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Alright Hitler made his OWN church SO NOT christian BUT the pope of rome publicly sent his praise to Mr Adolf for such good and christian work he was doing???

so we've established Hitler was religious but he wasn't CHRISTIAN ok.

But i still dont like the overenthusiastic buggers anyway.
(not christians nazi's)

Ultrasmurf_no_REALY wrote:Alright Hitler made his OWN church

Because no Christian ever started their own church, which is why there is only one church and one unified sect.

Most of the heads of the Nazi party were drug adicts who knows what they were thinking.

But if you are asking whether Hitler himself hated Jews because of religion then I can answer this.

Hitler actullay didn't have a strong problem with jews until he was trying to gain power. He used the jews as a way of blaming them for the problems Germany was having. It more of a political move. Blame a group of people that can easily rally groups.

Lots of people had prejudice against jews in that time in europe and Hitler saw this as an opportunity in gaining support for power if he targeted the jews.

Thus it was'nt religous although I cant say for the rest of the Nazi party.

Well he was beaten to art school by a jew although he was crap anyway

generalgrog wrote:Allright...I'm tired of this coming up in every thread about atheism and Christianity. I didn't want to derail another thread about it so lets have it out here, shall we? Keep it out of the other thread, please.

Some people, inparticular Athiests love to say that Hitler/Nazis were Christians. Why do they do this? Because if they can convince people that Hitler/nazis were a Christian group they can point the finger at them and say...seee...seee this is what Christianity gets you.

Do they really? Because I see people far more frequently claiming that darwinism/atheism are rooted in the nazis and to be blamed for the holocaust. But then again people try to draw various conclusions from the fact he was a vegetarian. Except he wasn't a vegetarian. The nazis certainly were surrounded by christian iconography, but they also were interested in the occult. So it's a mixed bag of religious ideas. They also took steps against atheist organisations, though it has to be said that a lot of atheist organisations were also left wing which was a more immediate cause for them to be a target. Nazi Germany was christians just like most European countries were christian, it's neither here nor there when trying to make a point about what was responsible for nazism. Anyone who boils down nazism down to atheism or christianity is a fool.

Depending who it suits for the sake of an internet discussion Hitler was a darwinist, a jew, a christian, a vegetarian or had one testicle and that's why the Godwin argument applies, because once you start comparing someone to the nazis to make a point the discussion is generally a waste of time afterwards.



I think there's a bit of goal post moving here though that genuinely is 'intellectually dishonest', if we are using such terms. To say "The Nazis were not Christians, I know this because the nazis were bad people, and christianity says you should be good, ergo this precludes the Nazis from being christian" is pure sophistry. You can't claim that all christians are good because by definition a bad person won't be a christian. That isn't how christianity is defined, there are bad people everywhere, and some bad people are definitely christian. You only have to look at the likes of the Westboro Church to see a group of Christians who are thoroughly unpleasant. Doesn't mean they aren't christian though, even though no decent christian person would share a table with them. They believe in a christian god and follow christian texts however twisted it might appear from the outside. But to take people like them, or Osama Bin Laden, and try to draw any kind of general point about christianity or islam is wrong.

Politics and relegion are different things. Just because a lot of christians may have been followers of the Nazi party, doesn't mean that their political policies were solely based around that relegion (there were Jewish Nazis too mind. They may not have been into the anti semitism, but the other policies worked for them). Fascism, as it was known around the mid 20th centuary, was based around cults of personality. Sure these could include relegion to further their own ends, but that's not usually their main tool. ¬¬

generalgrog wrote:
It's not a cop out...if we started to talk about an issue as large as "what is a Christian really?" it would end up usurping this entire thread. You see how the slavery rabbit hole went. Also it's not a cop out because I told him to start a new thread if he wanted to explore it.

The questions "Were the Nazis Christian?" and "Were there Christian Nazis?" are impossible to answer without first answering the question "What is a Christian?"

