The Pope's Visit

[flamingjimmy]

The pope did nothing of the kind.

 

He mentioned atheism in the same sentence as nazism, that is all.

 

It's starting to get tiring you ignoring all of my points except for single sentences per post that you take issue with, it's almost as if you don't have a response to the vast majorty of what I say

[spindrift]

jimmy, posting "Writing Hitler off as a mad man who caused the whole thing by himself " is pure straw mannery.

[flamingjimmy]

jimmy, posting "Writing Hitler off as a mad man who caused the whole thing by himself " is pure straw mannery.

 

It was a bit, to be fair though it was a strawman in response to a strawman.

 

"Just because somebody may hold a particular worldview (along with other views) doesn't make him a spokesman for that view, or even remotely representative of others who hold that view."

 

Nobody on here said that it does.

 

What threw me off was your last sentence "No matter how his madness is painted, he was still evil incarnate."

 

As if that was some sort of explanation for his actions, perhaps I was a bit hasty with my response though.

 

Seriously though, you can't lecture anyone on debate considering that you have ignored 90% of the points being made at you and only ever comment on single sentences that were written a little hastily.

[Grahame]

Can you quit it with the strawman arguments please?

 

What I said was 'Nazi Germany was an overwhelmingly Christian place'

 

What I did not say was 'The Nazis in Germany were all perfect Christians who followed the teachings of Jesus to the letter'.

 

I'm going to quote your previous post again, because thinking about it, there's an even worse piece of historical revisionism that I didn't notice the first time.

Spindrift: "The Holy Father is absolutely right: godlessness is the heart of Nazism. When Germans rejected their Christian roots, they reverted to racist paganism."

 

You've got it completely backwards, the racism of the nazis (specifically the antisemitism, as in, y'know the motivation for the holocaust) has it's roots deep in european Christianity which has had an extremely long history of antisemitism dating back hundreds of years before Hitler was even born.

 

The antisemitism at the core of nazi idealogy did not have pagan roots, it had Christian ones, and you'll be very hard pressed to find a respected historian who even hints otherwise.

 

When did Jesus say to kill. Remember Christianity is based on the teaching of Jesus.

 

 

[sccsux]

Tell that to the pope! He's the one conflating modern British secularism with Nazism not us.

 

He mentioned atheism in the same sentence as nazism, that is all.

 

Read the above again, noting the words in bold. Secularism & Nazism are the words used. Not atheists.

 

Seems you're linking secularism, atheism & nazis.

[spindrift]

It was a bit, to be fair though it was a strawman in response to a strawman.

 

"Just because somebody may hold a particular worldview (along with other views) doesn't make him a spokesman for that view, or even remotely representative of others who hold that view."

 

Nobody on here said that it does.

 

What threw me off was your last sentence "No matter how his madness is painted, he was still evil incarnate."

 

As if that was some sort of explanation for his actions, perhaps I was a bit hasty with my response though.

 

Seriously though, you can't lecture anyone on debate considering that you have ignored 90% of the points being made at you and only ever comment on single sentences that were written a little hastily.

 

 

 

The "Was Hitler a Christian/atheist" debate is a diverting sideshow to what the pope actually said, which cannot possibly be equated with associating nazis with atheism.

 

Of course the pope would sound an alert about the potential dangers of a godless society, it's his job after all, but the atheists seems a pretty easily-provoked bunch if they start screaming that the pope called them nazis. Quite simply, he didn't.

 

The spokesman for the C0fE was asked for a quote about what the pope said and volunteered:

 

"I don't think Stephen Fry is a nazi"

 

which is missing the point by a country mile.

 

 

If you tell me what points I've ignored I'm happy to respond, the debate so far has been ill-served by some truly crappy media reporting.

[plekhanov]

Read the above again, noting the words in bold. Secularism & Nazism are the words used. Not atheists.

 

Seems you're linking secularism, atheism & nazis.

Oh really?

 

"Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.

 

I also recall the regime's attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives.

 

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a 'reductive vision of the person and his destiny' (Caritas in Veritate, 29)."

[Grahame]

Untrue. Christians were not systematically persecuted in Nazi Germany. There were plenty of Christian victims of the Nazis, but their Christianity was incidental, not the motivation.

