood in any meaningful way.
Nazism arose in a Christian culture, as a repudiation of that culture. Nazism was a product of the de-Christianization of Europe, as is Communism.
mregnor, you try to make it sound as though christianity is a religion of love, mercy, kindness, peace, freedom, generous human rights, and hugs and kisses for everyone. Have you ever read the bible?
DeleteHere's what Egnor says Nazis say.
DeleteEgnor: Nazism arose in a Christian culture, as a repudiation of that culture.
Here's what Nazis really say.
Hitler, on the day the Enabling Act was passed giving him dictatorial power, described his struggle as against materialism, just like the struggle of creationists and Intelligent Designers, who struggle against materialism.
Hitler: “While the regime is determined to carry through the political and moral purging of our public life, it is creating and ensuring the prerequisites for a really deep inner religiousity. Benefits of a personal nature, which might arise from compromise with atheistic organizations, could outweigh the results which become apparent through the destruction of general basic ethical-religious values. The national regime seeks in both Christian confessions the factors most important for the maintenance of our folkdom... The national regime will safeguard to the Christian confessions the influence due them, in school and education. It is concerned with the sincere cooperation of church and state. The struggle against a materialistic philosophy and for the creation of a true folk community serves the interests of the German nation as well as our Christian belief.” [Hitler, Reichstag speech, 23 March 1933; in Cuno Workenbach, Das Deustsche Reich von 1918 bis Heute (1935), p.133, cited in William Donovan’s Nuremberg Report; compare Steigmann-Gall, p.116]
Hitler: "Along with the fight for a purer morality we have taken upon ourselves the struggle against the decomposition of our religion... We have therefore taken up the struggle against the Godless movement, and not just with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out. And above all we have dragged the priests out of the lowlands of the political party struggle and have brought them back into the church." [Speech in Berlin, October 24, 1933. Cited in Steigmann-Gall, p.117]
Hitler: "There has been no interference, nor will there be any, with the teachings or religious freedom of the confessions. To the contrary, the state protects religion, though always under the condition that that it will not be used as a disguise for political purposes... I know that there are thousands of priests who are not merely reconciled with the present state, but who gladly cooperate with it... Where can our interests be more convergent than in our struggle against the symptoms of degeneracy in the contemporary world, in our struggle against cultural bolshevism, against the Godless movement, against criminality, and for a social conception of community... These are not anti-Christian, but rather Christian principles!" [Speech at the Ehrenbreitstein fortress in Koblenz, 26 August 1934, cited in Steigmann-Gall, p.118]
Hitler: “...of all the tasks which we have to face, the noblest and most sacred for mankind is that each racial species must preserve the purity of the blood which God has given it... there is one error which cannot be remedied... namely the failure to recognize the importance of conserving the blood and the race free from intermixture and thereby the racial aspect and character which are God's gift and God's handiwork. It is not for men to discuss the question of why Providence created different races, but rather to recognize the fact that it punishes those who disregard its work of creation...
...my first feeling is simply one of thankfulness to our Almighty God... He has blessed our labors and has enabled our people to come through all the obstacles...
Today I must humbly thank Providence, whose grace has enabled me, who was once an unknown soldier in the War, to bring to a successful issue the struggle for the restoration of our honor and rights as a nation.” [Hitler, speech to the Reichstag, 30 Jan. 1937]
Here's what Egnor says Nazis say.
DeleteEgnor: Nazism arose in a Christian culture, as a repudiation of that culture.
Here's what Nazis really say.
Goebbels: “The struggle we are now waging today until victory or the bitter end is, in its deepest sense, a struggle between Christ and Marx.” [Joseph Goebbels, Michael (1929), p.66, cited by Steigmann-Gall, Holy Reich, p. 13]
From Mein Kampf: "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting [kämpfe] for the work of the Lord." [Mein Kampf, v.I ch. 2, Manheim translation, p.65; German version, p.70; Murphy translation, p.61; Reynal & Hitchchock edition, p.84]
Hitler said it again in a speech at the Reichstag in 1938.
Here is Walter Buch, devout Lutheran Nazi, Supreme Party Magistrate, head of the Nazi Party court and Martin Bormann's father-in-law, on what Nazis mean by "struggle".
Buch: "When Point 24 of our program says the party stands for a positive Christianity, here above all is the cornerstone of our thinking. Christ preached struggle as did no other. His life was struggle for his beliefs, for which he went to his death. From everyone he demanded a decision between yes or no.. That is the necessity: that man find the power to decide between yes and no."
"Just as Christianity only prevailed through the fanatical belief of its followers, so too shall it be with the spiritual movement of National Socialism." [Speech to the Nazi Student League, cited in Steigmann-Gall, p.23-4]
Newspapers of the Stormtroopers [Sturmabteilung, or SA] described what "struggle" meant to Nazis.
From an SA article titled "Under the Cross": "To us Christianity is not an empty phrase, but a glowing life. It lives through us and in us… Thus is the strength of the nation gathered under the sign of the cross. When the red beast threatens us, or the well-behaved philistine [sittsame Spießer]... sneers at us, we look up to the Cross and receive the doctrine of struggle."
From another SA article titled "Christ's Spirit - SA [Stormtrooper] Spirit!": "We interpret in the Gospel not the word, but the spirit. We see in the seed, in the model of our Savior not only that he does good and shuns evil, but also that he struggles... Jesus was not locked up in a church, waiting for the throng… What SA man has not surprised himself with the thought that the orator in a meeting, the man of the people, says exactly what a minister would preach?" [cited in Steigmann-Gall, p.145]
Erich Koch was a devout Lutheran elected president of his provincial church synod, also a powerful Nazi who murdered perhaps a million people in the Ukraine and enslaved the rest.
Koch: "Externally, much has changed. But in our church the Word of Christ according to the doctrine of Luther remains Righteousness, truth and love should guide us, not only at the level of charity but also in the joyful and active struggles for our Protestant confession of faith." [cited in Steigmann-Gall, p.145]
Egnor displays his bizarre ignorance of both Nazi history and Christianity!
DeleteEgnor: Nazism was a pagan ideology. It entailed the worship of race and soil
The phrase commonly used is "blood and soil", or in German, blut und boden. It is Christian doctrine that, to this day, continues to be popular with conservative Christians.
Egnor, as a Catholic, should appreciate what the Catholic episcopate of Germany set as guidelines in 1936:
“Race, soil, blood and people are precious natural values, which God the Lord has created and the care of which he has entrusted to us Germans.” [Quoted in Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p. 106]
As a Catholic, Egnor is obligated to honor the Catholic doctrine of "blood and soil" or blut und boden as his Catholic authorities tell him to do so.
"Blood and soil" or blut und boden continue to be popular with conservative Christians.
For example, consider the "Kinists", followers of racist creationism, based on the totalitarian, racist theology of Rousas Rushdoony. Rushdoony was perhaps the most influential American fundamentalist theologian of the 20th century. Rushdoony was also the spiritual guru of Howard Ahmanson, the billionaire who funds the pro-Intelligent Design Discovery Institute.
Here is a Kinist blog called "Spirit, Water, Blood" which blames Darwin for ANTI-racism, and celebrates "blood and soil". In this post he is attacking race-mixing as "Satan's triumph":
"Alienists [anti-racists] are so eager to deny that blood and soil have any significance whatsoever that they make themselves look increasingly ridiculous." [Spirit, Water, Blood (Blog)]
Here is another blog post, essentially pro-Nazi, entitled, significantly, "Oh, the Germanity!"
SWB: "While Yankees chase utopian dreams, the [American] Southerner “accepts the irremediability of a certain amount of evil and tries to fence it around instead of trying to stamp it out... His is a classical acknowledgment of tragedy and of the limits of power.” The Southerner distrusts abstraction, idealism, and progress, and loves kith and kin, blood and soil; the permanent things... The Yankee is “unhappy unless he feels that he is making the world over. He may talk much of tolerance, but for him tolerance is an exponent of power. [emphasis in original] His tolerance tolerates only the dogmatic idea of tolerance, as anyone can discover for himself by getting to know the modern humanitarian liberal.” ["Oh, the Germanity!"]
Michael Hill, a politician with the creationist, pro-slavery, fundamentalist political organization "The League of the South", writes:
Michael Hill: "Because of a resurgence of godless multiculturalism and universalism (the new Tower of Babel), white Western Christians are threatened with extinction as a separate and identifiable people because of their own weakness and lack of Biblical understanding about the God-ordained principles of nationhood. While all other “nations” (i.e. groups based on race and ethnicity and “blood and soil”) are encouraged to preserve themselves and their cultures, white Christians in the West (the descendants of Japheth) are told that we must give up everything we have in order to placate those different from ourselves and who bear some alleged grievance toward us (i.e. slavery, “racism,” hatred, etc.)..." [Michael Hill of the League of the South, quoted at "Oh, the Germanity!"]
