WHOA, there, horsie!
All I said was that the claim that Hitler was a sincere, devout Christian was in severe doubt.
This is NOT the same as defending (or even happening to be discussing) historical evidence for anti-Semitism within the Catholic Church; let alone trying to parse to decide how much was native to Catholicism, how much was "steeped into" the culture of Europe, or how much those two elements overlapped.
If you want to pursue that discussion, great; but it does not particularly interest me at the moment. Plese look to other posters to continue developing that topic.
Cheers!
Nobody died and put you in charge of my argument. If you can't see the connection between pieces of my argument, I can't force it on you, but let me just suggest, for conjecture's sake, that when I make a chain of argument, the pieces have something to do with each other.
All I said was that the claim that Hitler was a sincere, devout Christian was in severe doubt.
It's in severe doubt in devout christian apologist circles. It is not in severe doubt in historical circles, such as those of the custodians of the USArmy intelligence evaluation.
This is NOT the same as defending (or even happening to be discussing) historical evidence for anti-Semitism within the Catholic Church; let alone trying to parse to decide how much was native to Catholicism, how much was "steeped into" the culture of Europe, or how much those two elements overlapped.
Oh, indeed, how was anti-semitism "steeped into the culture of Europe", other than by the Catholic Church's 1400 years of intense propaganda?
If you want to pursue that discussion, great; but it does not particularly interest me at the moment. Please look to other posters to continue developing that topic.
Hitler, like millions of other Germans, was anti-semitic because he was educated in a famously anti-semitic church, in Germany, as attested to by his sister, friends and teachers, to whom he voiced a desire to become a priest, long before he had any thoughts of "scamming" 50 million germans into helping him mass-murder jews--comic-book incredible as such an assumption is. Like the theories that he was completely cynical in his public preseentations of his own convictions, the theories that he was anti-semitic because he was a nudist, or a vegetarian, or a teutonic savage tree-sprite Odin-ist, or because his mother was impregnated by someone who was hypothetically jewish--are not the way a sane person without an ax to grind would bet. A sane person would bet that the reason the other 10s of millions of christian germans were virulently anti-semitic, is the same reason Hitler was anti-semitic.