German bishop: Atheism responsible for Nazis and mass murder

[charlou]

German bishop: Atheism responsible for Nazis and mass murder

A German bishop has told his Easter congregation that mass murder and other crimes committed by the Nazis are evidence that atheism is inhumane. His comments have caused outraged among German atheist organizations.

"Without God, everything is permitted."

With this famous quote from Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the bishop of the southern Bavarian town of Augsburg wanted to warn his congregation of what he sees as the dangers of atheism.

Bishop Mixa told churchgoers that a society without God was "hell on earth" and could result in bloody regimes such as those led by Adolf Hitler or the Soviet Union.

"Decades past have proven the inhumanity of atheism through the godless regimes of National Socialism and communism, with their penal camps, secret police and mass murder," he said.

"Wherever God is denied or fought against, there, humans and their dignity will also be denied and violated," he added.

Falsification of history

Rudolf Ladwig, the head of German atheist organization IBKA, said Bishop Mixa's comments were completely "untenable."

Ladwig told German news magazine Spiegel that Mixa's comments were part of a long-running strategy by the church to incorrectly rewrite its own historical dealings with fascism.

"Resistance from the church [to National Socialism] only came from individuals," he said.

Bishop Mixa was also criticized by Michael Schmidt-Salomon from the Giordano Bruno Foundation, a German organization in support of evolutionary humanism.

Schmidt-Salomon told Spiegel the argument that National Socialism was godless was a "grand falsification."

"Evidence shows that the majority of the Nazi elite considered themselves Christian," Schmidt-Salomon said.

A history of controversial comments

Bishop Mixa is known in Germany as being outspoken and has ruffled feathers on more than one occasion.

In just one example in February, Mixa compared the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis to the number of abortions over the past few decades.

He also upset politicians two years ago when he criticized government plans to expand childcare facilities in Germany.

Mixa said the plans used federal aid to entice women to entrust their children to state care shortly after birth, degrading women to "birthing machines."
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4173109,00.html

Does this fool think that if he covers his eyes we can't see him?

[klr]

...
Mixa said the plans used federal aid to entice women to entrust their children to state care shortly after birth, degrading women to "birthing machines."

Coming from a Catholic bishop, this comment is full to overflowing with irony ...

[Hermit]

...
Mixa said the plans used federal aid to entice women to entrust their children to state care shortly after birth, degrading women to "birthing machines."

Coming from a Catholic bishop, this comment is full to overflowing with irony ...

It's worse than that.

Bishop Mixa told churchgoers that a society without God was "hell on earth" and could result in bloody regimes such as those led by Adolf Hitler...

He must think everybody is a fucking idiot. The catholic church can at best be described as not uncooperative in relation to Hitler's aims and ambitions. The Konkordat of 1933 bought it off in that regard. More than that, though, official cooperation is plainly visible here:






The papal nuncio Vasallo di Torregrossa addressing the Führer: "I have not understood you for a long time. But I have made an effort. Now I understand you." So too, every German catholic understands Adolf Hitler today and on the 12th of November will vote "Yes"

A significant portion of the protestant variety of christendom wasn't any better:




Worst of all, catholic priests and bishops were actually running concentration camps in Croatia, and organising massacres of orthodox christians and, of course, jews. (Link)


Religion, especially Mixa's brand, has been complicit up to its neck in the so-called godless hell, and I am pretty sure that Mixa knows it.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Religion, especially Mixa's brand, has been complicit up to its neck in the so-called godless hell, and I am pretty sure that Mixa knows it.

If you count denial as knowing. I am sick of answering xtians that point out how "the nazis were atheists" - no they fucking weren't! Bormann certainly was, Goebbels too, and a few other individuals, but Hitler was catholic at least up until 1944 (the last time he is reported as attending mass) and so were many other prominent members of the party. Others were equally staunch protestants. Oddly, very few followed judaism.

What Hitler certainly did want to do however, was to break the temporal power of the church - making it subservient to his state. That is well documented but it hardly makes him an atheist - in fact, he was publicly and privately against state controlled atheism.