He goes on like this at great length, race-mixing will destroy white civilization, blah blah. All typical creationism of the pre-1970's.
Piotr, I grew up in Croatia (ex.Yugoslavia), which you may remember was mildly oppressive. I know from talking to my colleagues from other communist countries, there were much worse places. Books were written about those horrors.
ReplyDeleteMy country was officially non religious. State sponsored and mandated ideological indoctrination by teaching Marxism-Leninism which would start in kindergarten and continue all the way to higher education. There was no Christmas officially so city made sure to put decorations up on Dec 26th every year. In school we had to sing praise to communist leaders, they were our new gods.
Religion was allowed but it was supposed to be practiced by dirty, unimportant masses not intellectuals.
My father was a teacher whose career stagnated when school board found he was religious. We tried to keep it secret but it leaked somehow. Because of that he was also followed for a while by agents, equivalent to KGB in function but different name.
I came to N. America to escape the oppression and of course for economic opportunities i.e. money and "chicks".
I wonder if you were one of those communist oppressors?
Eugen: I wonder if you were one of those communist oppressors?
DeleteI wonder what on earth makes you think so. Do you simply mean to offend me? I was a student during the Solidarity period and most of the marshal law years. I did the same as other students, in matters of politics. I joined the independent students' association, took part in university strikes, went on demonstrations, was arrested once and released after paying a fine. The Polish system was not particularly brutal: rather than that, it was boring and stupid, and the general atmosphere (after the universal optimism of 1980-81) was one of frustration and lack of perspectives, but not fear. After Solidarity nobody was afraid of the communists any more. We realised it was them who had reasons to be scared, and they knew it too, and eventually it broke their morale.
Unlike Russians or East Germans, we could travel abroad quite easily: I was in Britain on a student exchange visit before the marshal law was completely lifted. I had American and British teachers, and "1984" was required reading in my English Literature course (while being at the same time a forbidden book). The system was schizophrenic, since the party leaders tried to stay in power as well as making some feeble attempts to catch up with the world beyond the Iron Curtain. We won without shedding a droip of blood, simply by defeating the communists in a landslide manner in fairly conducted parliamentary elections. I believe the fact that we did not have to kill or die to win was one of the most spectacular triumphs in the history of my country.
Do you wonder I don't see the world in black and white, and have no kind words for our friend Dr. Egnor, who has never seen a real commie or fought for anything, but nonetheless divides the human race into good guys and bad guys with nobody in between, and wants my thanks for his being such a staunch Christian and a jingo hero? I'm grateful to many Western people and institutions for their real support -- to the British Council and its activities in Poland, and to George Soros, for example. Definitely not to the likes of Dr. Egnor with his patronising attitude and B&W vision.
Of course I mean "martial", not "marshal" law. Press "Publish" in haste, repent at your leisure.
Delete@Pitor:
DeleteWhy do you think that the Polish government went easy on you in the student strikes? Why was the Polish system "not particularly brutal"?
After all, student strikes and civil disobedience in other State Atheist paradises were one-way tickets to the gulag if you were lucky and the firing squad if you were not. Stalin had little patience for frisky students, Mao killed about 60 million of his own people, and Pol Pot was not known for his gentility with dissent.
Here's the reason "the Polish system was not particularly brutal":
The Catholic Church. The Polish commies realized that Catholicism was so ingrained in the Polish soul that the kind of brutal repression that was the hallmark of State Atheism everywhere else would be suicide in Poland. It would mean civil war.
The Church had your back, and is likely the primary reason you are not feeding the worms right now for your youthful indiscretions.
You hate that which saved your life and your country. Fool.
I don't hate Catholicism. Most of my family are Catholics and I simply don't happen to be one. As for "the Polish soul", and your political analyses, you have no idea what you are talking about and I don't feel like arguing with you in this over-spammed thread.
DeleteIf you don't hate Catholicism, you have an odd tolerance for your buddies Steve and Diogenes, who drip with anti-Catholic hatred.
DeleteHow do you feel about calling the Pope a Nazi and a child molester?
How do you feel about defending a Nazi and a child molester?
DeleteOberski,
Deletecool it. The current Pope was never a Nazi-- to be a Nazi you have to join the Party. He was forced into the Hitler Youth-- not the same. There is no evidence he ever molested children.
He has however protected and sheltered child molesters. That's bad enough. It is not necessary to make things up and call him a child molester.
The history of conservative Christians supporting Nazism in Germany and in the USA is incontrovertible. None of the conservative Christians on this thread even bother trying to dispute it.
We do not need to make up facts to show that fascism, Nazism and the Holocuast were necessarily based on conservative Christianity. Egnor has not even a shadow of a fact to dispute that.
We do not need to make up facts. Actual facts are damning enough and Egnor has no come-back, and cannot even defend his own bullshit.
@Diogenes:
DeleteObviously there were some conservative Christians who supported the Nazis, as there were Nazi supporters among any religious or political faction you can name.
The most conspicuous sectarian support for Nazism came not from conservative Christians (who in Germany were mostly members of the Catholic Center Party), but from the citadel of State Atheism in the Soviet Union, who in 1939 signed a mutual cooperation pact with Nazi Germany that made the Nazi invasions of Poland and Western Europe possible.
It's astonishing that an atheist would consider himself in a position to criticize Nazi collaborators, being himself of the worldview of the most well-documented, numerous,and enthusiastic collaborators Hitler had between 1939-1941.
Atheists in the USSR only stopped collaborating with their ally Hitler when he invaded them.
@Diogenes
DeleteWhat you say is true and I apologize to actual Nazis and child molesters for my invidious comparison to the pope.
Egnor repeats his bullshit that was already refuted:
DeleteThe most conspicuous sectarian support for Nazism came not from conservative Christians (who in Germany were mostly members of the Catholic Center Party), but from the citadel of State Atheism in the Soviet Union
Leaving aside your pig-ignorance in asserting that conservative Christians in Germany were "mostly members of the Catholic Center Party"...
You have ignored the facts, already detailed, that every country around Germany had fascist movements explicitly based on conservative Christianity, and that only fascist movements based on conservative Christianity collaborated with Hitler and deported Jews to death camps. Christianity was overwhelmingly correlated with the desire to exterminate Jews. Atheism was anti-correlated with the desire to exterminate Jews.
This was recognized by the Nazis themselves, who hated atheism, liberalism, modernism and the Enlightenment because they had led to emancipation and legal equality for Jews. In German history it is next to impossible to find an evolutionist who was anti-Semitic, while Christian anti-Semites were, basically, all Christians, to varying degress.
Since Egnor is pig-ignorant of all European history, I will re-post my previous comments here.
LET'S DISCUSS NAZI COLLABORATION.
The Christian regimes and Christian fascist movements who collaborated with Hitler far outnumber the atheist regimes who collaborated with Hitler-- and the atheist regimes weren't bent on killing all the Jews.
In contrast, the Christian regimes and Christian fascist movements who collaborated with Hitler were more numerous and collaborated because they wanted to kill Jews. In fact they did help out the Nazis by shipping the Jews in their territories off to death camps.
The fascist movements in all the countries around Germany were explicitly Catholic and they collaborated in the murder of Jews. The only exception if the Nazi Party in Germany itself, which pretended to be generically Christian but was implicitly Protestant, as Steigmann-Gall has shown in The Holy Reich.
In Croatia, the Ustasha in Croatia were fascist, fanatically Catholic, engaged in mass murder or enforced conversion of Serbs to Catholicism, and assisted the deportation of Jews.
In Slovakia, the fascist government was headed by a Catholic priest named Father Tiso, who assisted in the deportation of Jews to death camps, as Hitler himself expressed gratitude for in private:
Hitler: "We must undertake a campaign of cleaning-up [of anti-Nazi resistance], square meter by square meter, and this will compel us to have recourse to summary justice. The struggle with the terrorists will be savage warfare in the real sense... until Jewry, which is the bandits' Intelligence Service, is exterminated, we shall not have accomplished our task.
It is interesting to note the way in which this little Catholic priest who calls himself Tiso sends the Jews into our hands." [Hitler, Table Talk, 30 August 1942]
In Hungary, the right-wing military coup led by Admiral Horthy was supported by the Catholic Church.
