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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
You are ignoring my post 96. Is this in some way convenient to your argument?
Stone Deaf is one of the few truly invincible Warriors because nothing can shatter his impenetrable armor of non recognition. His primitive battle strategy is maddening effective; he simply refuses to acknowledge any arguments he doesn't like. Kung-Fu Master can hammer away with devastating blows, Cyber Sisters can screech in full throat and Profundus Maximus can expound until he drops, but Stone Deaf remains utterly oblivious as he advances his dogged and often repetitious attacks. In the early stages of battle a wide array of Warriors will fling themselves at Stone Deaf, but inevitably they fall back exhausted or lose interest when they see that their best weapons have no effect. His only real enemy is Administrator, who has the power to eject him from the discussion forum.
Click here for source and other flame warriors.
Would you like to live in a society like this? Why not? Is it because you would be constantly worrying that someone would declare you "a burden on society" and kill you? Do you think atheists feel any differently than you do when it comes to how much they value their own lives? The society you posit for "Godless" folks would never last because no one wants to live in perpetual fear; it has nothing to do with some God-imposed morality (humans are either moral or they are not. If they are moral then God does not need to impose morality upon them. If they are not moral then the only reason they would act moral would be through fear of retribution, and I'm not sure God wants humans who have to be threatened to do the right thing).
Uhen's Cetacean Evolution Page
There's new progress (and new issues) with AndrewC's favorite whale topic, the question of mesonychids versus hippopotamus-like animals.
Junior, this last might be a good one for the Ultimate Resource, although sometimes Scientific American removes articles quickly.
I'm not sure God wants humans who have to be threatened to do the right thing
Do your children ever have to be threatened (in any way)to do the right thing (i.e. the thing that would be in the best interests of your child and others, ... like not biting other people)? If you're like most parents, I'm sure that you anticipate that you won't have to threaten them forever, ... just long enough for them to mature to the point where they can understand for themselves why they shouldn't bite other people.
Stingray used to save the evo threads so he could embarrass the evos with their own comments. I sometimes wonder how they can type with their fingers in their ears.
Is this a logical refutation of their superstitions? No. But logic doesn't work with them so this is just as useful.
So, for a long time, did I, so I could prove to the witch doctors that we'd actually gone over this stuff n times already. My patience gave out before my hard disk.
What do you want to know about whale evolution?
Shall we start with mesonychian?
Ambulocetidae?
Remingtonocetidae?
Dorudontids (gee, those hind legs are getting smaller and smaller, aren't they)?
Dorudon atrox?
Or my personal favorite, Basilosaurus (whose hind legs are just a tiny little nub)?
Of course, there is always the more modern evidence of whale evolution:
That is questionable. In post 146 VadeRetro gives a SA link that again points out the new evidence that belies the old thinking. The long and the short of it is that nearly all of the new evidence shows a close relationship to herbivores not carnivores. Thar she blows!
The teeth of a 50-million-year-old whale called Pakicetidae, said Thewissen, are not as highly evolved as those of the mesonychians, making it unlikely that whales are the descendants of that group.
The fossil whales give mixed evidence about whether the cetaceans belong among the ungulates. Thewissen says that five traits of the early whales, including features of the skull, upper teeth, and feet, are "not inconsistent" with the hippo hypothesis. But the last molar on the lower jaw, which has three sections in artiodactyls, has just two in whales. And Thewissen recently discovered an anklebone from an early whale ancestor that still had legs. It lacks the rounded head characteristic of an ungulate anklebone, although it is similar in other respects.
Thewissen thinks his findings open the door to a tentative link between whales and ungulates. Several paleontologists at the meeting agreed that the whale-hippo link is looking more plausible, and Norihiro Okada, a molecular biologist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, thinks the case will soon get stronger: "I think paleontologists may discover more [features common to early cetaceans and early hippos] in the near future."
Vade's SA link
Although all the new fossils point to artiodactyls as the ancestors of whales, where on the family tree cetaceans belong in relation to hippos remains controversial. Whereas Gingerich's team considers the whale-hippo link a possibility, the analysis conducted by Thewissen and his colleagues indicates that cetaceans are not more closely related to one artiodactyl group—such as hippos—than another.
Resolving that matter will require further work. "Two other evolutionary transitions vital to our understanding of the relationship between whales and artiodactyls beg for elucidation: the precise ancestry of hippopotami and the origin of artiodactyls themselves," Kenneth D. Rose of Johns Hopkins University comments in a perspective article accompanying the Science report. "The answers seem likely to come only from an improved fossil record—perhaps from the same region that has yielded fossils showing that whales evolved from artiodactyls."
Plus, of course, all of the genetic data(save one) that put whales closer to hippos.
Also from Vade's link---"Now I admit the possibility that hippos are a sideline of artiodactyls that might be closer to whales than any other living animals," he remarks.
What intriques me, is the reluctance of the cognoscenti to abandon their positions facing such a preponderance of contrary evidence, yet their celerity to accept tenuous data when it supports.
Thanks, for the SA link Vade.
"He" being a former proponent of the mesonychid ancestry of whales.
AndrewC: What intriques me, is the reluctance of the cognoscenti to abandon their positions facing such a preponderance of contrary evidence, yet their celerity to accept tenuous data when it supports.
No question that scientists have pet theories. Notice however that it's considered bad form to keep going when the evidence is blowing you out of the water.
If, as often claimed by the C-siders, everyone was simply spinning the data for his own version of The Infallible Truth, such admissions as the one you quote would never happen.
And your grandfather and grandmother were likely racists also, so were they idiots, because of it? If you don't agree, you're a hypocrite. Looks like a lose-lose situation to me. Give up that line of argument, its a really dumb one, and a pretty good sign that you have no scientific argument as well.
There are only two possible views of the world. We are evolved animals and no absolute morality. Or there is absolutely morality and it comes from a source outside of mankind.
What you presented is the lamest theory to support the evolution fairy tale.
It's laughable anyone could even believe the speculation that was presented in this article. It's science fiction at its very worst.
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