You're ignoring a necessary premise of any argument that might be made in response to the original question, which seems an awful lot like an attempt to avoid presenting an explicit definition of what you consider a Christian to be. That might not be your intention, but that's how it appears.

Yak9UT wrote:Most of the heads of the Nazi party were drug adicts who knows what they were thinking.

But if you are asking whether Hitler himself hated Jews because of religion then I can answer this.

Hitler actullay didn't have a strong problem with jews until he was trying to gain power. He used the jews as a way of blaming them for the problems Germany was having. It more of a political move. Blame a group of people that can easily rally groups.

Lots of people had prejudice against jews in that time in europe and Hitler saw this as an opportunity in gaining support for power if he targeted the jews.

Thus it was'nt religous although I cant say for the rest of the Nazi party.

He hated Jews long before that.

Ultrasmurf_no_REALY wrote:Alright Hitler made his OWN church SO NOT christian BUT the pope of rome publicly sent his praise to Mr Adolf for such good and christian work he was doing???

so we've established Hitler was religious but he wasn't CHRISTIAN ok.

No, we've established no such thing.

generalgrog wrote:Now one mistake that you need to be careful of not making, is thinking that because different orthodox denominations differ in some minor issues, that we don't agree on the main tenets of Christianity. There are issues that we can agree to disagree on, such as church organization, baptism rights, charismatic issues, etc.. but we cannot disagree on the Main things such as the doctrines of the resurrection of Christ, the virgin birth, the Trinity, etc.GG

Surely following the teachings of Jesus Christ is the one doctrine that is essential to being a Christian? Belief (or lack thereof) in the resurrection, virgin birth, etc doesn't validate or invalidate the worth someone sees in those teachings.


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generalgrog wrote:You made a claim that I was relying on a book that had been translated 1/2 a dozen times. That 1/2 a dozen times figure shows your ignorance of the subject. The Bible has probably been translated 1,000's of times. I don't know how many languages their are in the world but I'm sure there is a translated Bible for each of them.

You're missing the point there. It doesn't matter how many different languages it's been translated into. It does many how many layers of translation it's been through before it reached the current version. If all current versions of the bible were translated from an original so that A->B, A->C, A->D, etc then all would be reasonably accurate. You could even compare B to C and so on for greater accuracy. The problem with the current versions of the bible is that they've been through numerous layers of translation A->B->C->D->E to get to where we are now. As such, the potential for gross inaccuracy is considerable. Add in the potential for deliberate mistranslation by people who had an axe to grind or a point to make and it's even worse.


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sebster wrote:

Manchu wrote:What Martin Luther has to do with Hitler specifically -- outside of Hitler's ahistorical understanding of the German Volk -- or, what you claim their relationship to be, is totally beyond me.

Hitler's understanding and approach to God was steeped in Protestant Christian thought. He went to church. The only reason anyone would claim he was somehow not Christian was because they don't want him in their camp. Which has everything to do with revising history to make it easier to fit with pre-existing worldviews, and nothing to do with learning the truth.

Stormrider wrote:Really? Some proof would be great. I shouldn't expect any though.

Did you read my earlier response in this thread? Failing to bother reading the arguments already put forward, then claiming no proof has been offered is incredibly cheeky.

The NSDAP is completely godless in it's foundation, the use of Christianity was a ploy to rile up Germany's substantial Christian population. The hierarchy of the NSDAP considered Christians useful idiots.

Except that is all nonsense that you've either made up or heard from someone who made it up. Read about Positive Christianity, something Hitler himself professed belief in and that he stated was a core belief of the Nazi party. Your claim that the NSDAP considered Christians useful idiots is complete fantasy, invented in the '50s to excuse Christian culpability in Nazi crimes, when many Christians were willing participants in the Nazi party, and in its leadership group.


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Ultrasmurf_no_REALY wrote:Alright Hitler made his OWN church SO NOT christian BUT the pope of rome publicly sent his praise to Mr Adolf for such good and christian work he was doing???