In Austria, Cardinal Innitzer cooperated with the pro-Catholic Austro-fascist government of Engelbert Dollfuß and Kurt Schuschnigg from 1934 to 1938. The Austro-fascist government was endorsed by the Church.
When Hitler annexed Austria, Innitzer and the other Austrian Catholic bishops signed a declaration endorsing the annexation, signed by the Cardinal with “Heil Hitler!”
In Spain and Portugal, the fascist movements were explicitly pro-Catholic (Franco called his movement to destroy democracy "The Crusade") and official Catholic policy supported fascist movements like those in Spain whenever they were pro-Catholic. The Nazis, of course, assisted Franco in Spain by sending the Luftwaffe to bomb civilians at Guernica; but the Catholic Church still supported Franco anyway.
Continued below:
Continuing on Collaboration with Nazis:
DeleteIn Italy, Pope Pius XI described Mussolini as "a man sent by Providence." As soon as Mussolini seized control, the Church signed the Lateran Pact of 1929 with the fascist regime, a pact that made Catholicism the only recognized religion,with a total monopoly over education (no secular education, natch), a monopoly over marriage laws, birth and death.
When Mussolini conquered Ethiopia, using poison gas and other brutal methods, he gave as one of his justifications that Ethiopian Christians allegedly believed in Monophysitism, declared a heretical form of Christology by a church council in 451 (Catholics and Protestants are dyophysite.)
In France, fascist movements like Action Francaise and the Croix de Feu [Cross of Fire] were explicitly Catholic and anti-Semitic. After Hitler conquered France, these Catholic organizations collaborated in deporting Jews to death camps. The head of the eugenics program of the French Vichy government was a conservative Catholic, Alexis Carroll, who wrote a book about miracle cures at Lourdes.
Now let's consider a negative control: What if they hadn't been Christian? What then?
This is surprisingly easy to answer.
First, the only country conquered by Nazis that didn't collaborate in deporting Jews was Albania, run by Muslims. Muslim Albania was conquered by Germans but did not cooperate in murdering Jews.
Second, many Jews escaped to Shanghai, then controlled by the non-Christian Japanese. When the Nazi regime demanded that their Japanese allies deport the Jews of Shanghai, the non-Christian Japanese could not understand why anyone would want to kill Jews.
So there is a simple correlation:
Fascists and Nazi collaborators are overwhelmingly likely to be explicitly Christian, to be motivated by Christianity, and certain to collaborate in the murder of Jews.
Non-Christians allied with or conquered by Nazis cannot understand why Jews need to be killed and did not cooperate in the deportation of Jews to death camps.
Christians killed Jews and lied about them for 1,900 years, called them child murderers. Martin Luther, in "Against the Jews and Their Lies", said Jews murdered small children. Conclusion: "We are at fault in not slaying them."
The Holocaust is a product of Christian epistemology: Lie, lie, lie about everyone with different religious beliefs than yours.
Christians lied about the Jews for 1,900 years. The founders of Catholicism and Protestantism were all anti-Semitic. All the famous Christian authorities were anti-Semitic.
DeleteMartin Luther, "Against the Jews and their Lies", which was constantly cited by Nazis. Luther accused the Jews of murdering children, and he said "We are at fault in not slaying them", well, the Nazis sure did. In "On the Shem Hamphorash", he pointed out that Jews were portrayed on the Judensau, the "Jew-pig", a statue on dozens of German churches and cathedrals that showed Jews suckling at the teats of a pig and gazing into its anus to read their Talmud therein. Here is a gallery of images of Judensaus on Christian churches, if you can stomach it.
St. Augustine of Hippo called the Jews Christ-killers.
John Chrysostom called them Christ-killers.
Hippolytus said the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem was punishment for Jews murdering Jesus.
Ephrem. Eusebius. Origen. Justin Martyr. Peter Chrysologus. Melito of Sardis. Philllip Melanchthon. Johannes Eck. All Jew-haters, all lied about the Jews.
St. Thomas Aquinas said Jews should be enslaved.
Pope Paul IV, in 1555, says Jews are naturally slaves due to their guilt for murdering Jesus.
Radulphe said kill them all.
St. Peter the Venerable said let them barely live with maximum suffering to prove God is just, but steal all their property and use it to fund wars to kill Muslims.
Now Christians want to blame their crimes on atheists. Historical revisionism. Sorry, we know your history better than you do.
Diogenes said:
Delete"There is no evidence he ever molested children."
There's no evidence that luther ever raped anyone, yet you call him "rapey". Think about it.
Whether the pope was a 'willing' nazi or not may be debatable but he might as well be one since the catholic cult is every bit as totalitarian, if not more so, as nazis under hitler were. Compared to the catholic cult, the nazis under hitler were rank amateurs when it comes to control, oppression, murder, lies, perversion, and destruction of cultures.
The pope is as guilty of raping/molesting children as anyone in the catholic cult who actually did those things and is still doing those things. Since he is the 'boss' and has helped orchestrate the cover-ups, he should be prosecuted and punished for every rape/molestation that occurred while he was poop and for conspiring to cover them up. Besides, even though there may not be any available evidence to prove that he ever raped altar boys, I find it real hard to believe that he would help cover up such despicable acts if he has never done them himself. As far as I'm concerned, a stake and a fire would be too lenient for him and all the other catholic child-raping monsters.
Another thing to consider is that when someone just drives the getaway car for bank robbers who kill a guard, that driver is also a robber and a murderer by law. I don't think that Steve's insinuation about the pope being a child molester is out of line.
TWT,
DeleteI think you are exaggerating certain facts.
The pope is as guilty of raping/molesting children as anyone in the catholic cult who actually did those things and is still doing those things.
OK, that is a judgement call. However:
I find it real hard to believe that he would help cover up such despicable acts if he has never done them himself
That is against common sense. People do this kind of thing all the time, cover up for other people's crimes to protect the reputation of their institution; or else they cannot really believe that such horrible crimes happened. We saw something similar, on a smaller scale, at Penn State.
Compared to the catholic cult, the nazis under hitler were rank amateurs when it comes to control, oppression, murder, lies, perversion, and destruction of cultures.
I feel this is an exaggeration. The Catholic church was not totalitarian-- through most of its history, it was polycratic, consisting of many different competing orders of monks/nuns/priests with very loose central control. It had to negotiate with many secular governments. It could not exert total control.
As for murder, compared with the Nazis-- it's complicated. The conquistadores and crusaders murdered many people in the name of Christ and his Church. But neither the crusaders nor the conquistadores were under the direct control of the church, in the sense of giving direct orders. Granted, church authorities called for crusades directly.
destruction of cultures.
Well, the Church did support wholesale destruction of cultures: Aztecs, Incas, Jews, Native Americans...
The Church didn't have direct, totalitarian control and didn't issue orders in anything like the way that, for example, the Nazis issued the Nuremberg Laws.
Rather, the church was responsible for the ideology, the value system that equated non-Christians with animals, the anti-democracy and anti-modernism, and the epistemology that enabled people to tell any ridiculous lie about non-Christians: Jews, atheists, Muslims, witches, etc.
It was the anti-democracy, the anti-modernism, and the anti-rationalist epistemology that made fascism and Nazism inevitable.
Without going into a lengthy explanation, I stand by what I said.
Delete" Do you simply mean to offend me?"
ReplyDeleteNo offence was intended, Piotr. Just looking at your comments above seemed you were not against communism that much. OTOH, if you were my countryman and atheist I would offend you, of course in my first language. Reason is atheism was synonymous with communism and I have no patience for that combination. In my small nation we consider Catholicism essential part of our national identity. I think it's like that with Polish nation.
I was young but I remember news of Solidarity movement. It's success gave encouragement to other East Europeans to fight communism.
I remember the Solidarity movement and the election of John Paul II and his visit to Poland.
DeleteThat was before I was a Christian (I was an agnostic/atheist), and still I was inspired by the courage and wisdom of the opponents of the communist regime and by the Catholic Church.
Part of what brought me to the Church (besides God's grace) was my admiration for her role in the liberation of people imprisoned by communism.
I find it hard to believe that a person like Piotr who personally lived through those events could be blind to the good work done by the Church.
Atheism blinds people.
