EquALLity wrote: ↑Fri Sep 15, 2017 5:55 pm
Hitler wasn't an honest person.
Maybe not always, but despite the exaggerations of propaganda he was pretty upfront about most of the things he believed. He grew up Catholic, and he had a lot of attachment to some of the concepts in Christianity.
EquALLity wrote: ↑Fri Sep 15, 2017 5:55 pmJust because you don't believe in evolution doesn't mean you believe in god.
It pretty much does if he rejected human (or at least Aryan) evolution from common ancestors. He seemed to believe some account of combination of limited evolution and creation that involved the races being created, or perhaps Aryans being created? He didn't seem to like the idea that the human "races" were closely related as evolution indicates, which may have led to his skepticism of evolution of humans. He doesn't seem to have been as skeptical of the evolution of other animals and plants, but maybe that changed in his life.
His statements are pretty mixed, so it's hard to parse. Some of his beliefs probably also evolved over time (his skepticism of evolution was more recent than his more supporting statements).
Either way, it's very difficult to argue he was an atheist (although it's possible that he was for a short time, there doesn't seem to be any record of that), particularly given the trajectory of his beliefs. I don't think he ever identified as an atheist, and he could easily have done so in the many recorded private quotes we have without fear this would reach the public; he was often surrounded by atheists and it wasn't a big deal to be an atheist in the party.
wikipedia wrote:Samuel Koehne of Deakin University wrote in 2012: "Was Hitler an atheist? Probably not. But it remains very difficult to ascertain his personal religious beliefs, and the debate rages on." While Hitler was emphatically not "Christian" by the traditional or orthodox notion of the term, he did speak of a deity whose work was nature and natural laws, "conflating God and nature to the extent that they became one and the same thing..." and that "For this reason, some recent works have argued Hitler was a Deist".[49]
EquALLity wrote: ↑Fri Sep 15, 2017 5:55 pmAre you saying he is Christian? As in, in your opinion and definition, was he Christian?
If so, what evidence do you have of that?
I'm saying "Christianity" doesn't mean much.
He was baptized and confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church, he never publicly disavowed it (unclear if he did so privately), he was never excommunicated and he remained in good standing. By definition of the Catholic church, he would have been Catholic.
He called himself Christian, and while he advocated a form of Christianity which was very different from mainstream Christianity (which would have been grounds for excommunication, Rosenberg's book was banned by the Catholic church), he still held Jesus in high regard as a (anti-Jewish Aryan) hero figure (who was killed by the Jews) and promoted belief in an intervening or moral-giving god of some sort (providence, again). It's likely a case of him reading into the Scripture what he wanted to see. It's too simplistic to claim this was a fabrication without any link to Hitler's actual beliefs; people aren't black and white cartoon villains, even Hitler. People want to see themselves as genuine, and particularly as his power grew and he had less of a reason to exaggerate or play down his beliefs it's very likely Hitler believed most of what he was promoting.
His beliefs in that respect were at least as "Christian" as those of Mormons.
EquALLity wrote: ↑Fri Sep 15, 2017 5:55 pmOr the Nazis created that to combine their ideology with popular religion to give themselves credibility... Seems more likely than Hitler being Christian based on his policies.
His public advocacy? He took away rights of Christians...
Most of this was Bormann and Goebbels' doing (who were atheists). Hitler didn't seem to agree with taking on the churches at that time.
Sure, he took away the rights of those who opposed him where he could, and it seems like he particularly hated what he saw as a Jewish corrupted pseudo-Christianity. His intention was to remove the Jewish corruption in Christianity and get at the real Jesus, as he saw him. There is no reason to believe that he didn't hold these beliefs about Jesus sincerely. Even for somebody like Hitler, you have to consider psychology and take them at their word on what they believe unless there's good evidence to indicate otherwise, and the evidence to the contrary seems scant. Everything in the faith he articulated was anti-Jewish, a warrior-Jesus and very compatible with his actions.