His vilification by later generations often obscures the fact that Hitler was both an extremely intelligent and a very complex individual. Pigeonholing him is as misguided as pigeonholing anyone. He was as full of contradictions as anyone else. You might find the following wiki piece of interest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitl ... us_beliefs

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I did a paper on the demographics of the Schutzstaffel for Prof. Gordon Mork's "Germany and the Holocaust" class at Purdue. Turns out that the SS is almost a perfect microcosm of the German public. In other words, they were not a special case or in any way un-representative of the Germans as a whole. Including their religious affiliations.

[AshtonBlack]

How does one call Godwin's Law when it's in the OP?

[klr]

I did a paper on the demographics of the Schutzstaffel for Prof. Gordon Mork's "Germany and the Holocaust" class at Purdue. Turns out that the SS is almost a perfect microcosm of the German public. In other words, they were not a special case or in any way un-representative of the Germans as a whole. Including their religious affiliations.

Exactly. Back when I first started reading about this in my teens, it was obvious that the Nazis were not some outcrop of German society, and that Nazism itself did not just appear out of nowhere, no matter how extreme a development it actually was.

How does one call Godwin's Law when it's in the OP?

"Godwin Zero"?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I did a paper on the demographics of the Schutzstaffel for Prof. Gordon Mork's "Germany and the Holocaust" class at Purdue. Turns out that the SS is almost a perfect microcosm of the German public. In other words, they were not a special case or in any way un-representative of the Germans as a whole. Including their religious affiliations.

Exactly. Back when I first started reading about this in my teens, it was obvious that the Nazis were not some outcrop of German society, and that Nazism itself did not just appear out of nowhere, no matter how extreme a development it actually was.

The proliferation of extremist groups in the 1920s practically guaranteed that some group was going to emerge as a problem. The Nazis just had better organization and the gift of a show trial for Hitler to show off to the country.

[al-rawandi]

Religion, especially Mixa's brand, has been complicit up to its neck in the so-called godless hell, and I am pretty sure that Mixa knows it.

If you count denial as knowing. I am sick of answering xtians that point out how "the nazis were atheists" - no they fucking weren't! Bormann certainly was, Goebbels too, and a few other individuals, but Hitler was catholic at least up until 1944 (the last time he is reported as attending mass) and so were many other prominent members of the party. Others were equally staunch protestants. Oddly, very few followed judaism.

What Hitler certainly did want to do however, was to break the temporal power of the church - making it subservient to his state. That is well documented but it hardly makes him an atheist - in fact, he was publicly and privately against state controlled atheism.

His vilification by later generations often obscures the fact that Hitler was both an extremely intelligent and a very complex individual. Pigeonholing him is as misguided as pigeonholing anyone. He was as full of contradictions as anyone else. You might find the following wiki piece of interest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitl ... us_beliefs

Indeed you are right. In Mein Kampf alone you see various, seemingly contradictory, passages. In one portion he says he is doing "the Lord's work". Not a very atheist turn of phrase. And He dedicates some time to bashing his favorite Viennese politician, Karl Luger, for using religion as the basis for his anti-Semitism. Hitler firmly believed anti-Semitism should be based on racial objections, not religious ones.

The better question to ask is, the absence of belief isn't cause to act, so what is the exact positive doctrine of atheism that caused certain Nazis to act? And why didn't religion stop the balance of the Nazis who acted the same? The religion of numerous Nazis never served as a bulwark against evil.

[Beelzebub2]

Worst of all, catholic priests and bishops were actually running concentration camps in Croatia, and organising massacres of orthodox christians and, of course, jews. (Link)

As a matter of fact, at that time the leading Archbishop in the Independent State of Croatia, Aloysius Stepinac, who has actually been charged for war crimes, (The Case of Archbishop Stepinac 1 and 2) and found guilty of collaborating with the Nazi regime, has been beatified and declared martyr in 1998 by J. Paul II.

Here he has been treated like a saint, a very popular one.