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Friday, July 25, 2008

Gott Mit Uns

Nosilia666-I mean nosilia999 went off on a rant implying atheists have killed more than any religious believer. It was really long so I won't repeat it here, but it's under Ray's "A Letter From an Atheist". One of the biggest (killed the most people) horrors (s)he listed as atheistic was Nazi Germany. I think a great number of his/her claims could be refuted but this one stood out at me because even with my layman's knowledge of history, I knew it was bullshit. One of Hitler's slogans on Nazi paraphernalia was "gott mit uns" or "god with us", atheist indeed. I found a good article regarding Hitler's beliefs. According to the article, Hitler was a Roman Catholic, became an alter boy, and was even named a "solider of Christ" at his church. Interestingly enough, the church's doctrine included hate propaganda against the Jewish people. This could have been an inspiration for Hitler when he wrote in Mein Kampf "I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of out Creator. By fighting off the Jews. I am doing the Lord's work. " He never left the church and the church never condemned him.

My point in all this is to refute nosilia999 by showing there are both good and bad people in every faith or lack thereof and it's sickening to watch someone try and twist history in an attempt to breed contempt for their fellow man of different (non)beliefs.

32 comments:

  1. Let's not forget the other axis powers in WW-II, Italians, rather catholic bunch of guys and the Japanese, their emporer was a real living God. So it'kind of hard to call them atheists.

    Then again history has never been the fundies strong point. If it's not in the Bible it doesn't exist.

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  2. Very true. I think maybe the history problems could be attributed to the inevitable homeschooling most of these fundies are subjected to.

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  3. LOL, just took a look at Rays cesspool, He's really scraping the barrel. Now he's reposted something from a few weeks ago. Guess they'll never notice.
    Also comments seem to have gone down dramatically down there. I wonder how that came about :-)

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  4. haha I noticed Ray reposted. I bet none of the fundies will say anything and will continue with their "great post Ray" comments.

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  5. Okay, so that wasn't just me.

    I'm still anxiously awaiting the return of the crockaduck.

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  6. Okay, some folks have already mentioned Ray's double posting here. My bad. nosilia999 has posted some more comments. The last one, 7/25 6:07 A.M., has a curious mix of bullshit and spin.

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  7. Over at PZ's blog, on the great desecration post, a buncha catholics kept bringing up the Hitler=atheist shit. After being pointed to many different historical websites and pictures of Hitler leaving church, being saluted to by priests and bishops and what have you, they pulled the "he wasn't a true catholic" card.

    What goes on in their heads that allows them to block out any evidence handed to them?

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  8. Ha! The Catholics say Hitler wasn't a true Catholic (didn't he hate Jews enough?), Ray's bunch say that Catholics aren't true Christians. Hmmmm. I'd like to see Jebus come back and tell them all to "get the fuck away from me".

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  9. If Hitler wasn't a "true Christian", Stalin wasn't a "true Atheist".

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  10. yeah, people who say hitler was atheist obviously don't understand the definition of atheism.

    atheists do not believe in gods.

    hitler believed in a god.

    it seems so simple to me.

    i don't want to blame hitler on christians or catholics by saying that, i just get irritated when they try to pin it on atheists when this is so clearly false.

    nobody has to claim responsibility for hitler. he was a bad guy. i just wish everyone would stop trying to blame it on each other and just make damned sure something similar never happens again.

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  11. Jesus wasn't a True Christian. I don't really think he was saved.

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  12. There are so many different types of Christianity... How do you know which is the REAL one?!

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  13. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  14. I know! The one that claims God speaks to them directly!

    ...Wait, they all do.

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  15. Some anonymous person said if all the people who were labeled "not true christians" by other christians were to disappear, there would be no christians left.


    @ amiable atheist

    Much agreed. Evil people are everywhere, but when a christian starts trying to say Hitler was evil because he was an atheist, it's just too easy to turn around and say "actually he was a christian!" haha

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  16. RAmen RS,

    Whether crazy people have beliefs or not I think is just a reflection of their society, experiences, how they grew up. etc. They can use that to aid them in their evilness, but it's not the reason they are evil. I mean it's just as silly as saying "Hitler ate fish before he came up with the final solution so eating fish must make one evil".

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  17. The main logical flaw that these clown dicks refuse to see past is that they're confusing cause with characteristic. Essentially what they're arguing is that if someone can be described as X, then X is the cause of their actions. You might just as well claim that since John Wayne Gacy was a Catholic who liked clowns, it was wearing scary greasepaint and going to mass that made him bury young boys in his basement. I call bullshit on that one.

