Pope Associates Atheism With Nazis

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Pope associates atheism with Nazis Sep 17, 2010
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11332515

A speech in which the Pope appeared to associate atheism with the Nazis has prompted criticism from humanist organisations.

However, the Catholic Church has moved to play down the controversy, saying the Pope knew "rather well what the Nazi ideology is about".

Humanists have said the comments were a "terrible libel" against non-believers.

In his address, the Pope spoke of "a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society".

He went on to urge the UK to guard against "aggressive forms of secularism".

The Pope made his remarks in his opening address to the Queen at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh.

He said: "Even in our own lifetimes 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.

"As we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th 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 a reductive vision of a person and his destiny."

'Highly political'

A statement from the British Humanist Association said the Pope's remarks were "surreal".

It said: "The notion that it was the atheism of Nazis that led to their extremist and hateful views or that it somehow fuels intolerance in Britain today is a terrible libel against those who do not believe in God.

"The notion that it is non-religious people in the UK today who want to force their views on others, coming from a man whose organisation exerts itself internationally to impose its narrow and exclusive form of morality and undermine the human rights of women, children, gay people and many others, is surreal."

The German-born Pope has previously spoken of his time growing up under the "monster" of Nazism.

He joined the Hitler Youth at 14, as was required of young Germans at the time.

Late on in WWII he was drafted into an anti-aircraft unit in Munich.

He deserted the German army towards the end of the war and was briefly held as a prisoner-of-war by the Allies in 1945.

The Pope's conservative, traditionalist views were intensified when teaching at the University of Bonn in the 1960s he was said to be appalled at the prevalence of Marxism among his students.

In his view, religion was being subordinated to a political ideology that he considered "tyrannical, brutal and cruel".

He would later be a leading campaigner against liberation theology, the movement to involve the Church in social activism, which for him was too close to Marxism.

-- Fri Sep 17, 2010 5:15 am --

:evil:

I'm firmly on the side of humanists on this one. It is offensive for the Pope to make remarks like that.

-- Fri Sep 17, 2010 5:37 am --

Let's take a look at the positive influence of the Catholic Church in the Philippines...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1709313.stm - Abortion on the rise in the Philippines

http://reproductiverights.org/en/docume ... n-abortion - Fact sheet on abortion in the Philippines

Other religions besides Catholicism also influence women's bodies, reproductive rights, and mental and physical health. Yeah, atheism is terrible for society! :evil: Of course a woman should be pregnant every other year until she hits menopause. What a shame that women want to access birth control so that they don't conceive and don't have to kill their fetuses or newborn babies, or abandon them, or end up dead themselves from a botched illegal abortion. Let's have many Catholic run orphanages filled with abandoned children that they can abuse their power over. Sorry, but religions trying to force women to have as many babies as possible is about the power of having more members of their faith on this planet compared to other religions, not about the welfare of women, families or society.

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Re: Pope associates atheism with Nazis Sep 17, 2010
On Christianity and Nazism - there is also the inconvenient issue of the German Christian Church of the Nazis:

shafique wrote:
Lutheran Nazism


In 1932 the Protestant church came under the influence of the Nazi movement called "German Christians" (Bewegung Deutscher Christen, also called "Stormtroopers of Jesus") and lead by the founder, Rev. Joachim Hossenfelder. This movement represented Hitler's "Positive Christianity" views and lawfully encoded into the Nazi "constitution." Hitler tried to force regional Protestant churches to merge into the Protestant Reich Church. Protestant churches throughout Germany participated in the movement but Hitler's union of the churches failed because of in-church bickering. Only one visibly apparent church remains in Germany that shows distinctive markings of Positive Christianity, a reminder of how Christianity and Nazism mixed together during the Nazi regime.

http://sites.google.com/site/apostolica ... utheranism
..
This picture from the pulpit of Jesus with a Nazi soldier makes the point quite well:

Image
..

