Do you deny that the hypothetical Nazi quotes are completely at odds with the Christianity or not? A simple yes or no will be a helpful start for your answer.
An atheist regime would have removed it immediately. As you indicated, there’s a strong possibility that (some of) the Nazis were prepared to move in an anti-Christian direction, but that still doesn’t make them atheists.
Not necessarily. We’re talking about controlling millions of people. make that move to early and it could blow up in your face.
“Prepared to move?” They were killing priests! by the thousands. The rabbis by the whatever number. So, if they seek to eradicate all the religionists, what are you left with? THAT makes them atheistic. Or is there another religion they were seeking to embrace after they had complete control?
You may want to look up that fallacy and read about it, as it does not apply to anything I’ve written.
Glad to help!
No, it’s exactly what you did. You said that, even if many of them claimed to be (and considered themselves to be) Christian, they didn’t really reflect the real thing. That’s what it means to commit that fallacy.
The Nazi regime was not atheist. Most of its members, including Hitler himself, were not atheists. They were, however, defeated by atheists, i.e. the military of Stalin’s USSR, which, after the purges in the 1930s, was pretty loyal and ideologically sound. Let’s not forget the role played by Enver Hoxha (speaking of state atheism), Josip Broz Tito (not nearly in the same league of criminality as the others, but he was an atheist and an Ally so I will include him), lots of others…
And, in Asia, consider Mao Tse-Tung! His loyal forces, and those of the mass-murderous Christian Chiang Kai-Shek, tied down and pushed back the bulk of the Japanese army, which itself was thoroughly Buddhist, Shinto, and worshipful of their Emperor.
It really does, though. Any person can call themself a christian, and you are not at liberty to gainsay that. Whatever you consider acceptable for christian adherence is of no consequence, believers run the full gamut from the nicest neighbors you can imagine to the most vile godwinizable pondscum mass-murderers, and you have absolutely no right to tell them that they are not christians just because they do not fit your definition. Hell, even Mormons can call themselves christians, and you can do nothing about it but grumble to yourself or look foolish (by excluding them).
Which is one of the main reasons behind atheism: christianity, the font of goodness and morality, has nothing to offer. There is some unsupportable nonsense about some alleged afterlife, but that only ends up making things worse (if you do nasty things, hey, jebus died for you, just make sure you are right with him before you leave this world).
Yes, yes, the standard line I see from religious people all the time. I’m well aware that despite the occasional attempts to pretend tolerance, the great majority of believers think atheists are all demonically evil monsters who should be killed, and would kill us if they thought they could get away with it.
Nonsense. Christianity is a religion that by nature tends strongly towards genocide and tyranny; its worldview screams out for it*. Christianity has always been about hatred and mass death; it reached to position it is in today precisely because its history is one of mass slaughter and conversion by force, not because it’s nice. The behavior of the Nazis was in perfect accord with the behavior of Christians throughout history; just better organized, with better weapons, and more people available to kill.
*Christianity is the One True Way that must be spread, those who disbelieve burn forever, those who believe go to paradise; claims that mean that tolerance leads to infinite torment as does allowing dissent. Tolerance, freedom and mercy are un-Christian in the extreme; it’s built into the core of the religion.
I can’t parse the double? triple? negative enough to answer yes or no, even if I were willing to accept your cheap rhetorical gambit to turn complex issues into binary ones.
Nazism is not obviously not completely at odds with Christianity, since most Nazis were Christians. Feel free to No True Scotsman this away, but realize that by so doing you’re reducing the world population of “true Christians” to about eight people – and given your hatemongering here, you’re not among them.
Although what that has to do with anything escapes me, since many large groups have overlapping memberships.
I hate to break this to you but the Germans were copying the US where we had been performing forced sterilizations on Native Americans and African-Americans or any other group that was deemed undesirable by the eugenics freaks. And even before compulsory sterilization came on strong in the US in the 1890’s there were the anti-miscegenation laws to prevent the spread of the Curse of Ham which was also used to justify the slave trade.
All of those people depended on their “understanding of science” but thats the thing about confirmation bias and attribution errors. You can find the “science” to support what ever you want to do if you ignore what science is.
Nonsense. You seem to be claiming that killing is something that (“proper”) Christians would never do, and that Christianity is all about loving thy neighbour, singing hymns and baking cakes for the church sale on Sundays. Clearly, as history shows us, this is not the case. Christianity, like most other religions, is ultimately about oppressing, converting, harassing or murdering those who haven’t yet been assimilated.
You seem to have the idea that “atheist” is somehow the opposite of “Christian”, specifically. That often comes up; I think it’s the arrogance of Christians assuming that theirs is the “natural” or default position for humans. Maybe “arrogance” is being unfair - I think many people have just been so immersed in Christian-centric culture that they can’t see that it is an artificial construct.
“However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.”
