Originally Posted by Joe K.
Phoney Darwinism?
People are animals. We emerged out of a struggle in which the strong survived and the weak died. That is what life is all about. Traditional ethics are meaningless and have no basis.
Maybe Hitler understood Darwin better than you.
Not precisely true. Do weak animals and plants exist? Yes, they do. Strength isn't necessarily fitness.
Chemistry is also inherently devoid of ethics, but somehow we don't point to the study of chemistry as a road to immorality.
Traditional ethics did in fact arise due to natural selection, so how about that?
No, traditional ethics in Europe arose out of a Christian context. Animals know only a struggle for survival. You speculation about the origin of ethics is only that - sepculation, not fact.
Chemistry doesn't teach we are only animals and that the strong defeating the weak is the origin of our being.
Chemistry is demonstrable fact. Darwinian origins are not.
Originally Posted by Joe K.
Right, it works, so who cares about ethics? You and Hitler have something in common. Just kill all of those weak and inferior people who have no business living.
Darwinism is in essence heartless and cruel.
It only appears that way because nature is indifferent. Yet among animals, altruism exists. Ancient human societies that predated modern religion also cared for their sick and infirm. You should look into the evolution of altruism, it negates your whole premise.
So were the Nazis indifferent to sick and dying people, they thought that was natural, and it is, if Darwinism is true.
If altruism exists among animals, that does not show we got it from them. It shows we havea common creator.
Ancient societies also had some kind of religion. They did not teach that we are nothing but animals, like your guru Darwin.
Your speculations about the origins of altruism are sheer imagination, without a particle of scientific fact or laboratory evidence. I hope you won't quote that pompous windbag Daniel Dennet now.
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Wilhelm Kube
He remained an active Christian despite being a zealous Nazi, did he believe in the Trinity? That Jesus rose from the dead after dyingas a sacrifice for the sins of the world? That there would be a day of judgment and liars and murderers would be cast into hell? That people needed to rpeent of their sins and be saved by Christ? That they needed to follow the teachings of Christ, IF they REALLY BELIEVED he was the Son of God? and in 1932 he organized the list of candidates of the Faith Movement of the German Christians for the ordinary election of presbyters and synodals within the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union on 13 November that year. The German Christians then gained about a third of all seats in presbyteries and synods. Kube was elected as one of the presbyters of the congregation of Gethsemane Church in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg. The presbyters elected him from their midst as synodal into the competent deanery synod (German: Kreissynode; Berlin then comprised 11 deaneries altogether), and these synodals again elected him a member of deanery synodal board (German: Kreissynodalvorstand). When in 1933 the Nazis came to power he remained active in the German Christian movement which sought to "Nazify" the 28 Protestant church bodies in Germany.[1] For 23 July 1933 Hitler ordered an unconstitutional, premature re-election of all presbyters and synodals, with the German Christians now gaining 70-80% of the seats, so Kube could then further advance as head of the Berlin synod of the old-Prussian Church. Following the German conquest of Poland in 1939 his Nazi party domain was extended to include Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia and Reichsgau Wartheland.[wikipedia entry]
Your source doesn't explain to you about the Germanic Christians, who scrapped the Old Testament and most of the New, dismissed Paul as just a Jew, claimed christ was an Aryan, and said their chief duty was to follow Adolf Hitler.
It also doesn't tell you that many Protestant seminaries and chruches had been dead for decades, rejecting the bible as out of date mythology and preachinghuyman philsoophy dressed up as religious language.
Wikepedia can be useful as a starting point, but it is very far from the last word on any subject.
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Erich Koch
Koch was one of the few Nazi party leaders to consider himself a professing Christian.[8] see red quote above In addition to his political career, Koch was also the elected president of the East Prussian Protestant Church Synod.the bible says nothing of such church politics. [8] Although Koch gave preference to the Deutsche Christen who scrapped the Old Testament and taught Christ was an Aryan who did not die for the sins of mankind and rise again movement over traditional Protestantism, his contemporaries regarded Koch as a bona fide Christian, whose success in his church career could be attributed to his commitment to the Lutheran faith.[8]
His contemporaries? And when he stands before the judgment seat of Jesus Christ? "Friendship with the world is enmity with God. Whoseovere therefore will be the friend of the world is the enemy of God." It is a straight and narrow way that leads to eternal life and few there be that find it." These are just a couple of Christian teachings that neither you nor your source know anything about.
Koch officially resigned his church membership in 1943, but in his post-war testimony he stated: "I held the view that the Nazi idea had to develop from a basic Prussian-Protestant attitude and from Luther's unfinished Protestant Reformation".[8] Of course we know how honest heand all of those other Nazis were.On the 450th Anniversary of Luther's birth (10 November 1933), Koch spoke on the circumstances surrounding Luther's birthday. He implied that the Machtergreifung was an act of divine will and stated that both Luther and Hitler struggled in the name of belief.[8] [wikipedia entry]
Luther did not believe that the blond blue-eyed Aryans were the master race, that Germany should rule the world, that the Jews were a threat to German racial purity, or any such racial nonsense. Your sources say and know nothing about the emergence of modern secular racial anti-Semitism - or maybe they know about it but cover it up as their sole desire is to attack Christianity.