Eugen: Reason is atheism was synonymous with communism
DeleteCategory error. There have been Christian communists, Christians collaborating with communism, Christians opposed to communism and fighting it, sometimes heroically. And there have been atheists with the sanme attitudes. I have actively and deliberately resisted communism, but I have never been an "anti-communist" in the sense of belonging to an ideological sect whose main preoccupation is hating the commies. Likewise, I am an atheist but that doesn't make me a religion-hater. I only oppose the encroachment of religion on areas where it has no business to intrude, such as science, secular government and academic life, and public education. The fact that the election of a charismatic Polish pope very likely precipitated the erosion of communism in Poland is no reason to grant the Church more influence nowadays than it should have in a democratic country -- just out of gratitude.
PS @Eugen
DeleteYou said yourself you left Croatia for North America (Canada?) to escape oppression, but also "of course" in quest of "money and chicks". Many young Poles left the country in the 1980s, almost exclusively for economic reasons. They certainly were not trying to escape atheism. Anyone looking for a Catholic stronghold to live in would have migrated in the opposite direction. Communism only made the Church stronger, and I'm sure many a parish priest looks back to good old times with understandable nostalgia as he counts his depleted flock.
@Pitor:
DeleteIndeed consumerism and materialism may ultimately be a greater enemy of the Church than was communism. But communism was a vile bloody horror, and its primary enemy was Christendom.
"I only oppose the encroachment of religion on areas where it has no business to intrude, such as science, secular government and academic life, and public education."
Who in the hell are you to decide where religion has "business to intrude"? It's up to the people, and to the democratic process. Religious worldviews have every much as much a place in science, secular government, academic life, and public education as your atheist crap has.
You atheists have a totalitarian streak. That's why we fight you and don't trust you in positions of power.
Who in the hell are you to decide where religion has "business to intrude"? It's up to the people, and to the democratic process.
DeleteSorry, but the scientific process operates in the same way everywhere in the world, and it isn't up to "the people" of any country to decide how it works. It's up to the the global consensus of specialists to accept something as valid science.
@Piotr:
DeleteDo you advocate legal censorship of religious expression?
Of course I don't.
Deletemregnor, there's a big difference between "legal censorship of religious expression" and keeping religious fairy tales out of science and public school science classes.
DeleteHave you ever thought about the fact that if your religious beliefs are allowed or forced into science and public school science classes, ALL other religious beliefs will be allowed or forced too? What makes you think that your particular beliefs will be the only ones allowed or forced?
@TWT
DeleteFWIW, I have, in the last few years, met more than ten people (otherwise seemingly reasonable) who think it would be a good idea to jail parents, and take their children from them for good, for no other reason that those parents want to bring their children up within established religions such as Christianity, Judaism or Islam. This is the kind of fanaticism that alarms me. I hear almost nothing similarly odious from religious people where I live.
Rapey: I have, in the last few years, met more than ten people (otherwise seemingly reasonable) who think it would be a good idea to jail parents, and take their children from them for good, for no other reason that those parents want to bring their children up within established religions such as Christianity, Judaism or Islam. This is the kind of fanaticism that alarms me.
DeleteI call bullshit on this.
Give us their email addresses and we'll ask them what they really said. Luther's probably lying again.
FWIW, I have, in the last few years, met more than ten people [...]
DeletePshaw! I have met eleven ... no, twelve ... oh, I forget the exact number ... religious people who ate baby livers for breakfast. Every atheist I ever met was an absolute sweetheart.
@Miller
DeleteYeah, but you're lying, I'm not.
@Paedo
I'm not giving out people's email addresses, and certainly not to the likes of you.
Anyway, the reason I've met so many is that I ask many atheists when I meet them, and here's the kind of thinking that lies behind it:
"On several occasions Dawkins has made the claim that sexually abusing a child is "arguably less" damaging than "the long term psychological damage inflicted by bringing up a child Catholic in the first place"
And here's the type of impact his words have had.
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/2767394
Here's more:
Deletehttp://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120928044258AAKcfIK
http://opinsy.com/statement/2582/the-religious-indoctrination-of-children-should-be-banned
Check the stats on the last one - exactly what my informal mini survey found.
Luther - you're saying you've met these people ... ? Yahoo Answers, again? I guess you could trawl Yourube comments as well (Hee hee - that was a typo, but I think I'll let it stand :0) ). Yes, people on the internet express all manner of exceptionable views. And invariably, they belong to a group with which you yourself do not identify. Well spotted.
Delete@Miller
DeleteI have met the people I say I have - the links (not just yahoo answers - so don't lie (again)) and quote show exactly what I have found and suggest that such people are fairly widespread thus making my reported experience completely believable. You seem to think that I am making some grand claim in need of peer review - I'm not - I'm simply reporting what I have found and providing copious evidence that they views I have encountered are widespread. That is, I am giving you actual examples of the phenomenon I say exists and you say doesn't.
'Copious evidence that the views are widespread ... '. Your original claim was that you have met more than ten people who advocate jail for parents and the removal of children (you really ask such nosey questions about people's worldviews when you meet 'em?) ... your evidence for this is (inter alia) a survey on the net relating to a somewhat different question: "The religious indoctrination of children should be banned.". An overwhelming 55% of 134 respondents agreed with that notion. Of those, one wonders how many were voting for taking it to individual homes, rather than educational establishments? Given that faith-based schools are specifically mentioned, I'd say very few.
DeleteI have no doubt you can find someone saying it, and that (in your apparent view) is all it takes to make a viewpoint widespread. I think you hear what you want to hear, not what people say. Grrr grrr atheist bastards mumble mutter.
Rapey: I have, in the last few years, met more than ten people (otherwise seemingly reasonable) who think it would be a good idea to jail parents, and take their children from them for good, for no other reason that those parents want to bring their children up within established religions such as Christianity, Judaism or Islam. This is the kind of fanaticism that alarms me.
DeleteThat which is asserted without evidence can be refuted without evidence.
With absolute certainty, you have no evidence. Rapey tells lies on every thread, Rapey is called out and he always just changes the subject.
Christianity has pulled this shit for thousands of years: lie about other people.
For 1,900 years Christians lied about Jews; for 2,000 years Christians lied about atheists and witches; for 1300 years Christians lied about Muslims; for 150+ years Christians lied about communists; for 100 years Christians lied about anti-slavery abolitionists and the US Civil Rights movement.
The conservative Christians for the last 50 years lied about homosexuals. They screwed the pooch on that one, the whole "destroy gay marriage" crusade, and alienated the younger generation.
You need another group to demonize. Since conservative Christians got caught murdering millions of Jews in the Holocaust, and you alienated the young by lying about gay people, now it's back to lying about atheists.
@Rapey:
DeleteThe fact still remains that everyone who attempts to apply the US First Amendment to the Constitution the way our Founding Fathers interpreted it, is hit by multiple death threats from Christians-- very rarely Muslims.
Here are just a few gruesome death threats that a 16-year-old girl gets when she tries to apply the US Constitution the way our Founding Fathers intended:
When I take over the world I'm going to do a holocaust to all the atheists
hail Mary full of grace @jessicaahlquist is gonna get punched in her face
I found it, what a little bitch lol I wanna snuff her
yeah well she's definitely got it coming to her
i've decided that im going to eat her family lmfao sounds good
your home address posted online i can't wait to hear about you getting curb stomped you fucking worthless cunt
lol I wanna stick that bitch lol
nail her to a cross
ima go drown that bitch in holy water
Fuck Jessica alquist [sic] I'll drop anchor on her face
Let's all jump that girl who did the banner #fuckthatho
definelty [sic] laying it down on this atheist tomorrow anyone else?
"But for real somebody should jump this girl" lmao let's do it!
everyone is going to beat you up now prob
this girl honestly needs to be punched in the face
whoever the bitch is... deserves to be punched in the mouth
I want to punch the girl in the face
I think everyone should just fight this girl
if I wasn't 18 and wouldn't go to jail I'd beat the shit out of her idk how she got away with not getting beat up yet
the best part is that shes already transferred schools because she knows someone will jump her #ahaha
Hmm jess is in my bio class, she's gonna get some shit thrown at her
who cares #thatbitchisgointohell and Satan is gonna rape her
gods going to fuck your ass with that banner you scumbag
lol I wanna stick that bitch lol
shes not human shes garbage
i hope theres [sic] lots of banners in hell when your [sic] rotting in there you atheist fuck
May that little, evil atheist teenage girl and that judge BURN IN HELL!
I want the immediate removal of all atheists from the school, how about that?
