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Posted on 01/26/2002 1:14:46 PM PST by Paul Ross
The Cross vs. the Swastika
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The Cross vs. the Swastika |
I vividly remember a high school conversation with a friend I’d known since we were eight. I’d pointed out that Hitler was essentially a pagan, not a Christian, but my friend absolutely refused to believe it. No matter how much evidence I presented, he kept insisting that Nazi Germany was an extension of Christianity, acting out its age-old vendetta against the Jews. Not that he spoke from any personal study of the subject; he just knew. He’d heard it so many times it’d become an article of faith — one of those things “everyone knows.”
Flash forward 25 years. A few weeks ago my last column (http://www.boundless.org/2001/regulars/kaufman/a0000528.html) refuted a number of familiar charges against Christianity, including the Christianity-created-Nazism shibboleth. Even though I only skimmed the subject, I thought the evidence I cited would’ve been hard to ignore; I quoted, for example, Hitler’s fond prediction that he would “destroy Christianity” and replace it with “a [pagan] religion rooted in nature and blood.” But sure enough, I still heard from people who couldn’t buy that.
Well, sometimes myths die hard. But this one took a hit in early January, at the hands of one Julie Seltzer Mandel, a Jewish law student at Rutgers whose grandmother survived internment at Auschwitz.
A couple of years ago Mandel read through 148 bound volumes of papers gathered by the American OSS (the World War II-era predecessor of the CIA) to build the case against Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremberg. Now she and some fellow students are publishing what they found in the journal Law and Religion(www.lawandreligion.com), which Mandel edits. The upshot: a ton of evidence that Hitler sought to wipe out Christianity just as surely as he sought to wipe out the Jews.
The first installment (the papers are being published in stages) includes a 108-page OSS outline, “The Persecution of the Christian Churches.” It’s not easy reading, but it’s an enlightening tale of how the Nazis — faced with a country where the overwhelming majority considered themselves Christians — built their power while plotting to undermine and eradicate the churches, and the people’s faith.
Before the Nazis came to power, the churches did hold some views that overlapped with the National Socialists — e.g., they opposed communism and resented the Versailles treaty that ended World War I by placing heavy burdens on defeated Germany. But, the OSS noted, the churches “could not be reconciled with the principle of racism, with a foreign policy of unlimited aggressive warfare, or with a domestic policy involving the complete subservience of Church to State.” Thus, “conflict was inevitable.”
From the start of the Nazi movement, “the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement,” said Baldur von Scvhirach, leader of the group that would come to be known as Hitler youth. But “explicitly” only within partly ranks: as the OSS stated, “considerations of expedience made it impossible” for the movement to make this public until it consolidated power.
So the Nazis lied to the churches, posing as a group with modest and agreeable goals like the restoration of social discipline in a country that was growing permissive. But as they gained power, they took advantage of the fact that many of the Protestant churches in the largest body (the German Evangelical Church) were government-financed and administered. This, the OSS reported, advanced the Nazi plan “to capture and use church organization for their own purposes” and “to secure the elimination of Christian influences in the German church by legal or quasi legal means.”
The Roman Catholic Church was another story; its administration came from Rome, not within German borders, and its relationship with the Nazis in the 1920s had been bitter. So Hitler lied again, offering a treaty pledging total freedom for the Catholic church, asking only that the church pledge loyalty to the civil government and emphasize citizens’ patriotic duties — principles which sounded a lot like what the church already promoted. Rome signed the treaty in 1933.
Only later, when Hitler assumed dictatorial powers, did his true policy toward both Catholics and Protestants become apparent. By 1937, Pope Pius XI denounced the Nazis for waging “a war of extermination” against the church, and dissidents like the Lutheran clergyman Martin Niemoller openly denounced state control of Protestant churches. The fiction of peaceful coexistence was rapidly fading: In the words of The New York Times (summarizing OSS conclusions), “Nazi street mobs, often in the company of the Gestapo, routinely stormed offices in Protestant and Catholic churches where clergymen were seen as lax in their support of the regime.”
The Nazis still paid enough attention to public perception to paint its church critics as traitors: the church “shall have not martyrs, but criminals,” an official said. But the campaign was increasingly unrestrained. Catholic priests found police snatching sermons out of their hands, often in mid-reading. Protestant churches issued a manifesto opposing Nazi practices, and in response 700 Protestant pastors were arrested. And so it went.
Not that Christians took this lying down; the OSS noted that despite this state terrorism, believers often acted with remarkable courage. The report tells, for example, of how massive public demonstrations protested the arrests of Lutheran pastors, and how individuals like pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (hanged just days before the war ended) and Catholic lay official Josef Mueller joined German military intelligence because that group sought to undermine the Nazis from within.
There is, of course, plenty of room for legitimate criticism of church leaders and laymen alike for getting suckered early on, and for failing to put up enough of a fight later. Yet we should approach such judgments with due humility. As Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett write in their book Christianity on Trial (to repeat a quote used in my last column), “It is easy for those who do not live under a totalitarian regime to expect heroism from those who do, but it is an expectation that will often be disappointed. . . . it should be less surprising that the mass of Christians were silent than that some believed strongly enough to pay for their faith with their lives.”