    Just because Stalin may have been an "atheist", that doesn't mean that it was his "atheism" that made him slaughter millions of his own people. WTF, when was the last time a non-theistic rationalistic society had a pogrom? Did any invading crusaders ever have battle cries like, "We see no convincing evidence of a personal god!"?

    Okay, let's say they concede the point. (Not fucking likely.)They'll then retreat to the position that while "atheism" may not be the cause of any genocide I might be planning to commit, that it at least doesn't hold me back from it. In that case, the inevitable conclusion is that the only reason that any of them doesn't go out raping dogs and burning down supermarkets is the love of Jesus in their hearts. Right? Is every day a constant temptation to grandmother mutilation? If so, I'm glad they they're on one side of the computer screen and I'm on the other.

    As far as this endless "Hitler was a Christian" vs. "Hitler was an atheist" goes, the truth is that Hitler was an oportunistic psychopath who'd take any position and say or do anything to further his cause. If it was Christian sloganeering that got folks riled up enough to stoke up the ovens, then let's put "Gott Mit Uns" on our belt buckles. On the other hand, if he felt like wiping his ass on an altarcloth, then you might as well put away the Charmin. I wouldn't take anything Hitler said about Christianity to be the result of deep theological pondering.

    I've actually become less and less tempted lately to visit Ray's House of Lies. I can only take so much of being called a lying, adulterous murderer. It's also getting more and more discouraging to read the constant parade of illogic and brick-headedness that constitutes the general run of the "thinking" over there.

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  18. "Did any invading crusaders ever have battle cries like, "We see no convincing evidence of a personal god!"?"

    LOL!

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  19. It's even simpler than that actually. Look at the Thirty Years War. This example isn't used very often (too Eurocentric I suppose). The Thirty Years War caused the death of one third to two thirds of the whole population in the region that is nowadays mostly Germany. Set in the 1940s, this would mean up to 40 Million dead in Germany alone, more than the whole Second World War killed worldwide. Now, equip the Thirty Years War armies with tanks and machine guns. Total annihilation. No Europe. Wiped off the map.
    Did I mention that the Thirty Years War was exclusively Christian on Christian, fought for differences of dogma? They weren't looking for territorial expansion, or resources. Only dominance of one dogma over the other.
    That's why WWII analogies fail.

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  20. And to add to my other post, some of the most brutal, savage, bloodthirsty and destructive armies in the Thirty Years War fought for exactly the specific Christian ideology Ray is endorsing.

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  21. I just saw that benjamin brought up 'Table Talk' to support nosila's false assertions.
    The compiling of Table Talk was instructed by Martin Bormann, a fanatic anti-Catholic 'prime secretary' of Hitler. TT was compiled from short notes the secretaries Heim and Picker jotted down. The curious thing about Table Talk, which is supposedly an account of Hitler's private convesations, is that Hitler's anti-clerical statements therein match no statements he ever made in any other context. There are no recordings of any form to verify if Bormann didn't selectively edit, filter and embellish the material to support his own agenda. Even more importantly, leaving the questionable authenticity aside, is the fact that in Table Talk, Hitler never denounces his faith. He confirms his belief in God and explicitly his belief in the Ten Commandments. Hitler:"Wenn ich an ein göttliches Gebot glauben will, so kann es nur das sein: die Art zu erhalten." In English: "Should I believe in only one divine commandment, it can be just this: to preserve the kind." This does not mean he denounced other Biblical law, it means that this is what he believed to be the essence of the Law.
    Remember that there are no extant shorthand notes of the original Talks, and Picker stated that he wanted to deliver only what he thought were the important, essential statements. Picker affirms that he omitted side arguments and elucidations 'to not confuse the reader'. Bormann noted in the margin of Picker's final draft that Picker did not ascribe the statements to specific persons present at the respective talks, so the various statements could have come from other people than Hitler himself. Picker states that Bormann 'unconcernedly adjusted' the drafts. In his memoirs, Albert Speer reports that Bormann deliberately floated the church theme in the talks to provoke Hitler to make hostile remarks. According to Speer, Bormanns tactic was to discuss some sermon or statement from a cleric and to get Hitler's attention by repeating aggravating parts of it. He did this until Hitler got angry and left dinner. Bormann's position in Hitler's headquarters was such that he could decide which of Hitler's statements and orders to pass on. One of his favorite phrases: "Nooone comes to the Führer except through me". In an often cited circular from 1941, Bormann states that National Socialism and Christianity were irreconcilable - an opinion that Hitler didn't share. Bormann even tried to ban Christmas carols from being sung at Christmas, a proposal which Hitler opposed.
    To conclude, Table Talk is a highly questionable, unreliable non-primary source, not credible to support otherwise uncorroborated historical research.
    A detailed article on this is Horst Junginger's The Führer as "hellish Messiah"

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  22. 'Nooone' should of course be 'noone' in my above post.