[Gruesome death threats toward 16-year-old girl]
@Paefdo
DeleteI just provided evidence which shows that what I am reporting is commonplace. As for the rest of your posts - yes, many religious people are, like you, complete psychos. My point is, and pretty much always has been, that it makes no difference whether it's a religious fanatic or an atheist fanatics who is torturing, murdering, or generally making live a misery for all who don't subscribe to their worldview. Thus I see your fanaticism as just as dangerous as the particular fanaticism you fanatically oppose.
@miller
DeleteLOL - my evidence that I have met such people is my testimony. (Virtually the only possible evidence that would be available in such a case.) So, if you don't accept that then you must explain why. And given that I have provided further evidence that clearly shows such views are commonplace, you now have to explain what reason you have to disbelieve something that, in light of that evidence, there is no good reason to disbelieve. This isn't a case of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence, because the claim is not extraordinary at all, but mundane, and therefore perfectly possible, and as such you need to explain why you are so resistant to the obvious truth. Moreover, even if I did make the claim up, the main point would still stand: huge numbers of atheists in the UK (some of whom I may or may not have met) think it would be a good idea to jail people and take their children away simply because those people bring their children up within well established religious faiths.
"atheism was synonymous with communism, Category error. "
ReplyDeletePiotr, OK I agree it's an error by a strict definition. You of all people should understand why someone growing up in communism would automatically equate communism to atheism. They are like a chocolate vanilla swirl cone.
Otherwise,you seem to be an atheist with moderate views, I can handle that. I occasionally read Sandwalk but rarely comment. Also, I think Larry Moran is an interesting scientist who thankfully allows opposing views on his blog. It's more fun that way.
As for one of the reasons I came to Canada i.e. money and chicks....I still have no money and have only one chick-wife. I say my expectation were overrated. :D
Don't tell your wife that.
DeleteNo,no no! She is Calabrese...very dangerous!
DeleteEgnor: You atheists have a totalitarian streak. That's why we fight you and don't trust you in positions of power.
ReplyDeleteBlah blah blah, I'm a hero. Hitler said the same thing: materialism and atheism would destroy civilization.
Hitler: "The fact is, we are weak-willed creatures; but nevertheless there is a Creative Power [schöpferische Kraft]. Wanting to deny that is stupidity. He who believes something false still stands higher than he who believes nothing at all. Thus a Communist professor imagines himself to triumph over Creation! Compared against such people, we will be Masters: whether we now draw from the Catechism or from philosophy, we have the choice to go back, while they, with their merely materialistic worldview, in the end just eat each other." [Hitler, Table Talk, Oct. 24, 1941, my translation]
The thing about right-wing authoritarians, including Hitler and Egnor, is that they think they're the heroes in a story book. They think they're the good guys. They think they have a simple system to identify who the bad guys are.
They also know what the threats to "Christian civilization" are: Jews, atheists, modernists, liberals.
I've noticed that Intelligent Design ideology is nearly identical to Nazi ideology, except with "Jews" replaced by "Darwinists".
Let us compare ID and Nazism, and let's see what happens when you replace "Jew" with "Darwinist."
1. In both cases, the Jew/Darwinist is claimed to be purely destructive, because he is atheistic/materialistic, and materialism can only be destructive. (Note that the Nazis accused Jews of being closet "materialists" just pretending to have a religion.)
2. The Jew/Darwinist is called a Christ-killer. (Yes, creationists William Dembski, William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Kindell, and Dan Gilbert did indeed call "Darwinists" Christ-killers, and yes, Nazis called Jews Christ-killers.)
3. The Jew/Darwinist is blamed for causing World War I *AND* World War II.
4. The Jew/Darwinist initiated, and is behind, Bolshevik revolutions.
5. The Jew/Darwinist is determined to destroy Christianity.
6. The Jew/Darwinist is dangerous because he does not believe in an afterlife.
7. The Jew/Darwinist is an intellectual elite maintaining a stranglehold on all professional institutions by illicit means.
8. The Jew/Darwinist is called a disease, parasite, or vermin that feeds on the host body, Christendom, and must be eliminated or civilization will perish.
9. The Jew/Darwinist has promoted a "worldview" that is mechanistic, reductionist, materialistic, corrosive to society, etc.
10. The Jew/Darwinist is blamed for promoting homosexuality, abortion, and lascivious popular entertainment.
11. The Jew/Darwinist is to blame for secularism, liberalism, rationalism, and the Enlightenment.
12. The Jew/Darwinist is to blame for higher criticism of the Bible/documentary hypothesis.
13. The Jew/Darwinist is himself sensuous and sexually promiscuous.
14. The Jew/Darwinist has promoted a "worldview" that ruined modern art, modern music, theater, etc. The Jew/Darwinist can neither create beauty nor appreciate it.
15. The Jew/Darwinist destroys family and/or marriage because of his materialism.
16. The Jew/Darwinist practices "The Big Lie."
@Diogenes
DeleteLet's compare your thinking with fanatics everywhere.
1. X/Christianity/religion is responsible for every evil thing that has ever happened and has no redeeming features whatsoever. It must be stamped out lest civilization fall.
Nuff said.
Rapey:
DeleteLet's compare your thinking with fanatics everywhere.
1. X/Christianity/religion is responsible for every evil thing that has ever happened and has no redeeming features whatsoever. It must be stamped out lest civilization fall.
No, that is not what "fanatics everywhere" say. Rather, fanatics typically say "people different from me are responsible for all of my society's problems."
In the comments above, I have tried to rein in both TWT and Oberski when I felt their accusations toward the Catholic hierarchy were not backed up by facts.
Christians for 1,900 years considered it acceptable to tell any ridiculous lie about Jews, atheists, witches; for 1,300 years, any ridiculous lie about Muslims; for 180 years, any ridiculous lie about Communists. The Christian epistemology rewards lying, and thus enabled the Holocaust.
The proper response to that it is not to exaggerate and say "Christianity has no redeeming features", rather, the proper response is to assess the evidence for an accusation and demand that accusations meet a high standard of evidence.
In this thread, I've presented dozens of quotes from primary sources showing that conservative Christians enthusiastically supported Nazism because (amongst other thing) they supported the Nazis' treatment of Jews.
Egnor and Luther have not presented any evidence to back up their claims.
@Paedo
DeleteYes, conservative Christians sometimes supported the Nazis. That was not a claim I was disputing. I was disputing the crazy idea that Nazism was state anti-atheism, and I refuted such a contention with the existence of Martin Bormann.
Gasiorowski, aren't you going to say something for all this Catholic bashing? Look what Diogenes did by clicking around Internet and presenting half a story that fits his world view.
ReplyDeleteAs a catholic basher from way back I'd be interested in an example of catholic bashing by Diogenes, if for no other reason than to expand my repertoire.
DeleteAnd why would you want someone else to do something about it ?
Why indeed? I'm responsible for what I say, and since there are different shades of atheism and I have explained my position, I do not have to comment on Diogenes's argumentative style or feel responsible for his opinions, especially if we are all guests on someone else's blog. Any Christians who visit it seem to be perfectly capable of self-defence. To tell the truth, I'm more interested in discussing science than religion or politics. But it so happens that Larry's scientific postings often attract creationist commenters who, quite unprovoked, start a thread like this one. It all began with Egnor's agitprop metaphor of "a particularly unsightly pustule on the whole rotten Darwinian enterprise". He had it coming, after such an opening gambit.
DeleteAll right Piotr, I was hoping there was a fiber of a catholic left in you. Nada. Oberski? Nada. I was hoping for more from you bratkos.
DeleteNow I'll have to type an anti-bash and I'm not happy because it takes me a long time to do it right. I'll rather try to condense something.
How am I going to bamboozle my boss tomorrow, that is the question?
Eugen, I don't consider myself a lapsed Catholic. Sorry, but if you want to "bash back" on your bashers, DIY.
DeleteEugen: Look what Diogenes did by clicking around Internet and presenting half a story that fits his world view.
DeleteOh, bullshit. "Clicking around Internet" my ass! I read many books on the Third Reich and the history of anti-Semitism and racism.
Here are some of my sources:
Saracens, Demons, and Jews by Deborah Strickland: a marvelous compendium of medieval Christian art depicting monstrous black Africans, animalistic Jews, demonic Muslims, etc., and detailing the traditional Christian animalization of different races and religions.
The Holy Reich by Richard Steigmann-Gall: a now-classic work documenting the diversity of religious beliefs among high-ranking Nazis. Short answer: Most were Protestant believers.
Betrayal: The Churches and the Holocaust edited by Ericksen and Heschel, a compendium of the best, fairly recent, scholarship by many historians on Christian churches, Catholic and Protestant, supporting and collaborating with Nazi persecution. Here you get Gunther Lewy, Doris Bergen, Heschel, and other important historians all in one book!