He didn't make his own church. I don't know where you got that from.

so we've established Hitler was religious but he wasn't CHRISTIAN ok.

No, he was Christian. A particularly confused and bizarre Christian, but still a Christian.


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Yak9UT wrote:Most of the heads of the Nazi party were drug adicts who knows what they were thinking.

This is another myth. Herman Goring was addicted to a mild painkiller, and had at one time been a morphine addict but was recovered by the mid-1930s. There has been speculation about other Nazis including Hitler but it is never any more than speculation.

But if you are asking whether Hitler himself hated Jews because of religion then I can answer this.

Hitler actullay didn't have a strong problem with jews until he was trying to gain power. He used the jews as a way of blaming them for the problems Germany was having. It more of a political move. Blame a group of people that can easily rally groups.

No, seriously, he hated the Jews. Really, really hated them. His part in the final solution is more debateable, as that seemed to come out of the junior leaders wanting to one-up each other in who hated the Jews the mostest, and out of a mutual panic as the situation on the Eastern Front got worse, but there can't be any doubt Hitler really hated the Jews.


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Ultrasmurf_no_REALY wrote:Well he was beaten to art school by a jew although he was crap anyway

Which is a great story with countless variations (he was failed by a Jewish teacher, a Jew was placed ahead of him in class due to ethnic quotas etc) but there's no evidence for any of the stories being any more than, well, stories.


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Howard A Treesong wrote:They believe in a christian god and follow christian texts however twisted it might appear from the outside. But to take people like them, or Osama Bin Laden, and try to draw any kind of general point about christianity or islam is wrong.

I'm now wondering if Muslims can start claiming Osama bin Laden isn't a Muslim. Actually, I suspect some Muslim folk probably do, and for much the same reasons as Christians try to claim Hitler wasn't Christian...

sebster wrote:
I'm now wondering if Muslims can start claiming Osama bin Laden isn't a Muslim. Actually, I suspect some Muslim folk probably do, and for much the same reasons as Christians try to claim Hitler wasn't Christian...

I've heard that Osama isn't adhereing to the correct process of waging a justified Jihad (destruction of buildings and killing of civilians, especially women and children being prohibited) but I haven't heard anyone claim that he is not a Muslim at all.

The problem is that whenever you see these arguments, people always just say Hitler was X so X must be bad.

This is of course a bad idea, as it makes little since to do this. Whenever you overgeneralize at this level, I generally assume the rest of their point is invalid.

People will just keep doing it though. They'll just keep trying to invalidate groups they dislike by comparing them to Hitler. It's Godwin's Law.

Personally I really dislike religious arguments, I like to talk about it, but people fight too much about it. Even on Dakka we have had some inflammatory comments made about religion, and most sites don't have the same amount of moderation and civility as we do.

As for FITZZ's analogy, we can't say you aren't a wargamer, but we can damn well say not all wargamers's are like you. We can very well defend our hobby from those who would say it only causes problems just because some people that participated in it have done bad things, and they have.

Emperors Faithful wrote:I've heard that Osama isn't adhereing to the correct process of waging a justified Jihad (destruction of buildings and killing of civilians, especially women and children being prohibited) but I haven't heard anyone claim that he is not a Muslim at all.

Absolutely. Do you think that's more than a little related to the high level of influence Christian groups have in the media here, and the relatively small representation of Islamic groups?


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Mike Noble wrote:As for FITZZ's analogy, we can't say you aren't a wargamer, but we can damn well say not all wargamers's are like you. We can very well defend our hobby from those who would say it only causes problems just because some people that participated in it have done bad things, and they have.

Absolutely. And I'd welcome Christian groups to make the exact same comments regarding Hitler...

The only reason anyone would claim he was somehow not Christian was because they don't want him in their camp. Which has everything to do with revising history to make it easier to fit with pre-existing worldviews, and nothing to do with learning the truth.

