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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
Which led to a whole series of discussions. Maybe ol'sparky would do well to familiarize himself with the discussions which have taken place on this subject in the past:
Fossil Record: Evolution or "Scientific Creation," The [Thread I] (2001-06-30)
Fossil Record: Evolution or "Scientific Creation," The [ Thread II] (2001-07-01)
Fossil Record: Evolution or "Scientific Creation," The [ Thread III] (2001-07-04)
Fossil Record: Evolution or "Scientific Creation," The [ Thread IV] (2001-07-06)
Fossil Record: Evolution or "Scientific Creation," The [ Thread V] (2001-07-08)
No, it isn't, it is an example that relates to concepts that you need to understand. The reactions that lead to the assembling of snowflakes are the same type of reactions that lead to the formations of complex molecules which leads to the formation of life. That several of these reactions occur leads to the conclusion that it is extremely likely that other reactions will occur as well, including the reactions that lead to the evolution of life forms.
Yes. Absolutely. It's Galileo and the solar system all over again. But religion survived that one. It will survive this one too. However, the creationists who insist on inerrancy are utterly ignorant of the history of the issue.
Exactly what leftists in the public (governtment) school system are trying to do today.
I have always found him to be an inspiration.
Sparky, the "Second Law" to which you are so eager to appeal, is the "Second Law of Thermodynamics."
It applies to thermodynamic processess, and says absolutely nothing about "information," whatever definition you are using for that term.
So, once again, I repeat the question for the benefit of the lurkers: How much study in Thermodynamics at the collegiate level have you had?
Really?
Someone forgot to tell that to all those Hurricanes that form each year in the Carribean.....
Well, yes, there were times when his zeal swept him into rhetorical excesses. But regardless of his rough edges, of which there were a few, one must admire the unshakable strength of his convictions.
Fool. Those are miracles, excempt from the 2nd law.
"The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find-over and over again-not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another."
Another evolutionist paleontologist Mark Czarnecki comments as follows:
"A major problem in proving the theory has been the fossil record; the imprints of vanished species preserved in theEarth's geological formations. This record has never revealed traces ofDarwin's hypothetical intermediate variants - instead species appear anddisappear abruptly, and this anomaly has fueled the creationist argumentthat each species was created by God."
Farther on, note the fish-amphibian series. The last slide (34) should be convincing. The earliest true amphibian still has practically the same head as it's lobe-finned fish ancestor.
Speaking of the general applicability of the second law to both closed and open systems in general, Harvard scientist Dr. John Ross (not a creationist) affirms: “...there are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics. Ordinarily the second law is stated for isolated [closed] systems, but the second law applies equally well to open systems ... there is somehow associated with the field of far-from equilibrium phenomena the notion that the second law of thermodynamics fails for such systems. It is important to make sure that this error does not perpetuate itself.”
[Dr. John Ross, Harvard scientist (evolutionist), Chemical and Engineering News, vol. 58, July 7, 1980, p. 40]
They certainly were immune to evidence.
People who believe this also claim the human tail bone is vestigial.If you are one of these,I'LL PAY TO HAVE YOUR'S REMOVED.
You would quickly discover that it had some vital, current purposes
You've presented several fossils that have proven absolutely nothing. Like Confuciusornis sanctus that evolutionist can't even agree on whether it means birds did or did not evolve from dinosaura.
Dozens of scientists, including top evolutionists, don't have the blind faith of huckster Ben.
Brazen. Everything you've claimed not to be there is out there already.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/chordata/cephalo.html
The famous Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia has yielded a few fossils of Pikaia, which appears to be a cephalochordate (although the fossils are still being restudied).
Evolutionists aren't even sure what Mr.Pikaia is (maybe Mr. Pikaia is transexual or really a girl)....
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