 

I'm sure that site won't be biased at all:rolleyes:

 

HITLER’S ANTI-CHRISTIAN ACTIVITIES

 

Hitler and party spokesmen, among them, Alfred Rosenberg, Goebbels, Rudolf Hess, and Goring were determined to rid Germany of Christianity. They removed the Old Testament from the Bible along with Paul's Epistles because of their Jewish authorship stating that Nazi and Christian beliefs were “incompatible” owing to the fact that Christianity came out of Judaism.

 

Martin Bormann, the second most powerful official in the Nazi Party after 1941, argued that Nazi and Christian beliefs were “incompatible,” primarily because the essential elements of Christianity were “taken over from Judaism.” Bormann's views were shared by Hitler who criticized the Christian ideals of meekness and guilt on the grounds that they repressed the violent instincts necessary to prevent inferior races from dominating Aryans. They held that Christ had been a blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan.

 

Their intention was to ultimately replace Christianity with a racist form of warrior paganism and Protestant and Catholic parents were pressurised into removing their children from religious classes and were to register them for ideological instruction instead. The children began their meals by thanking the Fuehrer and not God for their food.

 

In the Nazi schools charged with training Germany's future elite, Christian prayers were replaced with Teutonic rituals and sun-worship ceremonies. The Bible was replaced with Indian (Hindu) and German literature and their ceremonies became a sequence of nationalistic sermons, German classical music, and political hymns. The Christian cross was replaced with a “crooked” pagan cross called the swastika which is the symbol of the sun. Its use was abandoned in Pagan magical circles because of Hitler’s association with it.

 

Catholic newspapers were banned and so were young peoples groups. While this was happening to the Roman Catholics Hitler, Goring, and other Nazi minded clerks were organising the Protestant churches into a government dominated Reich’s church known as "The German Faith Movement." Before Hitler began his "Final Solution" against the Jews he first arrested eight hundred pastors and more were rounded up in 1938 until the Christian church (Lutheran) in Germany ceased to exist.

 

At the same time Hitler needed the support of the Roman Catholic Church and in 1934 he concluded a concordat that granted the Roman Catholic Church more rights in the German Reich than had ever been granted before. This was viewed by Hitler as his way into the circle of internationally recognized political powers.

 

The German Faith Movement was anti-Marxist, anti-Semitic and the traditional Christian doctrine of the brotherhood of man was totally rejected. The German Faith Movement was led by a fanatical Nazi called Joachim Hossenfelder. Hitler became the Reichs-bishop while Mueller became the titular head of the old Lutheran Church.

 

At a meeting at the Berlin Sport Palace Nazi leaders demanded that pastors who refused to accept the new doctrines would be dismissed, tortured and killed. The uproar was so loud and prolonged that Mueller had to forbid further political activity on the part of the German Faith Movement while a third of the true clergymen joined the Pastors’ Emergency Association, founded by Niemoeller to range themselves against the heresy.

 

Hitler said in Mein Kampf "My feeling as a Christian (the liar) points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers (his disciples were Jews), recognized them for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.

 

 

(Jesus never fought against his disciples, Jews-or anyone else, Hitler was a liar through and through.)

[Grahame]

That is most dishonest of you.

 

Jehovahs Witnesses are one specific small sect of Christianity, and yes, they were persecuted extremely harshly.

 

However the other x million Christians in Germany were not systematically persecuted in the same manner as the JWs and the Jews (and gypsies, gays etc.) were. That is simply not true at all.

 

Christians were persecuted in their thousands, Hitler had a time line and he put his plan into action after he had got what he wanted from the Catholic Church. If He had set about murdering Christians earlier the Catholic Church would never have agreed to his demands.

[spindrift]

We're not used to Germans coming here to talk about the war, so many people have jumped to entirely the wrong conclusion about Pope Benedict's attack on atheist extremism.

 

 

He didn't mean us.

 

 

He didn't even mean Richard Dawkins.

 

 

He was talking about the Nazis, who, he said

 

"wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live."

 

 

It is the representatives of what he calls

 

"the more aggressive forms of secularism"

 

which

 

"no longer value or even tolerate … the traditional values and cultural expressions [of Christianity]".

 

 

It is difficult to judge to what extent this is a large-scale movement.

 

 

 

The astonishing variety and force of invective thrown at the pope and his church in much of the media over the last week must certainly, some of it, come from people who would like to drive religious faith out of public life.

 

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2010/sep/16/pope-benedict-xvi-secularism

 

At the same time, it's hard not to suppose that in some of this the Roman Catholic church is standing as a proxy for Islam, which is certainly a great deal more unpopular.