Hitler, The Atheist.

Discussion in 'Agnosticism and Atheism' started by relaxxx, Dec 9, 2014.

  1. Okiefreak

    Okiefreak Senior Member

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    Thanks for a thoughtful post. I agree with you that (as I've said before) religion, including Christianity, can be a mind-crippling disease--the phenomenon some Christians call "toxic faith syndrome". I still think that the toxicity is unevenly distributed among different churches, and that most churches I've been involved with offer benefits in fellowship, promotion of charity work, and a positive outlook on life. I don't think that the congregations I'm familiar with destroy lives, although I know some lives that have been destroyed by sick, negative religions. I take an evolutionary view of religion, but I agree with Dawkins that the cultural aspects now outweigh the biological. Religion is a competition among memes , and I agree with your earlier posts that the process is guided more by survival value than by moral worth. Which is why we have such an interesting variety of strange sects marching behind the cross, and why the ones with the simple messages, emotional appeals and promises of health and wealth do better than the more rational ones. (Big Screen TV doesn't hurt either). I'm more skeptical than you about the inherent moral nature of humanity. Psychobiologist Steven Pinker thinks empathy is over-rated because we tend to feel it for people who are most like us. As only partially rational beings humans need positive reinforcement and appeals to the irrational side of their natures, through ritual and social support. I was attracted to Christianity because of what I took to be its message of Peace, Love and Understanding, which I think most churches still value--at least the mainline Protestant ones I have fellowship with. If the message was inside of me, It was reinforced by parental support. I'm fortunate that my parents were loving with good moral values, and were Christian "light". Anyhow, I'm getting too tired to think coherently. But I do appreciate your thoughts.
     
  2. Okiefreak

    Okiefreak Senior Member

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    Back again. You say that a good chunk of humans are simply nuts and can't decode the Bible. I think that's undoubtedly true. It's also true of politics which has a lot in common with religion. Political pollsters regularly deplore voters' lack of basic understanding of the basics if the political process, but lately, economist Anthony Downs coined a term for this phenomenon called "rational ignorance", defined as the decision to remain ignorant of certain knowledge where the information costs would exceed the beneits that the knowldege would provide...Busy men of affairs and struggling workers trying to ecke out a living alike may have little time for the exhausting life work of trying to study the Scholarly debate over the nature and message of Jesus. Instead, they may be tempted to shortcut the task by trusting a learned expert. In politics, this may mean getting one's world view and informantion from a trusted source like FOX new, MSNBC, or CNN, In religion, ti tends to mean getting religious information from one's pastor, a televangelist, or youth leader, comp counselor, etc.As a a result, many religious folks haven't thought deeply about what they believe and why. So many are shocked when they discover that Paul never met Jesus in the flesh,,and that the gospels aren't bases on eyewitness accounts.
     
  3. TheSamantha

    TheSamantha Member

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    I think Hitler was a pagan. I browsed a Hitler Youth book and there was a chant about summoning warrior gods and goddesses in the name of "Might Makes Right: Survival of the Fittest"
     
  4. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    the one good thing about this thread, is that you really can't logically or honestly judge anything because of who might be claimed to somehow relate or fit as a catagory.

    but i wouldn't call hitler an athiest. i would call the ideology of fascism his religion.
     
  5. relaxxx

    relaxxx Senior Member

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    Lots of people still in denial about Hitler being catholic.

    Maybe some slightly milder catholic ignorance:

    http://youtu.be/JPC0N0U0aco

    See how easy this guys ignorance could spread and turn into support for hatred, segregation, or even warfare?
    Just on the simple differences between Catholics and Protestants, let alone Catholics and Jews.
     
  6. relaxxx

    relaxxx Senior Member

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  7. Chodpa

    Chodpa Senior Member

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    hitler was a nihilist
    athiest suggests hedonic perspective
    hitler was fuck all totalitarian
    ironic he lived with a jewish family who he revered

    people still don't know why he became antisemetic
     
  8. Okiefreak

    Okiefreak Senior Member

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    Hitler was a politician, meaning we can't really tell what he believed on the basis of his public statements. Yes, he was born a Catholic. So was I, but to conclude from that that I'm Catholic would be a big mistake. Hitler's actions suggest that he was anti-Catholic. He murdered priests and the head of Catholic Action, confiscated church property, sent thousands of priests and nuns to the death camps, and closed Catholic schools. He didn't attend mass or receive sacraments while in office. According to Goebbels, his propagandist, he hated Christianity "because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity." The Goebbels Dairies, Taylor tr., pp.304-5). Hitler followed Nietzsche in viewing Christianity as a "slave morality", and railed against it as "the Jewish Christ-creed with its effeminate, pity-ethics". So was he a Catholic? Not in any meaningful sense of the word.
     
  9. Maybe Hitler was too much of a megalomaniac for him to take any religion seriously. Possibly, had he been successful, he would have set himself up as the new religion. I don't think you can really take the personal beliefs of a person like Hitler seriously. Discussing whether or not he was Christian or an atheist is like discussing whether or not he liked playing snooker. Guy was loonie tunes.
     