“They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.”
Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.—“Kill them all, the Lord will recognise His own.”
“Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex.”
And to get back to the question raised in the OP:
For some of us, it’s not that we think (despite those gruesome quotations) that all Christians are monsters or that Christianity inevitably leads to tyranny and massacre.
But–politically, I am a liberal; in terms of my views on religion, I am a secular humanist (as well as an atheist). I fear any religion or ideology which claims absolute certainty and universal truth and the possibility of achieving total perfection. Any such religion or ideology will be a grave danger to human liberty and human life if it is enabled to gain political power. I don’t want an Atheist State (a Stalinist State or a Maoist State) any more than I want a Theist State (a Salafist State or a Christian Reconstructionist State), or a theologically muddled quasi-Christian/neo-Pagan/Pseudoscientific Racialist/Evil Deist State (Nazism). Humans have shown a depressing tendency to commit horrible acts of violence and cruelty motivated by nothing more than tribalism and greed. Mix in the utter and complete certainty that you are doing the Will of God, or that History is on your side, or that you are fighting for the Revolution, or protecting the Aryan Race, and that anything you do is therefore acceptable because your end is the bringing about of total perfection, this will demonstrably bring out the worst impulses in human nature.
And I damned sure won’t accept that atheism in and of itself (as opposed to totalitarian systems, whether theistic or atheistic) is somehow “closer to” Nazism, or that, OK, sure, we’re not saying that all atheists are Hitler, I’m sure you personally are OK, buddy, but still, atheism does put us on the slippery slope to Hitler. That’s the sort of bullshit that makes atheists get all “obsessive” and “disdainful” and start “preaching”.
If there’s one answer that I feel most confident in giving to the OP’s question, it’s this: There’s no single reason that’s true of everyone. Different “obsessive atheists” are different.
I do find it psychologically plausible that at least a few individuals who are angry at the very idea of God have some displaced anger toward their fathers. I would never in a million years claim this was true of everyone.
Certainly, the truth or falsehood of a belief is a separate issue from the psychological reasons why people come to hold, insist on, or proselytize for that belief.
(Although, see William James on Pragmatism and deciding among “live options” based on the practical results of holding those beliefs.)
Do you still not get atheism? God is like a baseball bat. I see a bat, I think, “oh, a bat”, it evokes no emotion, just as “god” evokes no emotion in and of itself. When someone picks up the bat and bashes some else’s head in with it, I see that as uncalled for. This is analogous to how atheists view “the idea of god”, it is an idea, so what, can we just get people to stop misusing it?
Oh, and to the OP?
This thread shows why.
Who in this thread would you say is “obsessive”?
Another reason,
Because oppressed minorities NEVER gain equality through just shutting up and taking it from the oppressive majority. Silent oppressed minorities just get forced into model minority containers that the oppressors use to justify their actions against their group and others.
If the evil fairy godparentists would treat atheists as equals most of them would shut up.
And it would not surprise me if some believers used God the father as a substitute for a missing or distant real father. That would not make any arguments they have for their beliefs less valid.
Just as the psychological motivation of a writer or artist or scientist is irrelevant to the judgement of the quality of the work. We wouldn’t want to judge art or science as Capitalist art or Communist art or Jewish art, would we?
I have not read James, but my understanding of pragmatism from ethics is that you choose an ethical course based on practical results. I’m not aware that the truth or falsity of a statement about the world is judged this way. I think the philosopher Colbert went in that direction with his invention of the concept of truthiness.
As for the bigger picture, someone who keeps hammering on about 2+2 not equaling 5 might do it because of his upbringing, but he might also be doing it out of frustration.
Hmm.
I don’t do any preaching or “witnessing” in the sense of trying to get other people to become Christians. And yes, I know, to lots of folks that means I’m not really a Christian or as someone suggested above I’m afraid to lose an argument with some persuasive non-believer. Whatever.
Anyway, the only witnessing I suppose I do is to do the best I can to follow Christ’s teachings. If someone notices this is working out well for me and wants to know about it I’ll be glad to tell them but otherwise it doesn’t come up. There are a couple of people who have joined my church after such a conversation.
To many people on this thread and on this board, it is self-evident that Christianity is evil because so many Christians have done evil things. To me it’s equally apparent that correlation doesn’t equal causation, i.e. given the number of people who do evil and the number of Christians (almost everyone in the Western world up until fairly recently) and the power structure of Christianity, that correlation is not meaningful.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the individual lives of atheists have already proven me wrong–i.e. atheists are happier, more useful, more benevolent, smarter and less inclined to do shitty things.
If so, I’m far more likely to be convinced by observing and hearing about these effects than by being told I’m stupid and evil for being a Christian, or that if I’m not stupid and evil I’m really not a Christian.
I have a suggestion. We should open an atheist bar which we’d all go to. Then we could have a riot. 