At any rate, my point is hardly to defend every action (or inaction) on the part of German churches. In fact, I think their failures bring us valuable lessons, not least about the dangers of government involvement in — and thus power over — any churches.
But the notion that the church either gave birth to Hitler or walked hand-in-hand with him as a partner is, simply, slander. Hitler himself knew better. “One is either a Christian or a German,” he said. “You can’t be both.”
This is something to bear in mind when some folk on the left trot out their well-worn accusation that conservative Christians are “Nazis” or “fascists.” It’s also relevant to answering the charge made by the likes of liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: “History teaches that when religion is injected into politics — the Crusades, Henry VIII, Salem, Father Coughlin, Hitler, Kosovo — disaster follows.”
But it’s not Christianity that’s injected evil into the world. In fact, the worst massacres in history have been committed by atheists (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) and virtual pagans (Hitler). Christians have amassed their share of sins over the past 2,000 years, but the great murderers have been the church’s enemies, especially in the past century. It’s long past time to set the historical record straight. 
The complete text of this article is available at http://www.boundless.org/2001/regulars/kaufman/a0000541.html
Entropy measures the amount of waste heat that can not be turned into work. A power plant uses tons of coal every day to "replace" this waste heat that is lost. In the same way, the earth uses the sun to replace the energy that is lost due to entropy. Life doesn't contradict this, since everything alive gets energy from the sun, however indirectly.
Dr. Henry Morris:
The Second Law proves, as certainly as science can prove anything whatever, that the universe had a beginning. Similarly, the First Law shows that the universe could not have begun itself. The total quantity of energy in the universe is a constant, but the quantity of available energy is decreasing. Therefore, as we go backward in time, the available energy would have been progressively greater until, finally, we would reach the beginning point, where available energy equaled total energy. Time could go back no further than this. At this point both energy and time must have come into existence. Since energy could not create itself, the most scientific and logical conclusion to which we could possibly come is that: "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."
The evolutionist will not accept this conclusion, however. He hypothesizes that either: (1) some natural law canceling out the Second Law prevailed far back in time, or (2) some. natural law canceling out the Second Law prevails far out in space.
When he makes such assumptions, however, he is denying his own theory, which says that all things can be explained in terms of presently observable laws and processes. He is really resorting to creationism, but refuses to acknowledge a Creator.
Isaac Asimov: The universe and the earth are becoming more disorderly and the sun isn't stopping this or reversing established scientific law.
Hence the evolution of "closing time" at the neighborhood tavern ...
Darwin dealt in species, not races. Nice try, though.
Evolution doesn't apply to the Big Bang.
Proofs of Macroevolution [Missing]
You might try doing some research before bringing up this old canard.
Once again, it pays to do some research. Otherwise you fall prey to dragons ...
It is not an advantage to a humans to kill off the elderly. They help their family and/or tribe by relating experience and knowledge they have gained during their life. Competition among humans is between tribes rather than between individual people. Darwin did not argue for human extermination programs. This is a common misunderstanding of the phrase "survival of the fittest".
Anti-Jewish pogroms have a long history in Europe, and the holocaust was the industrialization of the medieval pogrom.
While not platypuses, dolphins or whales, the following links show that speciation (the creation of new species through random mutation and selection) has been observed. The general idea is, what holds true for a sampling of species probably holds true for all species.
Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
David N. Menton, Ph.D.:
In an effort to promote the evolution of "higher forms" of humans, Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton, founded the Eugenics Movement. Eugenics is the "science" which seeks to improve the biological makeup of the human species by selective breeding. Galton advocated the regulation of marriage and family size according to the genetic quality of the parents. He believed that if controlled breeding was applied to humans, as it was to farm animals, a perfect human breed could be developed. This concept of the "master race" was put into practice by Adolph Hitler in Germany in an effort to create a "pure Aryan race," while exterminating "inferior" Jews.
No discussion of the devastating impact of Social Darwinism on society would be complete without considering its strong influence on the development of Marxism and communism. Frederich Engels and Karl Marx (co-founders of Marxist communism) were exceedingly enthusiastic over Darwin's book On the Origin of Species. Karl Marx wrote a letter to Engels in December of 1860 declaring that On the Origin of Species was "the book which contains the basis in natural history for our views." In another letter to Engels in January of 1861, Marx declared:
"Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis of struggle in history...not only is a death blow dealt here for the first time to 'Teleology' in the natural sciences, but their rational meaning is emphatically explained." (As quoted by Conway Zirkle in: Evolution, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959, p. 86).
The reality is that there are massive gaps in even the theories of how species allegedly involved.
There is NO evidence and no fossil record. Evolution contradicts therodynamics and is based on the absurd idea that mutations are massively beneficial. It's a crock of BS that's even more absurd than global warming.
If killing off the sick and elderly lent some kind of advantage to a tribe, then the most successful nation in history would have been the Aztecs.
Darwin's cousin was racist just like he was.
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