Catholics for Hitler: Never Forget

Your recent posts and thoughts have all been very condescending to those who are religious. You make it sound like ANY person who is religious at all is incapable of sincere kindness or any good at all. That they are all hypocrites, ignorant, or just plain stupid. On the other hand, you also make it sound like the thought that any atheist could be a jerk or exhibit some of the same mannerisms you see and hate in religious folks is completely absurd.

Any person – white, black, catholic, jew, atheist, asian – is capable of meanness, insensitivity, hatred, etc. Also, those same people are capable of traits such as kindness, generosity and sincerity.

I feel like if you ever actually met some of your readers you might already have judged some of us and developed some assumptions of our character or intellect based simply on what we believe. All Atheists, Christians, Jews, Blacks, Whites, Catholics are not the same and don’t all believe the same. While I respect your belief’s and your opinion’s, I would ask that you might refrain from placing all Christians in one big lump of whacko’s simply because of what one group may have done in the past. And I’ll promise to do the same for my belief of atheist’s.

Hitler appealed to Christian religion in his early speeches before he rose to power, but was very consistent in his private conversations about religion being incompatible with National Socialism — and was very consistent about how he believed public speeches to be propaganda, a recurring theme in Mein Kampf.

He may not have been atheist — he seemed to believe in an inexorable march of fate that would exist outside of the bounds of human control, so that’s probably some sort of “theism lite” — but he wasn’t a Christian.

And yes, it’s scary what members of an organized religion is capable of. And those with no membership in organized religion are capable of exactly the same thing — by the mid-1930′s, active religion was as discouraged in the Nazi party as membership in the Party was increasingly prohibited by German bishops. There were plenty of atheists along with the theists in the Party. The point isn’t what individuals in an organization can do. It’s what the group as a whole aims toward. And the harsh, condemning speeches of the German archbishop — later Pope — against the Nazi party left no doubt as to that.