Sam Harris

If Hitler hadnt learnt his anti-semtism from fundemental christians then the holocaust may never have taken place…The Christians taught the west how to hate the jews…that is their legacy to us…and let no one trick you into blieving Hitler was an atheist…if anything he was a Christian…a roman catholic one at that…and the Roman Catholic Church never excommunicated him.  In fact after the Nazi States collapse-they protected the mass murderers and allowed them to escape justice.  Most of the SS where practising Christians, including the ones that pushed children into the gas chambers.

Mephistophelean - 03 April 2011 02:14 PM

If Hitler hadnt learnt his anti-semtism from fundemental christians then the holocaust may never have taken place…The Christians taught the west how to hate the jews…that is their legacy to us…and let no one trick you into blieving Hitler was an atheist…if anything he was a Christian…a roman catholic one at that…and the Roman Catholic Church never excommunicated him.  In fact after the Nazi States collapse-they protected the mass murderers and allowed them to escape justice.  Most of the SS where practising Christians, including the ones that pushed children into the gas chambers.

Many, if not all, the people running the concentration camps in the USSR were atheists. However, I do not think that you and your fellow atheists would like atheism to be grouped in with those murders as you seem to group Christianity in with SS murderers. One of the most influential theologians in Christian theology today is the late Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He resisted Nazism to the point that he and his friends and family were nearly successful at assassinating Hitler. He was eventually executed by the Nazis for this. I am studying biblical theology and one teacher began every class by reading an excerpt from one of Bonhoeffer’s books. Furthermore,  Jesus Christ was a first century Jew who is the epitome of non-violence such that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. give him significant credit for influencing their non-violent movements. Also, all the first Christian believers were Jewish including all of the apostles. You should recognize the influence that ethics derived from evolution had on Hitler. The first step of the holocaust was actually to kill thousands of mentally challenged people to keep them from corrupting the German gene-pool. This a direct quote from Mein Kampf (taken from Project Gutenberg’s online text),

“If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the
stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle
with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout
hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher
stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.”

I have no problem with the theory of evolution, but I think you are not presenting a fair picture of the cause of the Holocaust.

We have both religion and atheism used to commit genocide. Perhaps rather than blame religion or atheism we should look at some similarities. In both cases people thought they were right and believed they were doing something that served a greater good. Funny how people will kill for a paradise. When I say ‘right’ I mean the kind of absolute right that makes a person very dangerous.

What is easier for me to understand as an agnostic is that the stupid, selfish and violent aspects of human nature comes from humans evolving in groups and also in competition with other groups. It makes sense that ideology is actually subsumed by more fundamental human nature. In other words there may be many types of rationale that excites and agitates one group of primates into collective action against another.

rhp567 - 18 April 2011 02:34 AM

We have both religion and atheism used to commit genocide. Perhaps rather than blame religion or atheism we should look at some similarities. In both cases people thought they were right and believed they were doing something that served a greater good. Funny how people will kill for a paradise. When I say ‘right’ I mean the kind of absolute right that makes a person very dangerous.

What is easier for me to understand as an agnostic is that the stupid, selfish and violent aspects of human nature comes from humans evolving in groups and also in competition with other groups. It makes sense that ideology is actually subsumed by more fundamental human nature. In other words there may be many types of rationale that excites and agitates one group of primates into collective action against another.

I don’t think Christianity teaches that I have a right to kill or cause violence to anyone. Almost every Christian theologian today sees the center of Christianity in Jesus Christ, who is the epitome of non-violence as he allowed himself to be subject to a cruel death.

In both cases people thought they were right and believed they were doing something that served a greater good. Funny how people will kill for a paradise. When I say ‘right’ I mean the kind of absolute right that makes a person very dangerous.

It feels like you are just scapegoating different groups now. To believe that you are absolutely right seems necessary if you are going to risk your life for anything. If you observe someone molesting a child, do not you have the absolute right to try to stop it, and are absolutely right in doing so?

First of all I never said atheists havnt committed cruel deeds, however they have never been done in the name of atheism…Stalin murdered millions of his own people based on his political beliefs and his own insecurities in relation to holding onto political power.

By claiming that Stalin killed in the name of his atheism is a total distortion of historical facts.  Atheism itself isn’t a philosophy, or belief system which people fight and die for. It is only a view of disbelief in the existence of a god or gods.