Aryan Jesus by Susannah Heschel, a marvelous study of the huge number of Protestant theologians who developed the theory that Jesus was not racially a Jew, and the "Institute for the Eradication of Jewish Influence in Church Life", a respected theological institute that organized the Protestant concoction of a super-anti-Semitic theology during WWII.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, a standard work, now a bit out of date. Shirer blames Nazism on Martin Luther.
The Politics of Cultural Despair by Fritz Stern, another classic work on the right-wing cranks who helped inspire the Third Reich.
Hitler's Letters and Notes ed. Werner Maser, with marvelous photocopied reproductions of Hitler's hand-written notes, so we know what he really thought. Hint: he got his "fundamental racial law" from the Bible.
Hitler's Private Library by Timothy Ryback, as the title states, about Hitler's private collection of books: Ryback re-reads them and tells us which books of Hitler's were well-worn, which neglected, which paragraphs were underlined by Hitler, etc. Surprisingly, this gives us a lot of insight into Hitler's character! Short answer: an occult egomaniac who hated the Jews.
Plus I read many primary sources: Mein Kampf, Hitler's Table Talk, two books by Hitler's mentor Houston Stewart Chamblerlain, Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century, Nazi Propaganda Before 1933, etc. etc.
"Clicking around Internet" my ass! OK, you punks want to argue with me about the Third Reich, fine, I'll win.
I was hoping there was a fiber of a catholic left in you
ReplyDeleteNo need to be nasty about it.
Oberski, no need to speak for Piotr.
DeleteGasiorowski, aren't you going to say something for all this Catholic bashing?
DeleteGood advice.
We need to start a whole need thread on Egnor's mind-boggling egomania.
ReplyDeletePiotr was himself involved in the actual resistance against real communism in Poland.
But, Egnor tells Piotr that he, Egnor, is the one who defeated communism-- yes, Egnor did, and Egnor demands Piotr give him gratitude and thanks!
Piotr to Egnor: Don't flatter yourself. It was not your anti-communism or anti-atheism that set us free. It didn't matter at all to us how heroically anti-communist you felt.
But Egnor disagrees!
Egnor: The opposite is true.
Ah! We see that Poland was not set free by Poles, like Piotr! No, it was set free by Egnor's heroic anti-communist feelings! Egnor feels he should flatter himself.
Egnor set Poland free, by feeling heroically anti-communist! Egnor's anti-atheism and anti-communist feelings really DID set Poland free! Take that, Piotr!
But what did mere Piotr do, while Egnor was setting his country free, by means of his anti-communist heroic feeling?
Piotr: I was a student during the Solidarity period and most of the marshal law years. I did the same as other students, in matters of politics. I joined the independent students' association, took part in university strikes, went on demonstrations, was arrested once and released after paying a fine.
But, Piotr, why would you think the ACTIONS of yourself and other Poles could have something to do with what happens in Poland?
Just because you were there when it happened and you DID things? Of course not! It's the feelings of American Christians that matter.
Piotr: After Solidarity nobody was afraid of the communists any more. We realised it was them who had reasons to be scared, and they knew it too, and eventually it broke their morale.
Now why should we believe you, Piotr? Just because you were there and you saw it happen?
Damn atheist! You think you POLES had something to do with what happened in POLAND just because you were there and you actually DID stuff?
Egnor: No thanks to you atheist bootlickers.
Of course not! Conservative American CHRISTIANS like Egnor know who the real heroes are-- themselves!
Egnor: The Catholic Church with JPII stood as a pillar of freedom and human rights
Right, like when after the war Catholics like Bishop Hudal showed great concern for the human rights of all Nazi war criminals and gave them phony passports so they could get more human rights in the Catholic countries of South America.
And like when the Church supported the fascist movements in Austria 1934-38, Italy, Spain, Portugal and South America. Lotta human rights there.
Piotr explains how Poland became free.
Piotr: We won without shedding a droip of blood, simply by defeating the communists in a landslide manner in fairly conducted parliamentary elections. I believe the fact that we did not have to kill or die to win was one of the most spectacular triumphs in the history of my country.
Why should we believe you? Just because you were there and you saw it happen?
Egnor will set us straight as to who deserves the credit.
Egnor: For 45 years Americans and other fervent anti-communists paid, bled and died to free your ass.
See that? Egnor freed your ass! How could you ever possibly free Poland, when you're not even American and not Christian!?
Piotr: Do you wonder I don't see the world in black and white, and have no kind words for our friend Dr. Egnor, who has never seen a real commie or fought for anything, but nonetheless... wants my thanks for his being such a staunch Christian and a jingo hero? I'm grateful to many Western people...not to the likes of Dr. Egnor...
Egnor: Don't forget to say thanks to us anti-communist Christians for your freedom, you ungrateful ass.
Take that, Piotr! Remember, it's the feelings of American Christians that change your world. Now, you owe Egnor an apology and uh, a medal. Possibly also a steak and a blowjob.
Speaking as an American, I cringe with embarrassment at the out-of-control egomania of American conservatives.
DeleteMark Twain said that the US Civil War was started by Sir Walter Scott. Because Scott wrote novels like "Rob Roy" that romanticized chivalry and knighthood. The Southerners read those novels and started to think they were grand heroes battling jet-black villains, so the South thought of themselves as victims of the Northern abolitionists-- they could not imagine themselves as victimizers of their black slaves-- and the flip side of their Calhounian Southern victim-complex was their egomaniacal image of themselves as heroes.
Now this confabulation of Calhounian minority-victim-complex and egomaniacal hero-fantasy is smeared over all American right-wingers, far outside the old slave states. It's a franchise.
American right-wingers are all about egomania and the self-image of the hero. "It's all about meeeee." When I hear jingoistic right-wing asses demand gratitude from and deny heroism and courage to non-whites or non-Americans, it makes me cringe with embarrassment.
Dear readers:
DeleteIf you want to understand anti-Catholic hatred in the world today, there's no better place to start than this thread. Diogenes, Steve, and to a lesser extent Piotr just drip with bigotry and hate. 'Catholic clergy are child rapers, evil Nazi-lovers', etc.
These folks are crazy with hate.
The last time I read such hate directed at a religion was when I read Mein Kampf.
Catholic clergy are child rapers, evil Nazi-lovers
DeleteThese are simply statements of fact backed up by multiple, overlapping and consistent sources.
For an informative tour through the 2000 year history of child abuse by the rcc, I suggest reading Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes - The Catholic Church's 2,000-Year Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse by Rev. Thomas Patrick Doyle, O.P, A. W. Richard Sipe and Patrick J. Wall, Volt Press, Los Angeles ISBN 1-56625-265-2.
@Oberski
DeleteBy your "reasoning", one might also say that atheists are child rapists, nazi-lovers, cannibals, mass-murderers, terrorists etc etc etc. And it would be just as true as what you said and just as unreasonable. True, because we could find some atheists who have committed such crimes, and unreasonable because, given the implied meaning of such statements, they imply that all atheists/catholic clergy do this, or worse, that such things are in some way formally connected with being an atheist/a member of the catholic clergy.
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteRapey: By your "reasoning", one might also say that atheists are child rapists, nazi-lovers, cannibals, mass-murderers, terrorists etc etc etc. And it would be just as true as what you said and just as unreasonable. True, because we could find some atheists who have committed such crimes
DeleteNo. There are child molesters in many groups, but the Catholic authorities sheltered their molesters and could do so specifically because law authorities-- in our supposedly secular government-- law authorities in the USA, Ireland etc. consciously chose to let religious authorities handle (protect) their own molesters themselves.
The cops would hear about a child-molesting priest and in city after city all over the USA, and in Ireland, the cops would say, "Don't arrest him. Let the Bishops handle that molester." They did, by moving him to other parishes where they could molest more kids.
You cannot say anything like that about atheists.
In no city in the USA did cops ever hear about a child-molesting ATHEIST, and then say say, "Don't arrest him. Let the other atheists handle that molester."
Only religious authorities-- to be fair, not just Catholics but Protestants and Jews-- have the official privilege of impunity from prosecution for molesting kids.
I'm sure there are atheist molesters, but no atheist has any privilege of impunity from prosecution for molesting kids. Only Christians and Jews get that.
I'll believe atheism is a religion when atheists get US taxpayer $$$ from the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives and when atheist get to molest kids for free like Christian and Jewish authorities.