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  23. Funny how nosilia never mentioned the Thirty Years War. "Cherry picking for Jessbus!!!". It's also very sad, but doesn't surprise me, that another rayniac came in and supported nosilia with their on cherry picked/questionable science. The ironic thing is most of these wars, to oversimplify them, were partly fueled because someone didn't like someone else's beliefs. Nosilia and friends are twisting history to use these wars to create more hate towards people of other (non)faiths.

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  24. Oh, and to be fair about Stalin.
    Stalin did not take down the churches in Russia because he was atheist. He was just taking down the competition[the church had a big influence on the people].
    sorry, if I'm off topic.
    But, I don't cherry pick. I admit someone did something, and what his beliefs were.

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  25. To keep off topic, I've always found Stalin and Russian history in general really fascinating. I wish I knew more about it.

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  26. me too. i tried a sorry attempt at learning russian through podcast.

    I experienced epic fail.

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  27. emily at Ray's:
    [Hitler] also worked to take complete control over every church, taking out all the symbolism (crosses, images of saints in catholic churches), take the Bible out of every church and replace it with "Mein Kampf" (sounds like a joke or exaggeration but this is an historical fact.) He also stopped publication of all bibles, worked to destroy every existing copy of the bible as well as crosses and other symbolisms of Christianity.

    emily, saying it's a fact doesn't make it so. You give no source and are thereby alone very questionable. I have never heard of any of this, and I live in Germany, where we have weeks of discussing the Nazi 'era' in school. Albert Speer's memoirs contradict your point - Hitler personally endorsed the singing of Christmas carols, even in his own headquarters. Just for the fun of it, I'm now going to check on your claims by looking for sources other than the lying apologist sites I presume you used.
    Here goes: First source, the Protestant Martin Luther Memorial church in my home city. What do we see there? Nazi symbolism right next to statues of saints, Jesus next to a uniformed SA trooper. Another, Jesus with children and an other SA man. The organ, donated by the NSDAP in 1935.
    So much for the symbols in churches.
    Now for your claims about 'Mein Kampf' and the Bibles. Nothing. Neither publication nor possession of Bibles was ever forbidden in the Nazi era.
    If you have sources who aren't just making stuff up, present them. Otherwise you're just another Liar for Jesus.

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  28. Nice work Felix :-)
    HA! emily, we have a German guy on our side. How stupid can these people get? I hardly remember anything from the last history class I took and even I remember seeing plenty of Nazi paraphernalia with pictures of swastikas and crosses right next to each other.

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  29. Felix! Are you currently in germany?!

    I'm trying so hard to learn German. I've got a book, and several podcasts.[Fail]Maybe I should get Rosetta Stone...


    I plan to perhaps go to Germany sometime in my life, and stay for a while.

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  30. Hi ranting!
    Yes, I live in Berlin. It's hard to learn German for most people. Sometimes I get the impression that the language is deteriorating, but I suppose there are people who can't even get simple idioms, terms and phrases right in any language. Very many Germans speak English fairly well, at least sufficient to help out a foreigner, so communication shouldn't be difficult except in the small villages.
    If you visit my country, travel around a bit before you decide where to stay. There are significant regional differences of culture, not least of religiosity. We still have quite a few religiously motivated laws left, but arguably few ever are enforced in most parts of Germany, or influence the average citizen much. There are very few fundies of the creationist type, and no politician or church leader in their right mind panders to them. I can think of no more than two academics who try to promote ID in the country, and nobody really listens to them anyway. Thankfully, even though I disagree with some of her policies, our chancellor is a scientist, as is her husband, so they know well how to spot pseudo-scientific ideologies.
    For anyone interested, here's a great blog article a fellow German from Munich and advanced student of philosophy wrote:
    http://mphil.livejournal.com/3093.html#cutid1

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  31. I just replied to emily at Ray's. I approached my post as politely as possible, to express that what she wrote was not fully supported by her source. She wasn't completely wrong, but asserted more than what historians actually said. The plans to carry out what she asserted took place were there, but never carried out to their full proposed extent. I think my post, which should appear shortly, has found some common ground where we can leave it. The essence is, the Nazis did try to replace traditional Christianity with their own 'Aryanized' version, not destroy religion. Nothing confirms that enforcing atheism or establishing an atheistic society was their goal.

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