Image

This is of Adolf himself, holding a stormtrooper's hat. It comes from the font where babies are baptised.


philosophy-dubai/christian-terrorists-t37925-120.html#p322679
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Re: Pope associates atheism with Nazis Sep 17, 2010
Nazi Germany celebrated Christmas without Christ with the help of swastika tree baubles, 'Germanic' cookies and a host of manufactured traditions, a new exhibition has shown.

The way the celebration was gradually taken over and exploited for propaganda purposes by Hitler's Nazis is detailed in a new exhibition.

Rita Breuer has spent years scouring flea markets for old German Christmas ornaments.

She and her daughter Judith developed a fascination with the way Christmas was used by the atheist Nazis, who tried to turn it into a pagan winter solstice celebration.

Selected objects from the family's enormous collection have gone on show at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne.

'Christmas was a provocation for the Nazis - after all, the baby Jesus was a Jewish child,' Judith Breuer told the German newspaper Spiegel. 'The most important celebration in the year didn't fit with their racist beliefs so they had to react, by trying to make it less Christian.'

The exhibition includes swastika-shaped cookie-cutters and Christmas tree baubles shaped like Iron Cross medals.

The Nazis attempted to persuade housewives to bake cookies in the shape of swastikas, and they replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas, who traditionally brings German children treats on December 6, with the Norse god Odin.

The symbol that posed a particular problem for the Nazis was the star, which traditionally decorates Christmas trees.

'Either it was a six-pointed star, which was a symbol of the Jews, or it was a five-pointed star, which represented the Soviets,' Breuer said. It had to go.

In the 1930s, the Nazis tried to change the ideology of Christmas. But when World War II started, the focus became more practical.

Civilians were ordered to send Christmas cards to the soldiers at the front. There were also tips on how to make Christmas cookies in the face of food shortages.

In 1944-1945, the Nazis tried to reinvent the festival once again as a day to commemorate the dead, in particular fallen soldiers. 'By then nobody felt like celebrating,' Breuer explained.

Happily, the German people mostly ignored the clumsy propaganda efforts and continued with the same traditions as before.

The is a legacy of the Nazi Christmas. The wartime version of the traditional Christmas carol 'Unto us a time has come' is still sung. 'The Nazis took out the references to Jesus and made it into a song about walking through the snow,' Breuer said.

Surprisingly, German churches put up little opposition to the Nazification of Christmas. 'You would have expected them to protest loudly and insist that it was a Christian festival,' said Breuer. 'But instead they largely kept quiet, out of fear.'



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldne ... z0zkTajICL
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Re: Pope Associates Atheism With Nazis Sep 17, 2010
Jehova's Christians ban Christmas and are still Christians, as the pics and article in my post showed - Hitler tried to regulate the Church and encoded Christianity into the Nazi constitution.

This is a tough one for the young one to try and explain away! (but nice attempt with the Daily Mail article.. close but no cigar).

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Re: Pope Associates Atheism With Nazis Sep 17, 2010
Interesting links from both of you.

Hitler was not guided by any religious moral beliefs or humanist moral beliefs. He was devoid of any common human morals!
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Re: Pope associates atheism with Nazis Sep 17, 2010
^You're right, Hitler's use of religion was cynical and hardly Christian - and the general comment applies to all those who misuse religion for violence etc. However, he still had Bishops of the Reich and an official Nazi church etc - and yet he advocated the slaughter of those who shared Jesus' religion and blood - the Jews!!

philosophy-dubai/christian-terrorists-t37925-135.html#p323270

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Re: Pope associates atheism with Nazis Sep 17, 2010
Jehova's Christians ban Christmas and are still Christians, as the pics and article in my post showed - Hitler tried to regulate the Church and encoded Christianity into the Nazi constitution.


I can't say I see a connection to replacing Christmas with the occult and Jehovah's Witnesses.

Having a JW family as neighbors, I don't remember them celebrating Pagan holidays around Christmas time.

In reality though, the article was clear that the Nazis were intent on de-Christianizing Christmas, not banning it because of their interpretation of Christianity.

But perhaps you saw some insightful wisdom in your analogy that no one else does?

and yet he advocated the slaughter of those who shared Jesus' religion and blood - the Jews!!