He could have been a deist and a Positive Christian in the way Jordan Peterson is a Christian, but that seems a little unlikely, and would have required him to hold virtually no supernatural beliefs which seems unlikely due to his belief in providence.
Looking at his strongest personal influences and mentors, what Dietrich Eckart and Alfred Rosenberg believed and advocated may be a better indication of Hitler's beliefs than his own personal statements which are more limited, or perhaps Hitler was more like Trump than anything else and just easily swayed from day to day depending on who talked to him last.
EquALLity wrote: ↑Fri Sep 15, 2017 5:55 pmYou said that his anti-Semitism was largely due to Christianity... Do you have evidence of this?
His feelings seem to have been rooted in his childhood, and the Catholic cultural antisemitism he grew up in. The Jews were the murderers of Jesus; there were a lot of religiously motivated justifications for hatred of them.
It's likely there were other factors too, particularly some racist writers of the era that fed into it and his close associates including neopagans like Rosenberg. I'm sure the echo chamber amplified and confirmed their beliefs.
EquALLity wrote: ↑Fri Sep 15, 2017 5:55 pmBtw... The first sentence of that Wikipedia article: "Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs have been a matter of debate; the wide consensus of historians consider him to have been irreligious and anti-Christian, while a small minority have claimed he was a Christian."
So... According to most historians, he was not a theist, let alone a Christian.
No, that doesn't say he wasn't a theist. Irreligious is different from atheistic. From a psychological perspective, that's probably why he created his own religion (or did so with Rosenberg), to codify and share his beliefs with others so he would have a religion he could belong to. I think he was looking for a compromise, both internally and externally. I don't think it was a very well calculated move of propaganda; if it were it would have been much better executed. The Nazis weren't that stupid. Positive Christianity was widely rejected and amounted to an epic fail in terms of propaganda. He would have been better advised to just pretend to agree with Christian scripture instead of rewriting it. It's not necessarily clear how much power Hitler had, though.
He was almost certainly something ranging from a deist (if he believed nothing of what he promoted in Positive Christianity) to a Christian (as much so as a Mormon, anyway).
It is correct that he was also anti-Christian, but only to certain denominations and beliefs within the church. Catholics are also anti-Christian (against protestants), and protestants against Catholics.
Hitler and Rosenberg saw the church as corrupted by the Jewish Torah in the old testament, and he believed it to be a lie created by the Jews to pollute Christianity or something like that. It doesn't take a whole lot of cherry picking to interpret it that way, so it wouldn't have even had to be overtly dishonest.
People don't like to believe somebody like Hitler could have been sincere... it's easier to believe in cartoon villains than the banality of evil and the complexity of human psychology. I think everything Hitler said and represented had some truth to it.
For example, he wasn't a vegetarian, but he was perhaps in the colloquial sense of eating little meat or perhaps just eating foul, and he was concerned with animal rights. He loved his dog, too. Even the most evil people can have some compassion in them.
EquALLity wrote: ↑Fri Sep 15, 2017 5:55 pmBlame Darwin?
They attribute Hitler's actions to his belief in
social Darwinism, a worldview that treats evolution as if it were a moral system...
He saw a struggle between races, and that rhetoric was useful (although misused), and probably came from some of the atheists in the party too.
Theist have long been trying to use Hitler as an argument against atheism or evolution, though, and it's very hard to parse out that propaganda and bias. There's nothing in evolution or even social Darwinism to support racist pseudoscience. I don't think we can say they correctly understood these concepts if they cared much about them at all.
EquALLity wrote: ↑Fri Sep 15, 2017 5:55 pmThere were other figures, but he was the leader, so it makes sense that he would go along with popular religion, as is explained in the Wikipedia quote.
That's speculation, though, and it kind of ignores human psychology and the fact that he spoke on so many other things. It seems like he was pretty upfront within the inner circle about a pragmatic resistance to taking on the church, but they did anyway; I think it's clear Hitler could be outvoted on things.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter.