These arguments are intimately entertwined, and I have a point, and I care about it; this is not a rhetoric class exercise for me, and you're not the daddy of this conversation.
The condition of Adolph's soul is not the same thing as a historical analysis of anti-Semitism on the continent. One can lead to a discussion of the other, but it doesn't HAVE to.
If you don't want to argue about something, just refrain from doing so--sheesh.
The condition of Adolf's soul came up as an epistimological point on account of your question concerning my "certainty". If you don't want answers, don't ask questions, and particularly don't follow that up by continuing this inappropriate attempt to control the conversation by by patronizing me. Who taught you to argue in this spinless manner? It lacks onions.
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.
Claiming that one of the greatest mass murderers in history was "really a Christian" is ONLY going to cause you to lose all credibility,
How someone feels about some thesis is not a measure of its likelihood.
except with the atheist club around here.
And historians not affiliated the the RC church, and only a handful of those, and the USArmy intelligence branch, and pretty much any of his biographers.
Hitler co-opted elements of Christian theology to make his race-based pseudo-philosophy more palatable in the social context of the times. Just as Bubba and Jimmuh Carter donned the mantle of evangelical Christianity in the States to further their careers.
Not a relevant argument. There can be no serious doubt that Hitler started out christian, and got his anti-jewish bias from the same source as those to whom he appealed.
Oh, indeed, how was anti-semitism "steeped into the culture of Europe", other than by the Catholic Church's 1400 years of intense propaganda?
That's a question for a professional historian. Like I said, that's not what I am concerned with.
Right, because you prefer not to cope with the tellingly obvious, about which there is no significant historical doubt, even within the RC church.
Hitler, like millions of other Germans, was anti-semitic because he was educated in a famously anti-semitic church Yup. But somehow none of the other German leaders, from the Kaiser to Hindeburg, ever felt it their duty to engage in genocide; and to invade the rest of Europe and Russia; and to exterminate as many Jews as they could reach in every country they subjugatted. Hitler was an outlier in the data.
Hitler is extremely far from the only christian who has murdered jews wholesale in christian countries. The fact that many people refrain from murdering jews, doesn't gainsay that many have, historically, in the name of christianity.
For you to insist that he was a mainstream, sincere Christian will not earn you any credibility.
...with christian apologists, which I already conceded.
Yes, exactly. Think about what you are saying. Hitler and the nazi propaganda machine called on the Bible, and RC doctrine, law and tradition, by specific verse, event, and document, to justify murdering jews. Hitler did not think that vegetarian nudist Odin-worshipping jew-hatred would turn the trick, now did he? He thought christian-based jew-hating would turn the trick, and it did. It is irrelevant to what extent Hitler's christianity was a pose, and to claim it was entirely a pose flies in the face of his early history, and his frequently repeated public affirmations. You can't make someone not a christian based on the fact that they are hypocritical and you don't like them: that policy would cause the abandonment of churches from Portland Or. to Portland Me.
...
Running Wolf--please feel invited to bug off, I had quite enough of your disjoint, cryptic style of argument last time around.
No, it's because I'm something of a World War II buff.