I dunno, I think this is unfair, and not really the normal sebsterian level of nuance.

I agree, if somebody says "I'm a Christian" and goes to Christian church, and generally lives with the trappings of the relgion, it's not entirely possible to just say they're not a Christian.

On the other hand, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that somebody is not acting in accordance with Christian teachings, and is not representative of "true" Christianity.

So, if somebody says that Hitler never claimed to be a Christian, never associated with Christianity, yeah, that'd be revisionist.

On the other hand, if they say he was in no way representative of Christian values, or even if they shorthand that by saying he was "not a Christian" I think that's perfectly legitimate.

sebster wrote:

Stormrider wrote:Really? Some proof would be great. I shouldn't expect any though.

Did you read my earlier response in this thread? Failing to bother reading the arguments already put forward, then claiming no proof has been offered is incredibly cheeky.

The NSDAP is completely godless in it's foundation, the use of Christianity was a ploy to rile up Germany's substantial Christian population. The hierarchy of the NSDAP considered Christians useful idiots.

Except that is all nonsense that you've either made up or heard from someone who made it up. Read about Positive Christianity, something Hitler himself professed belief in and that he stated was a core belief of the Nazi party. Your claim that the NSDAP considered Christians useful idiots is complete fantasy, invented in the '50s to excuse Christian culpability in Nazi crimes, when many Christians were willing participants in the Nazi party, and in its leadership group.


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Ultrasmurf_no_REALY wrote:Alright Hitler made his OWN church SO NOT christian BUT the pope of rome publicly sent his praise to Mr Adolf for such good and christian work he was doing???

He didn't make his own church. I don't know where you got that from.

so we've established Hitler was religious but he wasn't CHRISTIAN ok.

No, he was Christian. A particularly confused and bizarre Christian, but still a Christian.


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Yak9UT wrote:Most of the heads of the Nazi party were drug adicts who knows what they were thinking.

This is another myth. Herman Goring was addicted to a mild painkiller, and had at one time been a morphine addict but was recovered by the mid-1930s. There has been speculation about other Nazis including Hitler but it is never any more than speculation.

But if you are asking whether Hitler himself hated Jews because of religion then I can answer this.

Hitler actullay didn't have a strong problem with jews until he was trying to gain power. He used the jews as a way of blaming them for the problems Germany was having. It more of a political move. Blame a group of people that can easily rally groups.

No, seriously, he hated the Jews. Really, really hated them. His part in the final solution is more debateable, as that seemed to come out of the junior leaders wanting to one-up each other in who hated the Jews the mostest, and out of a mutual panic as the situation on the Eastern Front got worse, but there can't be any doubt Hitler really hated the Jews.


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Ultrasmurf_no_REALY wrote:Well he was beaten to art school by a jew although he was crap anyway

Which is a great story with countless variations (he was failed by a Jewish teacher, a Jew was placed ahead of him in class due to ethnic quotas etc) but there's no evidence for any of the stories being any more than, well, stories.


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Howard A Treesong wrote:They believe in a christian god and follow christian texts however twisted it might appear from the outside. But to take people like them, or Osama Bin Laden, and try to draw any kind of general point about christianity or islam is wrong.

I'm now wondering if Muslims can start claiming Osama bin Laden isn't a Muslim. Actually, I suspect some Muslim folk probably do, and for much the same reasons as Christians try to claim Hitler wasn't Christian...

Hitler Didn't like Jews yes but in one of his early journals he talks about how using the jews as a political tool could give him support with people in Germany. As I said his motives were more Political then religious.

Hitler didn't like jews yes but it wasn't as great as when he was in power. He would even talk to and get help by Jews selling his paintings.

Phryxis wrote:I dunno, I think this is unfair, and not really the normal sebsterian level of nuance.

I agree, if somebody says "I'm a Christian" and goes to Christian church, and generally lives with the trappings of the relgion, it's not entirely possible to just say they're not a Christian.