No he didn't. He advocated the removal of impure blood from the Nordic peoples. Theoretically, one could convert to Judaism and ideally they would have been left alone.

Not that this exonerates the Nazis, but the decision to outright exterminate Jews wasn't decided upon until the Wannsee Conference.

However, he still had Bishops of the Reich and an official Nazi church etc


That's probably because Germany, like a number of European states to this day, never officially separated religion from the state.

The doesn't change the fact that what the Pope said was correct - the Nazi party was hard secular and atheistic leaning.
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Re: Pope associates atheism with Nazis Sep 17, 2010
A simple question eh - were the German Christian worshippers and Bishops etc of the Nazi church atheists or Christians?

Is it not the case that Hitler enshrined in the Nazi constitution what he called 'Positive Christianity'?

One article about the Nazis taking Christ out of Christmas (and therefore agreeing with JWs that it is a pagan festival) doesn't change the fact there was indeed a Nazi Church, with Nazi bishops and worshippers (or does it?)

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Re: Pope associates atheism with Nazis Sep 17, 2010
JW wouldn't celebrate Odin. The Nazis did.

The Nazis had no problems with using a regional ethnic/national religion (the Norse gods) to replace an alien religion - Christianity.

I'm careful to make this point because Nazi ideology wasn't Paganistic, it was secular. But in this case, their ideology clearly favored a 'Germanic' religion over a non-Germanic religion.

As for 'Positive' Christianity, the actual implementation of this 'form' of Christianity would hardly have been favored by any Christian priest or pastor.

It involved the removal of the entire Hebrew Bible, the Pauline epistles, and three of the four Gospels.

Although, in all fairness, it would seem that would contradict my previous claim that, theoretically, the Nazis would not have had any qualms with someone of 'pure' Nordic stock converting to Judaism seeing as how the Nazis advocated the excision of the entire Hebrew Bible from the Christian Bible.

But I think that was for obvious practical reasons than for any dislike for the religion of Judaism.
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Re: Pope associates atheism with Nazis Sep 17, 2010
The pope should know he was Nazi once himself ! :shock:
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Re: Pope Associates Atheism With Nazis Sep 18, 2010
Don't look here if you are a happy Catholic - http://crispian-jago.blogspot.com/2010/ ... n-hat.html
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Re: Pope associates atheism with Nazis Sep 18, 2010
shafique wrote:A simple question eh - were the German Christian worshippers and Bishops etc of the Nazi church atheists or Christians?


I couldn't see an answer to this simple question. Perhaps the answer 'of course the Nazi worshippers and Bishops of the Nazi German church were Christians and not atheists' was too obvious an answer.

I haven't seen any evidence that the Nazi Christians celebrated Odin in the Martin Luther Church (pictured above), for example. In fact, your argument is substantially no different from those who say that Easter is actually a pagan festival of spring that has been adapted to Christianity - with even the name Easter deriving from the goddess Eostre, the chicks and eggs being symbols of fertility etc - many Christians will argue that Easter is not really of pagan origins, just like the Christian Nazis would have denied they are worshipping Odin in their churches at Christmas. (Indeed some argue that Christmas itself is originally a pagan mid-winter festival)

So, is this nothing more than loon smoke and mirrors when faced with the fact that official Nazi constitution included Hitler's 'Positive Christianity'?


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Re: Pope associates atheism with Nazis Sep 18, 2010
I guess you dropped your JW analogy after you realized how dumb it was.

I'm pretty sure any Pagans/Odinists alive during the Third Reich would have been quite happily surprised with the Nazi decision to celebrate Odin in place of Jesus during Christmas:
She and her daughter Judith developed a fascination with the way Christmas was used by the atheist Nazis, who tried to turn it into a pagan winter solstice celebration.


The Nazis attempted to persuade housewives to bake cookies in the shape of swastikas, and they replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas, who traditionally brings German children treats on December 6, with the Norse god Odin.
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Re: Pope Associates Atheism With Nazis Sep 18, 2010
You and your loon fanciful theories again - JW analogy still applies, they consider themselves Christians and don't celebrate Christmas.. but that is moot.

