10/24/09

Adolf Hitler Was a Christian! Was Adolf Hitler a Christian?, part 1

Please note that this essay will now be housed in True Freethinker’s section on Adolf Hitler / Nazism / Communism

16 comments:

  1. Adolf Hitler is as much a Christian as Lucifer, Jim Jones, Joseph Smith, Mary Eddy, or David Koresh. In that they aren't. Thanks, Mariano for summarizing so much info in one place!

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  2. Let us consider whether Adolf Hitler was, as some claim, a Christian.

    Those "some" of course, including Hitler himself.

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  3. Cedric,

    We will come to that.

    For now, based on your someone is whatever they claim to be reasoning; if I claim to be a 20 foot tall Japanese-chinchilla-human-big foot-alien hybrid then that is what I am.

    aDios,
    Mariano

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  4. For now, based on your someone is whatever they claim to be reasoning; if I claim to be a 20 foot tall Japanese-chinchilla-human-big foot-alien hybrid then that is what I am.

    No.
    I'm not making that claim.
    Maybe Hitler was a Christian. Maybe he wasn't.
    I don't really care.
    Yet he did claim that he was a Christian.
    It wasn't just some mysterious "some people".
    Hitler himself called himself a Christian.

    Just like any other person might call themselves a Christian.
    For example: George W. Bush or Jerry Falwell or the Pope or Peter Popoff.

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  5. Why is it important if Hitler was a Christian?

    1930/1940's Germany was predominantly Protestant/Catholic country and only few people back then opposed Holocaust or Hitler himself.

    Not to mention they have elected him.

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  6. MK,

    I think it matters people use the fact that Hitler said he was a christain against christians. Also, I really don't think he was since the Bible says things such as...

    Exodus 20:13 - "You shall not murder."

    Matthew 5:43-44 - "You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

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  7. Also, I really don't think he was since the Bible says things such as...

    Woah up there for a second!

    So if you are a Christian and then you do something "bad" according to somebody's reading of the bible, you instantly get your membership revoked? Is that how it works?
    Seriously?
    Hmm
    ;)

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  8. "I think it matters people use the fact that Hitler said he was a christain against christians."

    Umm, OK. Why would German (for the most part Christians)elect him (an open Anti-Semite) and kept him in power since 1933* then?

    Why was opposition against Hitler so weak (while NSDAP membership was in millions)?

    *I am not talking about wartime Germany here

    1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 (speaking of Jews)

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  9. @MK "1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 (speaking of Jews)"

    What's your point?

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  10. @Cedric: "So if you are a Christian and then you do something "bad" according to somebody's reading of the bible, you instantly get your membership revoked?"

    Hardly. How you respond to your sin being exposed, however, is indeed a good indication of where your heart is.

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  11. How you respond to your sin being exposed...

    That's fine as far as it goes but who exactly get's to make the call (here on this mortal coil) if you have "sinned" or not?

    ...a good indication of where your heart is...
    It would be nice to see into somebody's heart.
    I cannot see into yours, any more I can read your mind.
    Having only a "good indication" to go by doesn't sound very useful. Too much wiggle room for interpretation.

    One man's Christian is another man's deluded self-serving scumbag.

    No offence intended.

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  12. "That's fine as far as it goes but who exactly get's to make the call (here on this mortal coil) if you have "sinned" or not?"


    Hmm, tough call. Several million bodies of one target group, about as many of his own countrymen the same - many of them only boys. Add about at least 10 times that many in Russian dead... And unrepentant to boot, rather blaming his own Volk for not having strangled enough Juden, for not having marched off sooner to do the Napoleon Charleston, for not having offered up enough youth to shoot RPG's at Soviet tanks while his McThousand Year Reich fell to pieces. And a real class act too, putting a bullet through his own mistress' head and poisoning his pet dog, meanwhile bombs rain down on a city he once criminally ruled over...

    Yeah... like I said, that's a tough call.

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  13. kh123: "Several million bodies of one target group, about as many of his own countrymen the same - many of them only boys."

    Again, they were murdered by ordinary Germans many of whom were Christians.

    Even if Hitler was an atheist, why would Christian country elect anti-semite and nationalist?

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  14. "Even if Hitler was an atheist, why would Christian country elect anti-semite and nationalist?"

    Could it be that many of them were anti-semite themselves? (Martin Luther writings,1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 etc. etc.)

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  15. Given that Germany was under the sway of "rationalism" and "higher criticism" - i.e., "We couldn't really trust the Bible so let's just write it off and listen to rationalist dissertations on it" - then yes, antisemitism (as well as Darwinism) made some great headway in Europe at that time.

    Luther didn't help - but then again, that's why most Christians don't accord him any binding scriptural authority - even I as a Jew understand that. Perhaps if German Christians had been more in-tune with what Scripture actually taught, maybe they would have called out Luther and his irritable bowel on more than one occasion.

    ...So we have watered-down cultural Christians who followed more the fancy of denominationalism, local politics, and "modern" secular ideas about the world (most notably coming from the antichristian & Darwinian camps) rather than any reality emanating from their own Scripture. Quite a few German Jews ("Jackets") fell under this category as well - they felt more fealty to the secular (Germany) than they did the spiritual (Torah). Of how many of them survived the maelstrom that ensued afterwards... who knows.

    And, wow - I don't know how I'm going to get out of that 1 Thess. reference. I mean, after all, that was written by Rabbi Shaul, a former Pharisee ( Acts 23 ), of the tribe of Benjamin, ( Phillipians 3 ) who made a point of visiting as many synagogues as he did goyim.

    "“My manner of life from my youth, which was spent from the beginning among my own nation at Jerusalem, all the Jews know. They knew me from the first, if they were willing to testify, that according to the strictest sect of our religion I lived a Pharisee. And now I stand and am judged for the hope of the promise made by God to our fathers. To this promise our twelve tribes [of Israel]..."

    But, wait! "Our twelve tribes"? Paul talking about growing up in Yerushalayim?!! But I thought Paul (Shaul) was antisemitic?!! Oh... this isn't boding well for MK's well founded assertion that German antisemitism was fueled by what Rabbi Paulos said about his own people....


    By that yardstick, even Groucho Marx is antisemitic.


    One quote that I think does explain the racist tide in Germany:

    “I consider the Negro to be a lower species of man and cannot make up my mind to look upon him as ‘a man and a brother,’ for the gorilla would then also have to be admitted into the family.”

    -Ernest Haeckel (Darwin's "German Bulldog"), The History of Creation: Vol II, translated by E. Ray Lancaster (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1876), p. 365–366.

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  16. "Yeah... like I said, that's a tough call."

    You are ranting.
    Boring.

    Hitler was a bad guy. Yeah, we all get that.
    The Germans were the bad guys.
    We've all seen those black-and-white movies.

    However, Hitler lead a nation to war that was, before the start of WW2, two thirds Protestant and one third Catholic.

    Who gets to decide if Hitler was a Christian or not?
    You? If so, then how?

    So we have watered-down cultural Christians

    Who decides if the Germans were "watered-down cutural Christians"?
    You? If so, how?

    No True Scotsman.

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