On the other hand, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that somebody is not acting in accordance with Christian teachings, and is not representative of "true" Christianity.

So, if somebody says that Hitler never claimed to be a Christian, never associated with Christianity, yeah, that'd be revisionist.

On the other hand, if they say he was in no way representative of Christian values, or even if they shorthand that by saying he was "not a Christian" I think that's perfectly legitimate.

Thing is, we've been getting the revisionist claim that he was never a Christian, that his only association with them was to play them as fools, and that he was entirely contemptuous of Christians. Which is revisionist history devised to distance the faith from the Nazis, and what I've been arguing against in this thread.

I agree that it was not representative of Christianity or its true teachings, but that doesn't change the fact that Hitler thought it was.


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Yak9UT wrote:Hitler Didn't like Jews yes but in one of his early journals he talks about how using the jews as a political tool could give him support with people in Germany. As I said his motives were more Political then religious.

Hitler didn't like jews yes but it wasn't as great as when he was in power. He would even talk to and get help by Jews selling his paintings.

All sorts of racist jackholes work, even closely, with the targets of their race hate. Racism is really weird like that.

But from the very earliest start to his political career, Hitler really had a hate-on for the Jews. The early stages of the Nazi party included all kinds of weird politics taken from across the political continuum (it would take until the Night of the Long Knives for Hitler to gain complete control and settle on the final version) but one thing was constant - the hate for the Jews.

I'm astounded that a thread prominently featuring religion and Nazis has made it all the way to 5 pages whilst remaining unlocked.

chaplaingrabthar wrote:I'm astounded that a thread prominently featuring religion and Nazis has made it all the way to 5 pages whilst remaining unlocked.

Actually that's fairly typical. The catalyst that sends these threads into their doom has yet to show itself, but it very well may.

Let's hope not though.

Phryxis wrote:

The only reason anyone would claim he was somehow not Christian was because they don't want him in their camp. Which has everything to do with revising history to make it easier to fit with pre-existing worldviews, and nothing to do with learning the truth.

I dunno, I think this is unfair, and not really the normal sebsterian level of nuance.

I agree, if somebody says "I'm a Christian" and goes to Christian church, and generally lives with the trappings of the relgion, it's not entirely possible to just say they're not a Christian.

On the other hand, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that somebody is not acting in accordance with Christian teachings, and is not representative of "true" Christianity.

So, if somebody says that Hitler never claimed to be a Christian, never associated with Christianity, yeah, that'd be revisionist.

On the other hand, if they say he was in no way representative of Christian values, or even if they shorthand that by saying he was "not a Christian" I think that's perfectly legitimate.

I nominate sebsterian as word of the year.

I agree it is perfectly fair to say that he in way is Representative of all Christians.

sebster wrote:

Emperors Faithful wrote:I've heard that Osama isn't adhereing to the correct process of waging a justified Jihad (destruction of buildings and killing of civilians, especially women and children being prohibited) but I haven't heard anyone claim that he is not a Muslim at all.

Absolutely. Do you think that's more than a little related to the high level of influence Christian groups have in the media here, and the relatively small representation of Islamic groups?

Actually, I wasn't including any media outlets giving this information. I was reffering to conversations I've had with Muslims, some of which I consider friends. I'm sure that some station (maybe not Al Jazeera but att least someone) or a Imam in a televised account would do their best to distance Osama from the wider Islamic religion. But the actual people that I've talked to didn't really try to outright deny Osama's status as a Muslim (a few supported his resistence to Western Ideals) but they universally felt that his actions only tarnished the Muslim faith and encouraged further attacks (and only made people favour Israel more, but that's a whole other issue that resulted in many passionate speechs on their part). Suffice to say, I really didn't try to bring the fellow up too much. I got enough gak from asking about Israel.