@Paedo
DeleteWho cares if you believe atheism is a religion. It has as little to do with anything I said as the rest of your incoherent ramblings.
Diogenes
ReplyDeleteBy picking points out of historical context you gave impression of just flying through online pages and collecting stuff which will help you present Christianity in a negative way. Later listing of the books you have shows that you actually did more reading on that era than me.
I have only one book on the era of Third Reich : A Brief History of the Third Reich by British historian Martyn Whittock. There is a chapter in the book devoted to the issue of relationship between Christianity and Nazis. Briefly put it was not a harmonious or friendly relationship. Nazis imprisoned 700 Lutheran pastors who didn’t cooperate. They shut down Catholic schools, forced Catholic youth to join Hitlerjugend etc. Catholic bishop von Galen publicly opposed concentration camps, euthanasia, sterilization etc.
(I recommend this book to mregnor.)
Now briefly on the issue of Nazi installed puppet regimes in East Europe. Each country with established puppet regime developed resistance movement that helped erode regime and promoted its collapse at the end of the WW2. My grandfathers on my mom’s and dad’s side were collaborating with anti fascist movement. One grandfather was transporting anti fascist rebels from island to island on his fishing boat. They would do it at night and row for hours in silence. Another one defended his village from Italian “black shirts” death squad with his friend and couple of rifles. Death squad wanted to do their usual cowardly business: kill dozen or so people, steal wine, food and leave. Hearing rifles firing at them, they decided it was not worth it, just turned away and went for easier target. I heard stories from both grandfathers but not too often. They spoke little about those difficult times.
Interesting how they went through such a hell and never lost their faith and never blamed God for evil they encountered. They blamed evil men for atrocities, especially Nazi puppet regime and its supporters. They simply dealt with issues of the moment and didn’t whine like we do today.
As good Catholics (I assume) did your grandfathers ever comment on the fact that the catholic church was openly supportive of the puppet government installed by Mussolini ?
DeleteOr the fact that a program of genocide was pursued against Jews, Serbs and Roma (all non catholics by the way) by the puppet government supported by the church ?
Or the fact that Pope Pius XII protected Ante Pavelić after World War II, gave him refuge in the Vatican properties in Rome, and assisted in his flight to South America ? (Similar to what Ratzinger is doing for the paedo Cardinal Law, formerly of Boston, now cowering in the Vatican to escape US grand jury subpoenas.)
Given that "They blamed evil men for atrocities" I'm sure that they would not have hesitated to point out the evil done by evil men in the catholic church.
At least Eugen cites a source, unlike Egnor and Luther.
DeleteSo let's examine his claims.
Eugen: Nazis imprisoned 700 Lutheran pastors who didn’t cooperate.
"Didn't cooperate." What does that mean, specifically? I would like a quote about that, in context so I can judge it. I have not seen such statistics and would like to know what they did to get imprisoned.
There are no examples of Nazis imprisoning people for teaching Christianity, teaching that Jesus was savior or teaching that the Bible was true. In the Church Struggle two Bishops were briefly arrested, a point we'll get back to.
There were many bishops, cardinals, theologians and pastors who enthusiastically supported Nazism. A few did actually resist. Obviously the German Christian Sect [Deutsche Christen, DC] were enthusiastic supporters of Nazism.
It is common for Christians to cite the Confessing Church [Bekennende Kirche, BK] as resisting the Nazis, but recent scholarship has reversed that view, showing that even most of the BK, the alleged "Christian resistance", supported Nazism-- 85% of them swore loyalty to Hitler.
Historian Kenneth Barnes: "He [Bonhoeffer] began to lose confidence in the Confessing Church, as it became stymied by internal divisions and held to a conservative, defensive strategy, refusing to take risks. The willingness of most Confessing pastors, around 85 percent, to take the loyalty oath to Hitler in 1937 and 1938 greatly disheartened him." [Kenneth Barnes, in Betrayal (1999) p.122]
Bonhoeffer did resist, after 1938. Before 1938 he supported the Nazis' anti-Jewish policies on the grounds that it was the government's sphere and the Jews were dangerous. After 1938 he joined a secular resistance movement, not a Christian resistance movement, because there was none.
In the Church Struggle, circa 1937, the Nazi government attempted to coordinate Protestant churches by putting them under a single Reich Bishop, at the time Ludwig Muller, like a Protestant Pope. Historian Steigmann-Gall concludes that Hitler was trying to make Protestantism stronger by unifying Protestant sects.
This unification of Protestant sects was resisted by the BK, and Jaeger, the official who served Reich Bishop Muller, briefly arrested two Protestant bishops, Hans Meiser and Theophil Wurm. This resulted in massive popular protests demanding the bishops' release.
That sounds like resistance to Nazism, but it's not. Both Meiser and Wurm expressed loyalty to the Nazi regime, as did their followers. They saw the struggle as between Protestants and Muller, not between Protestants and Hitler, to whom they were still loyal. During their protests, the bishops' supporters sang "The Horst Wessel song" which is the Nazi Party anthem, signifying their loyalty to Nazism.
German Christians protested en masse when two bishops were arrested, and Hitler himself reversed the unpopular order. But German Christians did not protest in any large numbers when Jews were deported and marched down the mains streets of their towns to death camps.
Consider: the two arrested bishops, Wurm and Meiser, along with 10 other Protestant Bishops signed a revised Godesberg Declaration ("Grundsätze") on 31 May, 1939-- this was after the struggle against Muller. This declaration swore loyalty to Hitler, recognized racism as part of Christian theology, and described Christianity as the NEGATION of Judaism. [See Heschel, Aryan Jesus, p.86-7]
Wurm and Meiser were not heroes and did not resist Nazism nor racism, nor did the BK in general, nor did Protestantism in general.
As for racism and anti-Semitism-- virtually no Protestant authorities fully rejected racism and anti-Semitism. Many developed an explicitly racist theology called Schoepfungsglaube ["Orders of Creation", literally creation belief, creationism] which said God made some races and genders differently [better or worse] than others. Long after the war, it continues to this day to be influential, particularly in supporting Apartheid in South Africa, condemning homosexuality and demanding subjugation of women.
DeleteThe founder of the Intelligent Design movement, Phillip Johnson, believes in Schoepfungsglaube "Orders of Creation" theology, forged in Nazi Germany.
Even Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the BK-- his writing before 1938 was conflicted regarding the Jews, and after 1938 he defended the Jew physicially but his theology was logically incoherent because he believed the State had the obligation to defend against the Jewish menace-- see Kenneth Barnes in Betrayal.
Eugen contineus: They [Nazis] shut down Catholic schools, forced Catholic youth to join Hitlerjugend etc.
That's correct-- Nazis converted sectarian schools to (officially) genetic Christian education, with mandatory Christian school prayers and mandatory religious education. This was officially genetic Christian, but as historian Steigmann-Gall has shown, it was strongly biased toward Protestantism.
It is for reasons like this (and many others) that I consider Protestants more directly responsible for Nazism than Catholics.
But this was certainly not "secularism." During the entire Nazi era, the Nazi Reich gave taxpayer deutschmarks straight to the Protestant and Catholic churches. Hitler paid his taxes to the Catholic church until he died.
Catholic bishop von Galen publicly opposed concentration camps, euthanasia, sterilization etc.
I don't think von Galen opposed concentration camps. I would like to see a quote in context for that.
It is true that von Galen opposed euthanasia and sterilization. Many more Protestants supported eugenics and sterilization and, as many historians have documented (e.g. see Steigmann-Gall), Protestants were in the vangaurd of German eugenics legislation-- they were ahead of Nazis on that issue, not merely collaborating. Protestant hospitals carried out sterilization and abortion [see Steigmann-Gall]. Catholic hospitals run by priests and nuns actively collaborated in murdering the disabled [see Betrayal, Introduction by Ericksen and Heschel.]
Many Catholic authorities were anti-Nazis in 1933-34, but after 1934 many Catholic authorities came around and collaborated with Nazism [see the two chapters by Guenther Lewy and Michael Lukens in Betrayal], obviously including several theologians including Joseph Lortz, Cardinal Innitzer, the notorious "ratline" organizer Bishop Alois Hudal, etc.
Nevertheless the relationship between Nazism and Catholicism is far more complex than that between Protestants and Nazism. Protestants just loved Nazism; Catholics after 1934 had a love/hate relationship with it, but could not oppose it effectively, because Catholic authorities, like Protestants, really did hate the Jews, and they appreciated the fact that the Nazis would carry out right-wing social engineering.