Allow me to quote from the conclusion of Steigmann-Gall's dishonest and incompetentbook:
It is apparent that certain presumptions about Nazism will never fully disappear. If for no other reason, Nazism serves as a useful foil, a way of gauging good and evil in the world. We are given to presuming that the things we dislike in modern society must have reigned triumphant in Nazism. In fact, what we suppose Nazism must surely have been about usually tells us as much about contemporary societies as about the past purportedly under review. The insistence that Nazism was an anti-Christian movement has been one of the most enduring truisms of the past 50 years. Hitler persecuted Christianity and despised itIt started as a preconception even before the movement gained power and only gained strength after the war. UntrueFor Western societies intent on rebuilding themselves after the worst devastation in world history and facing a new atheistic "menace", it could be argued that preserving this truism was a political necessity. The unprecedented polarity in which the postwar world found itself and the almost crusadelike mentality of the Western establishment at the time hardly provided a warm home for critical self-examination. hot air Exporing the possibility that many Nazis regarded themselves as Christian would have decisively undermined the myths of the Cold War and the regeneration of the German nation that the metaphor of the Stunde Null (zero hour) so precisely represented. Rubbish
Even as other conceptions of Nazism - either as capitalist smoke screen or medieval anachronism - have falled under the weight of empirical scrutiny, this particular preconception seems as firmly entrenched as ever. In one sense this is entirely understandable. Nearly all Western societies retain a sense of Christian identity to this day. !!!!!!! Many peoplelove to attack and slander Christianity today, inlcuding this sourceMoral boundries are still in some measure drawn by biblical stricture and other forms of Christian social ethic. That Nazism as the world-historical metaphor for human evil and wickedness should in some way have been related to Christianity can therefore be regarded by many only as unthinkable. Christianity is not just a theological system; it is also a byword for moral and upstanding behavior of any kind. This is especially evident in the contemporary United States, where acts regarded as immoral, improper, or unethical are sanctioned as un-Christian, no matter how Christian the perpetrator or the motivation. This pedestrian usage of the phrase "Christian," no less significant for being ill defined, serves to reinforce the theological argument that the evil of Nazism surely bears no relation to the beauty and magnificence of the Christian religion in whatever form.
This argument that Christianity is far removed from National Socialism is not based on such vague and subjective phenomena, but on the teachings of Christ and the essence of Christianity, about which S-G is completely ignorant.
But men of God have been responsible for numerous acts of aggression and murder born of prejudice. The Crusades, Inquisition, and Apartheid, to name only the most obvious historical episodes, are generally regarded as "un-Christian" moments, even though it was piously Christian men who devised them and carried them through. Were they following the teachings of Christ? No. And what about all of the evils commited by secularists? Of course in a Christian society, the best way to attack intolerance of any kind, most particularly antisemitism, is to argue that it is anti-Christian. However, although the ethical value of this stance is self-evident, when it is transposed onto historical analysis problems emerge. Moral instruction quickly becomes historical apologia. The desire to shape a morally upstanding populous too often implies the suppression of difficult truths. By detaching Christianity from the crimes of it's adherents, we create a Christianity above history, a Christianity whose teachings need not be ultimately investigated. Seen in this light, those who have committed such acts must have misunderstood Christianity, or worse yet purposefully misused it for their own ends. "Real Christians" do not commit such crimes. "Real Christianity" is about loving one's neighbor and the righteousness of the meek. But there is another side of the coin. As the theologian Richard Rubenstein puts it, "The world of the death camps and the society it engenders reveals the progressively intensifying night side of Judeo-Christian civilization. Civilization means slavery, wars, exploitation, and death camps. It also means medical hygiene, elevated religious ideas, beautiful art, and exquisite music." Christianity, in other words, may be the source of some of the same darkness it abhors. Christianity can be perverted, as can anything else.
There is a danger in depicting any aspect of Nazism as "normal." However, the corollary to such an admission is not that Nazism is somehow redeemable, but rather that it is much closer to us than we dare allow ourselves to believe.That's very true - of Darwinists The discovery that so many Nazis considered themselves or their movement to be Christian distortion of fact and lies. Not one leading Nazi stated belief inany of the fundamental teachings of Christianity. makes us similarly uncomfortable. But the very unpleasantness of this fact makes it all the more important to look it squarely in the face.
Pure lies. This is a serious distortion of what Naziism was all about. Hitler makes many references to Darwinian values and life as a struggle in Mein Kampf. S-G ignores all of this because he is motivated by a hatred of Christianity and wnats only to attack it.
He ignores the countless of millions of ordinary people who have really tried to follow the teachings of Christ and never harmed anyone, then points to evil murderes in the Inquisition etc. whom the bible plainly states will not go to heaven.
If I were you I would not waste my time with S-G's idiotic book, but read
The Scientific Origins of National Socialism by Daniel Gasman. He provesbeyonda shadow of a doubt that Ernst Haeckel, Germany's leading Darwinist before WWI, expressed many ideas identical to Hitler's. Life as a struggle, survival of the fittest, German supremacy, extermination of the sick and the weak - these ideas of a leading darwinist were identical to Hitler in a way that no teaching of the New Testament is. You might also read Richard weikart's book
From Darwin to Hitler. He documents how because of Darwinism many German intellectuals in the decades before Hitler came to see death as positive, normal, natural, and healthy, a means of weeding out the unfit.