Phryxis wrote:On the other hand, if they say he was in no way representative of Christian values, or even if they shorthand that by saying he was "not a Christian" I think that's perfectly legitimate.

The difficulty with simply saying "he wasn't a Christian" is that Hitler certainly seemed to consider himself to be a Christian. His writings suggest strongly that it was something he was reasonably passionate about and that he considered himself a good Christian.

None of that is a reflection on anybody else that considers themselves to be a Christian but it's certainly something that any thoughtful Christian is going to find difficult to reconcile which is why, I think, Hitler and the other Nazi's are dismissed as being crazy or drug addicts. Easier to write them off as in some way damaged or defective than to come to terms with the idea that reasonably intelligent men could find some kind of moral position where the things that they were doing were not only acceptable but also Christian (to them, at least).

So I thought of something recently, which goes in accordance with this.

One of the Ten Commandments was "Thou shalt not murder." Well, does that mean, that once you kill someone you cease to be a true Christian, or are you simply not a very good one?

I think that it is hard to justify violence with Christianity considering that if you do kill you are breaking one of the most important laws of it. So in a sense, Hitler may have considered himself a Christian, but he certainly didn't follow the rules very well.

Mike Noble wrote:I think that it is hard to justify violence with Christianity considering that if you do kill you are breaking one of the most important laws of it. So in a sense, Hitler may have considered himself a Christian, but he certainly didn't follow the rules very well.

Seems to me in the Bible you can kill as many people as you like if God is on your side.

Mike Noble wrote:So I thought of something recently, which goes in accordance with this.

One of the Ten Commandments was "Thou shalt not murder." Well, does that mean, that once you kill someone you cease to be a true Christian, or are you simply not a very good one?

I think that it is hard to justify violence with Christianity considering that if you do kill you are breaking one of the most important laws of it. So in a sense, Hitler may have considered himself a Christian, but he certainly didn't follow the rules very well.

Then what about a christian in the army? Hitler certainly beleived what he was doing was good for his government and country.

If hitler beleived in the bible followed any form of Christianity then sorry but he's a Christian, it doesent make Christians bad or anything (westboro baptist church anyone? noone (sane) beleive they represent all christians). Same way extreamist Muslims doesent make Muslims bad. (again, if you have some sanity)

"Murder" is an unlawful/immoral killing. Killing someone can be sanctioned under the law and by moral/religious authorities, particularly in the cases of self-defense and justified war. The Nazis thought what they were doing was justified, so they didn't consider it murder, self-deluded though they were.

Mannahnin wrote:"Murder" is an unlawful/immoral killing. Killing someone can be sanctioned under the law and by moral/religious authorities, particularly in the cases of self-defense and justified war. The Nazis thought what they were doing was justified, so they didn't consider it murder, self-deluded though they were.

I probebly should of made my post clearer... but thanks for clearing that up

Hey I am not great with computers so I don't know how to bring Howard a Treesong's post here, but he mentioned that he saw Nazism being attributed to darwinism etc.

Just wanted to point out that this thread is a response to some (very intellectual) atheists bringing up the Christian-Nazi connection on a thread about why do Christians do good deeds (I'm parapharasing very poorly here). So the shoe does fall on that foot as well.

Sebster gave a nice response to many of the points made but gave a very casual dismissal to the source of the original quotes made by the OP. Is this really a questionable source?

I have never read said book, but they seem logical from a fascists mindset. Most if not all politicians lie to the public, so comments spoken before a large gathering of protestant christians seem more like political bravo (like how Gore "created the internet") that actual belief.

So my question remains, is the source of the original quotes not considered true?

Here's a detailed article.

BY JINGO I THINK I'VE CRACKED IT!

Generalgrog is a Christian.
Generalgrog is not a Nazi.
Therefore, the Nazis were not Christian.

That's essentially what you're saying. Of course give me sufficient time, and the patience to do so, and I'll find you a Christian that say's you're no such thing yourself.

Ah Religion....so much for bringin peace and succor!