I simply asked about the Nazi Christian church - their bishops and worshippers - are you seriously saying that these guys were atheists?

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Re: Pope Associates Atheism With Nazis Sep 18, 2010
Come on eh, just spit it out. They were not atheists!
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Re: Pope Associates Atheism With Nazis Sep 18, 2010
shafique wrote:You and your loon fanciful theories again - JW analogy still applies, they consider themselves Christians and don't celebrate Christmas.. but that is moot.


Stupidity knows no bounds.

JW's not celebrating Christmas has no connection to replacing Christ with Odin.

This doesn't even need an explanation.

Come on eh, just spit it out. They were not atheists!


That point isn't if individual Nazis were atheist or not. Some high ranking Nazis were atheist, others apatheist, still others were Christian or members of the occult.

Nazi ideology was completely secular as was shown by their plan to take Christianity out of Christmas and replace it with Odinism.

If Germany was completely Pagan, then the Nazis would have officially promoted Odinism instead of having to force Christianity to fit their ideals by lopping off major portions of the Bible - the entire Old Testament, three out of the four gospels and most of the epistles.

Good grief.

http://books.google.com/books?id=YWUxDK ... nn&f=false
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Re: Pope Associates Atheism With Nazis Sep 19, 2010
The problem, young loon, is that the Nazi constitution included Hitler's 'Positive Chrsitianity' and there was an official Nazi church, the Protestant Reich Church , along with Bishops and worshippers (and not forgetting the church pictured above).

No amount of smoke and mirrors about Nazi's changing Christmas will obscure this fact. JW are another Christian group who also have differing views about Christmas from Pauline Christians (that it IS indeed originally a pagan festival, for example).

The Nazi Christian (Protestant Reich) church certainly wasn't atheistic. However, I totally agree that the religion of Jesus has been changed to suit the political views of those in power - not least by the Nazi Christians who used the Bible to justify their anti-semitism. They weren't the first Christians to do so.

Anyway, we seem to have no disagreement that the Nazis did in fact have a Nazi Christian church and that they changed some teachings to fit their ideology. As the good book says, 'there's nothing new under the sun'

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Re: Pope associates atheism with Nazis Sep 19, 2010
The problem, young loon, is that the Nazi constitution included Hitler's 'Positive Chrsitianity' and there was an official Nazi church, the Protestant Reich Church , along with Bishops and worshippers (and not forgetting the church pictured above).


That isn't a problem. The Nazis would have promoted Odinism if the vast majority of Germany's population still clung on to their ancestral faith.

No amount of smoke and mirrors about Nazi's changing Christmas will obscure this fact.


So why would they replace Jesus with Odin?

JW are another Christian group who also have differing views about Christmas from Pauline Christians (that it IS indeed originally a pagan festival, for example).


I don't think someone who doesn't know basic Christian theology should drop words like 'Pauline' Christianity as if your mentioning of the word has something to do with Jehovah's Witnesses.

That's like dropping big words into a post to make you sound more intellectual but managing to use them incorrectly.

For the record, JWs use the Bible (which offers different translations of certain verses) as mainstream Christians use in addition to another holy book.

So, I'm at a loss at your apparently ignorant claim that JW's reject the Pauline epistles.

Don't worry, you probably don't know what you're talking about either and so are just as lost.

The Nazi Christian (Protestant Reich) church certainly wasn't atheistic.


Nor were the Islamic organizations the Baath party supported in the nineties while Saddam was in power.

Are you really that obtuse?

However, I totally agree that the religion of Jesus has been changed to suit the political views of those in power


Blah blah blah, blah blah blah.
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Re: Pope Associates Atheism With Nazis Sep 24, 2010
Glad we seem to agree that the Protestant Reich church was not atheistic - I rest my case.

(You may want to re-read what I said about JW's views on Christmas vs the views of Pauline Christians. BTW - do you disagree with the JWs that Christmas is actually originally a pagan mid-winter festival??)

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