PZ Myers reposted a long, long list of quotes from Adolf Hitler, who Bill Donohue stupidly thinks was an atheist. Here are a couple of them, and then go over to Pharyngula for the rest:
“I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.”
[Adolph Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936]
“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 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 against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before 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. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. 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 today this poor people are plundered and exposed.”
[Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich on April 12, 1922, countering a political opponent, Count Lerchenfeld, who opposed antisemitism on his personal Christian feelings. Published in "My New Order", quoted in Freethought Today April 1990]
“I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so”
[Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941]
Sounds like a major league atheist to me.
Yeah. That’s it.
Seriously, PZ’s list is HUGE. Hitler was no atheist. He was a committed man of Catholic Christian faith.
Not to mention his slogan for women;
Children, kitchen. Church.
And the pope never excommunicated him.
For anyone who did not sleep through this part of history class in high school, it is pretty common knowledge that the Roman Catholic Church at the very least enabled Hitler to move forward in his early days, and for the rest of the War basically sat back and did nothing.
I think hitler would have said anything to get what he wanted, but much of the nazi hierarchy established a type of religion that was an amalgam of Nordic pagan mythology and magic and racist quackery. Himmler in particular was into this and had a remote castle with a ‘black sun’ (multi-armed swastika) on the floor where the SS held rituals and initiations. The History Channel has run “Nazis and the Occult’ periodically which covers all this. The point being, they were anything but atheists; but I’m sure Donahue thinks being a Pagan is even worse…..whatever.
As far as I know, Hitler considered himself a Catholic until his suicide. If anything the atheism was for public consumption and I never really saw anything atheistic about the whole Nazi programme.
Journal entry of Goebbels:
“The Führer is deeply religious, but deeply anti-Christian. He regards Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race. This can be seen in the similarity of religious rights. Both have no point of contact to the animal element, and thus, in the end, they will be destroyed.”
And Hitler said of Julian the Apostate:
“wie klar ein Mann wie Julian die Christen und das Christentum beurteilte”
How clearly a man like Julian had judged the Christians and Christianity
A Christian would not agree with Julian the Apostate’s criticisms of Christianity.
Pharyngulites (including Evan Hurst) exist to validate the work of Dunning and Kruger.
It should be noted that the Nazi military uniform belt buckles contained the inscription, “Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us).
http://www.nobeliefs.com/mementoes.htm
To reasonable people, this might seem problematic for the religious hypocrites that we contend with daily, but I think we often forget how immune these people are to both reason and the charge of hypocrisy. They know that they are wrong–they are simply lying. If you’ve ever watched a debate on evolution, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Those who challenge the theory always bring the same refuted arguments: carbon dating, human footprints in dinosaur fossils etc. But at the end of the day, they win if they can fill up all the time with charge after charge. And the religious right knows that the public’s attention span is far less formidable than those of academics.
Unfortunately, it’s not just Bill Donohue spreading the lie that Hitler was an atheist.
You’ll find this lie throughout the literature of Christian right wing literature – and those who use it do it expressly to point out the so-called dangers of atheism.
This works all too well for the uneducated who don’t know better, which sadly, is one main reason why the US is so far behind on civil rights.