But I will grant you that Galen criticized enforced eugenics (other Catholic bishops) and that Dietrich Bonhoeffer courageously opposed Nazism in action (his theology could not oppose Nazism logically because he agreed the Jews were a threate to society.)
@Paedo
DeleteMartin Bormann = evidence that Nazism was not state anti-atheism. Short, sharp, to the point.
Conclusion:
DeleteThe only religious group in Germany that consistently opposed Nazism were the Jehovah's Witnesses [JW]. They were pacifist and opposed all wars and militarism, so Hitler shot about 600 of them. But JW are not considered Christians because of their theology.
Moreover, the Protestants of the time denounced the JW as "Judaizers"-- the word "Judaistic" was synonymous with "bad" to Christians of that era. They accused the JW of being funded by American Jews. The racist Schoepfungsglaube Protestant theologian Walter Kunneth even said that Christians have an obligation to hand JW's over to the Gestapo.
So if Eugen wants me to admit that some Christians actively resisted Nazism because they opposed treatment of Jews and other victims: sure that's right-- a few.
As far as I know, less than you could count on both hands, maybe on one hand, out of a country of 80 millions, over 95% Christian, with taxpayer deutschmarks going straight to both churches, and atheism and paganism explicity outlawed by the Reich.
Rapey:
DeleteMartin Bormann = evidence that Nazism was not state anti-atheism. Short, sharp, to the point.
You have no evidence that Bormann was an atheist, or that he implemented any atheist policies. Bormann was indeed anti-Christian but not atheist-- no Nazi was. Bormann sent down some anti-Christian directives and Hitler or some other higher-ranking Nazi always overrode his directives.
The Nazis paid taxpayer deutschmarks straight to both Protestant and Catholic churches, and they banned and closed down atheist and pagan organizations. Those directives were never countermanded.
There are more atheists in the Republican Party today than there were in any major position of power in the Nazi Party.
@Paedo
DeleteIt is well known Bormann was an atheist. And it matters not whether he implemented atheist policies. What you can't seem to get through your thick skull is that I am not claiming Nazism is atheism, but merely that it was not primarily, nor even significantly, as you ludicrously suggest, anti-atheism.
Rapey: It is well known Bormann was an atheist
DeleteUh, anyone who says "it is well known" has no evidence.
That which is asserted without evidence can be refuted without evidence.
As I already stated:
The Nazis paid taxpayer deutschmarks straight to both Protestant and Catholic churches, and they banned and closed down atheist and pagan organizations. Those directives were never countermanded.
For this and many other reasons cited by me with page numbers from history books, Nazism is proven to be state anti-atheism.
@Paedo
DeleteGo check out Wikipedia - Bormann is in the list of German Atheists, and this is well known. Just because you choose to disbelieve because of your fanatical religious views is neither here nor there.
Luther,
Deleteyou cannot even be bothered to included a hyperlink?
If Bormann is on such a list as you claim, which I cannot find and you did not link, then it only matters if it is cited to a peer-reviewed historical source.
If such a peer-reviewed citation exists on this Wikipedia list, then please copy in the citation. I own many books about Nazism and it's quite probable I have that book or can hunt it up. So cite the book used as a reference. Don't cite Wikipedia.
If I cited Wikipedia, I could simply copy this:
Wikipedia on atheism in Nazi Germany: On October 13, 1933, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess issued a decree stating: "No National Socialist may suffer any detriment on the ground that he does not profess any particular faith or confession or on the ground that he does not make any religious profession at all."[86] However, the regime strongly opposed "godless communism"[87][88] and most of Germany's freethinking (freigeist), atheist, and largely left-wing organizations were banned the same year.[89][90]
In a speech made 24 October 1933, Hitler claimed to have "undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."[91]
And in a speech made during the negotiations for the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933, Hitler argued against secular schools, stating:
"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith."[92]
One of the groups closed down by the Nazi regime was the German Freethinkers League. One of its chairmen, Max Sievers, was beheaded by the Nazis on January 17, 1944 for treason.
According to a 1945 U.S. Office of Strategic Services report, the Nazis "abolished the right to pursue anti-religious and anti-Church propaganda. The Prussian government closed the so-called secular (weltliche) schools in which no religious instruction was given and reestablished religious instruction in professional and vocation schools. All organizations of free-thinkers were forbidden."[93]
So, I can cite Wikipedia too, but that is not ideal. Citing peer-reviewed historical books is real evidence.
@Paedo
Deletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:German_atheists
And here: "On October 13, 1933, Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess issued a decree stating: "No National Socialist may suffer any detriment on the ground that he does not profess any particular faith or confession or on the ground that he does not make any religious profession at all."
Yaaaaawwwwn. Learn to use the internet.
Rapey:
Deletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:German_atheists
Bormann's off the list.
Yaaaaawwwwn. Learn to use the internet.
This from a person who includes a hyperlink in perhaps one out of 100 comments, and who never cites peer-reviewed literature in any field.
@Paedo
DeleteAh, this'll be the peer reviewed Journal of Famous Atheists.
Egnor once again distinguishes himself as an outright liar.
ReplyDeleteEgnor: The last time I read such hate directed at a religion was when I read Mein Kampf.
Egnor has never read Mein Kampf-- if he has, then he is lying outright.
Egnor cannot cite and has not cited a single example of a passage in Mein Kampf attacking the religion of Christianity. Hitler doesn't even attack the religion of the Jews-- he says the Jews are atheists with no actual religion.
In Mein Kampf Hitler expresses hatred towards everything except Christianity. He portrays himself as the defender of Christianity and Egnor's vaunted "Christian civilization."
Hitler expresses hatred towards Jews, liberals, modernists, Weimar, intellectuals, other races, lascivious entertainment-- all the usual targets of conservative Christians.
From the real Mein Kampf: "The Jews were always a people with definite racial qualities and never a religion, only their progress made them probably look very early for a means which could divert disagreeable attention from their person. But what would have been more useful and at the same time more harmless than the 'purloining' of the appearance of being a religious community? For here, too, everything is purloined, or rather, stolen. But resulting from his own original nature the Jew cannot possess a religious institution for the very reason that he lacks all idealism in any form and that he also does not recognize any belief in the hereafter. But in the Aryan conception one cannot conceive of a religion which lacks the conviction of the continuation of life after death in some form...
The Jewish religious doctrine is primarily a direction for preserving the purity of the blood of Judaism as well as for the regulation of the Jews' intercourse with one another... But the best stamp is given by the product of this 'religious' education, the Jew himself.
His life is really only of this world, and his spirit is as alien to true Christianity, for instance, as his nature was two thousand years ago to the Sublime Founder of the new doctrine [Christ]. Of course, the latter made no secret of His disposition towards the Jewish people, and when necessary He even took to the whip in order to drive out of the Lord's temple this adversary of all humanity... But for this, of course, Christ was crucified, while our present party Christianity disgraces itself by begging for Jewish votes in the elections and later tries to conduct political wirepulling with atheistic Jewish parties...
...How far the entire existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown in an incomparable manner and certainty in the 'Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion,'...” [Mein Kampf, Reynal & Hitchcock edition, Chapter “Nation and Race”, p.421-3.]
Comment moderation kicks in after 14 days on Sandwalk. That means that three days from now I'll have to approve every comment on this thread.
ReplyDeleteI'm warning you all right now that I don't intend to allow this pointless "debate" to continue.
It's time for all of you to start composing your final comment.
Diogenes
ReplyDeleteFrom the book I read I got the impression of tension and unfriendliness between Christians and Nazis. That's basically it. You studied this topic in great detail so I accept what you say. As for quotes, I left the book at work where I re-read bits and pieces today. I do remember name Rosenberg that von Galen argued with.
It's no big deal anymore, blog owner said comments are closing soon anyway and it's getting a bit tedious.
Oberski
ReplyDeleteAny organization or institution ran by humans has problems be it a church, government, law enforcement, health care, education....Power corrupts humans and also on a good day they make mistakes. You seem determined to find everything negative in a big institution like Church while happily skipping, like a mountain goat over dew covered bushes on September morning in Nunavut, positive aspects of the same.
Stop skipping.
This comment thread deserves to be linked in the Wiki article on "Godwin's Law", perhaps lending weight to the concept that homo sapiens' life really is as much a matter of the disposition and the heart as it is of the intellect and the head.
ReplyDeleteDarwin said, "Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory."
Perhaps the counterfactual conditional of this quote could read:
"Any one whose disposition leads him to attach less weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will most easily accept the theory."
Charles Darwin (1859)