If someone is murdered by an atheist that dosn’t mean being murdered by atheism.  However when people kill because they think it is ordained by their God, then their brand of Religion has killed.

We just need to look at what is happening in Uganda. Under the Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009, if passed, will mean
Gays can face the death penalty if caught practising their homosexuality.  Their family and friends who did not inform the police about their homosexual activity can face up to seven years in prison.  All this is being done in the name of CHRISTIANITY.  In fact American evangelicals have travelled to Uganda over the years to whip up anti-gay feelings.  It dosn’t matter whether you agree or dissagree with this disgusting Bill.  It dosn’t change the fact that it is religiously inspired.  And this ain’t even touching the issues concerning The Lords Resistance Army’s attempt at establishing a Uganda based firmly on the Ten Commandments.  Christians ARE being taught to hate in religions name!  There is nothing you can say that can change that fact.  And I’m sure you want to! 

Going back to Hitler and the Holocaust.  Hitler DID learn his anti-semitism from people like Karl Lueger, the Austrian Mayor of Viena and founder and leader of Christian Social Party.  Hitler NEVER learnt to hate Jews from atheists.  And as point to note he never recinded his membership of the Roman Catholic Church and that same Church NEVER EXCOMMUNICATED him for his genocide.

The Nazi Party’s programme firmly states:
We demand liberty for all religious denominations in the State, so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the morality and moral sense of the German race. The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not bind itself in the matter of creed to any particular confession. It combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us, and is convinced that our nation can achieve permanent health from within only on the principle: the common interest before self-interest. 

Hitler also stated:
‘My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews 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. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…. And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people…. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues ‘and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited’
(speech in Munich. 12 April 1922)

And there are many other statements concerning Christianty. 

And another FACT is that the two main Christian churches in Germany supported him. A little research shall show this.  Hitler claimed that he was doing Jesus’s work. Whether you believe this or not is irrelevant to the known facts!  Yes a handful of Christians did rebel against Hitler and his NSDAP, does not mean that the Christian Churches rebelled also.  NO they forbidded it.  I would argue that people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Helmuth James Graf von Moltke would still have organised resistance against the Nazis whether they where theists or not. 

So again I make the same statement:  Hitler learnt to hate the Jews after listening to anti-semitic speeches by Christians and and this learnt hatred led directly to the death camps at Sobibor, Triblinka and Auschwitch, to name a few.

As for Christ…Before you swallow the New Testament stories, it would be advisable to read Bart D Ehrmans MISQUOTING JESUS.  It shows up huge holes in the Jesus story.

Mephistophelean - 18 April 2011 07:27 PM

Hitler also stated:
‘My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews 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. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…. And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people…. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues ‘and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited’
(speech in Munich. 12 April 1922)

And there are many other statements concerning Christianty.

You cannot be serious Mephistophelean, you trust a public speech from hitler as his gospel truth? His speeches were all propaganda. What you have to do is read books from those who knew him personally, such as Albert Speer, who chronicles quote after quote from hitler and others who quoted him as harshly negative towards Christianity, a darwinist who was eventually going to replace Christianity with a state religion based on arian nonsense.

It really dosnt matter if he was a christian or not…(Which as someone who has studied him since I was a teenager, I believe that he was a Christian of the old school) His preachings of hate were directed against the Jews and other enemies, real or imaginary… The fact is that he preached to a Christian nation who listened and responded.  It was Christian men after all who gassed tens of thousand of men, women and children in the gas chambers, it was Christian men who served in his Einsatzgruppen and it was Christian men who helped formulate the Nuremberg Laws.  It was the Christian churches that celebrated his birthday and told their congregation not to oppose Hitler’s politics and it was the Catholic Church who assisted many of Hitler’s mass murderers escape justice after the war.

The Christians did play their part in Hitle’sr anti-semitic polices…To try and state that isnt so is a stupid thing to claim.  If one studies Christian anti-semitism throughout the centuries one can understand how Hitler got his warpped ideas in the first place. 
(try reading Father, Forgive Us. by Fred Wright) The church was forced to tone-down controversial issues as time moved on because society was becoming more secular in nature…not because it wanted to.  If we hadnt become more secular, im convinced we would still be locking gay people up and listening to preachers preach the age old hatreds about theJews.