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  10. relaxxx

    relaxxx Senior Member

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    So are you satisfied with that? Some hearsay third person conflicting account that says he's not AS Catholic as your personal qualification? My mother was a Sunday school teacher who told me that God didn't exist one time when she was having a bad day about something. Years later she would deny ever saying such a thing. People say lots of shit and they even say things they really don't mean or believe sometimes. Hitler and Goebbeles were human beings with each their own problems, and each their own accounts, and their own personal agendas, and their good days and bad days...

    The video was a sarcastic response to right wing people who want to insist that Hitler was an atheist, not less christian or catholic than themselves. It really doesn't matter what Hitler was, actions and images speak louder than words. The Nazi party was a right wing fanatical group of many CHRISTIAN Germans who with fascist fanaticism took control of Germany and among other things, sought out the eradication of a race of people absolutely defined by their religion.

    [​IMG]
    It says GOD WITH US
    nuff said.
     
  11. heeh2

    heeh2 Senior Member

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    From Mein Kampf, written by Adolf Hitler.

    "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 for the work of the Lord."
     
  12. Eerily

    Eerily Members

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    Christianity is a universal religion. Hitler was obviously very exclusionistic. He wanted to promote the German Aryans and no one else. Maybe if he actually had some beliefs of some variant of Christianity he may have claimed the German Aryans are God's chosen people, but I doubt it.
     
  13. Okiefreak

    Okiefreak Senior Member

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    Spoken like a true politician. He may have even believed it. Does that make him a good Catholic, or a good Christian for that matter?
     
  14. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    hitler's science was bull shit science. his religion was bull shit religion. his everything was bull shit everything. except. his ego. and his cleverness to gain the support of his supporters and to get them to let themselves be manipulated by him. this is not a reflection on any belief, science, or lack of either or both. but their are, many aspects of christianity, several other religions, and pretty much anything that praises hierarchy for its own sake, which results in gullibility and the promotion of gullibility.
     
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  15. Eerily

    Eerily Members

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    Hitler wasn't a scientist.
     
  16. themnax

    themnax Senior Member

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    nor a religious scholar, nor anyone who gave a dam about either, except to convince others he was to get his way. none of which, of course, proves anything about either.
    its difficult to determine if he even actually thought he was doing the world a favor, or just wanted to convince everyone else that he thought he was.
    i know he wanted to build grandoise monuments to himself. wonders of the world to outshine those of ancient rome. which he seems to have been obsessed with.
    he may have thought, he could make the world what he would consider a better place, if the world made him some kind of a god.

    my parents used him as an excuse to say that science without religion would make the world a very unhappy place.
    i'm only saying that such is an empty argument, because his idea of science was bullshit.
    (not denying that his idea of religion, any religion, was just as much bullshit too)
     
  17. Eerily

    Eerily Members

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    He didn't think that nor want to convice others that he did. He knew that the world can't be done any favors, that the world was indifferent to the affairs of man. Nor did he want to do humanity a favor or convince anyone that he wanted to do humanity a favor. He clearly wanted people to think that he was working in the interests of the German race, as I believe he called it.



    Western culture is obsessed with ancient rome and ancient greece, they're are birth places.



    He claimed to like the world as it was.


    I don't know what his science was, specifically, but the German's of his time were second to none.
     
  18. relaxxx

    relaxxx Senior Member

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    What an odd thing to say when Hitler at the very least used religion.
    Who was without religion?
    Millions of German Nazis?

    If you want to learn anything from Hitler it should be,
    Animosity without religion doesn't get 6 million Jews rounded up and massacred.
    That's the power of organized religious ignorance right there.
    God's work.

    God with us.
     
  19. relaxxx

    relaxxx Senior Member

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    Without religion continued....

    Hitler Greets Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller

    [​IMG]

    Hitler came to power as chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. That same year military chaplain, Ludwig Muller was elected bishop of the German Evangelical Church, with Hitler's blessing. Muller favored a Reich Church consisting of a federation of Protestants and Catholics who supported the National Socialist state. Nazis infiltrated Catholicism with the signing of a Nazi-Vatican concordat on July 20, 1933. This treaty guaranteed the Catholic Church certain rights in Germany, but restricted opposition to the Nazis.

    Protestants favoring National Socialism were known as the "German Christians," but there was considerable dissent among some pastors. The German Christians resolved that Jesus was an Aryan revolutionary fighter against all things Jewish, which was given as explanation for his murder at the hands of Jews. It was further resolved that baptized Jews within Germany would be dismissed from the church. And finally, the Old Testament was dismissed as Scripture, rejected as Jewish myth. Some theologians sought to combine Christianity with German folklore advocating Aryan superiority.

    http://wade.typepad.com/nonconformist_chronicles/church-history/
     
  20. fraggle_rock

    fraggle_rock Member

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    I'm really doubt that Hitler's religious beliefs had any real connection to his actions or the actions of any other Nazis-- Christianity was simply the dominant western European religion and publicly renouncing it would have been politically harmful.

    Hitler might have been insane, but he wasn't stupid... unlike so many Christians.
     
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