Hitler and Christianity

66. Richard Dawkins has stated that he considers sexual abuse of children to be “arguably less” damaging than bringing them up to believe in religion (Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God, p. 202, quoting Dawkins’ book The God Delusion). Now, people who abuse children sexually are subject to criminal penalties, and rightly so. Some questions:

(a) Does Dawkins believe that parents who bring their children up to believe in God should be sent to jail, and have their children taken away from them? This is what can happen to sexual abusers, and religious parents who teach their children are, in Dawkins’ view, possibly as bad.

(b) If religious parents are put in jail for bringing up their children according to their beliefs, should those imprisoned parents be forced to work seven days a week without adequate health care, housing, or food, until they drop dead, with possibly some torture thrown in on the side? This is not a rhetorical question, since atheists have a proven track record of this sort of thing.

(c) If atheists deny any such intent, are they sincere, or are their denials merely a clever evasion to minimize opposition until they are able to set up the left wing dictatorship I suspect many of them long for? Let’s not forget, by the way, that deceit, camouflage, and evasion are ordinary parts of nature, so what incentive do people who think of themselves as animals have to be honest?

(d) Richard Dawkins is a well-known scientist – does this give him the authority to give advice on how children should be raised?

(e) In addition to his child-raising expertise, does Prof. Dawkins have some scientific insights on how Europe’s current economic problems might best be handled? Might more attacks on Christianity be helpful?

67. In his book The End of Faith, Sam Harris stated that, in his Utopia, if a country was jeopardizing the health of the world, “There is little doubt we would ultimately quarantine, invade, or otherwise subjugate such a society” [The End of Faith (London 2006), p. 52-53]. Since in this context Harris mentioned the SARS scare in China in 2003,China may be one of the countries that will have to be quarantined, invaded, or subjugated. We might also add Russia, Mexico, India, or any other country that jeopardizes the health of the world. Some questions that arise:

(a-e) Does Harris think invading or subjugating China or Russia or India would be a light and simple matter? Who will carry this out? Who will make such decisions? How will the leaders be chosen? Or is it just that Sam Harris is full of hot air?

(f) Does this mean atheists, too, are willing to kill for their beliefs? They certainly have been in the past.

(g) Does Harris think it justifiable to wade through rivers of blood if at the end of all of the killing we will have a world he feels more comfortable in?

(h) If the answer to that is “Yes,” is this typical of atheists who think that people are only matter and nothing more?

68. Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin and other Communists expressed many explicitly atheist sentiments – including denial of God, the harmfulness of religion, and the truth of science. Hitler, on the other hand, expressed no overtly Christian teachings (such as the Trinity, the virgin birth, or the deity of Christ). So, are people who try to link Hitler Christianity while detaching Communists from atheism really being objective and fair?

69. Is someone who believes “There is no God” an atheist?

70. Is someone who believes “There is no God, and Christianity is a false religion” an atheist?

71. Is someone who believes “There is no God, Christianity is a false religion, and religion is harmful to society” an atheist?

72. Is someone who believes “There is no God, Christianity is a false religion, religion is harmful to society, and the best we can do is build a just society here on earth” an atheist?

73. Is someone who believes “There is no God; Christianity is a false religion; religion is harmful to society; the best we can do is build a just society here on earth; and the best way to build a just society is to eliminate religion, private property and capitalism” an atheist?

74. Is someone who believes “There is no God; Christianity is a false religion; religion is harmful to society; the best we can do is build a just society here on earth; the best way to build a just society is to eliminate religion, private property and capitalism; and those who stand in our way are enemies of mankind and should be shot or sent to slave labor camps for the future happiness of humanity” an atheist?

75. Is someone who believes “There is no God; Christianity is a false religion; religion is harmful to society; the best we can do is build a just society here on earth; the best way to build a just society is to eliminate religion, private property and capitalism; those who stand in our way or disagree with us are enemies of mankind and should be shot or sent to slave labor camps for the future happiness of humanity; and there is nothing wrong with killing millions of people because man is nothing but matter and killing is not intrinsically wrong, if it is done for the sake of future good” an atheist?

76. If someone answers “Yes” to questions 69-73, but “No” to questions 74-75, is this because they are (a) incapable of thinking clearly; (b) devious; or (c) some other explanation (fill in the blank) ______________________________________.

77. If you had to stand before God one day for judgment, how would you feel if everything you had ever said, thought, and done were brought out into the open?

78. Little children may cover their faces as a means of avoiding unpleasant realities. Is this the atheist approach toward God?

The riddle of Nazi anti-Semitism has occupied the minds of many, though others have assumed that there is simply no answer, that the extermination of 6 million harmless and innocent Jews by modern industrialized methods is so far removed from ordinary thought patterns as to be beyond reasonable analysis.

One curious comment about this problem has been made by noted historian Richard Evans. A widely recognized expert on the Third Reich and the author of major works on the subject, he more than many other people should be able to give us some insight into this problem – if, that is, the problem is amenable to the ordinary methods of scholarship he has so completely at his command.

Evan’s comment was this: “the history of modern anti-Semitism in Germany began with the court preacher Adolf Stöcker” (The Coming of the Third Reich, 2005). Who was this individual to whom we can attribute such incredible catastrophes? Adolf Stöcker was Kaiser Wilhelm’s court chaplain. He was concerned about excessive Jewish influence in Germany, and wanted to limit it. He founded the Christian Social Workers’ Party, but it was not successful and never had any great influence on the political scene.

To examine this more carefully, we need to be aware that there were by the 19^th century two different anti-Semitisms in Germany. The first was traditional religious anti-Semitism of the sort that had existed for many centuries. This saw the Jews as the killers of Christ, under God’s wrath because they had rejected and killed Jesus Christ. The second was the secular anti-Semitism that emerged out of the so-called Enlightenment. As advocated by such major German thinkers as Kant, and Fichte, as well as many others, this second variety of anti-Semitism was not concerned with religious issues. Its adherents did not believe the Bible was the word of God, were not overly concerned with the crucifixion of Christ. They had an entirely different approach.

Secular “Enlightenment” anti-Semitism was hostile to Judaism for three reasons. First, the idea of God and the Jews as presented in the Old Testament itself was obnoxious to them. A God of one nation only who blessed those who obeyed him and sent destruction on his enemies and set up punishments for violations of divine laws was anathema to modern secular philosophers. Secondly, current Jewish practices were offensive to them. That the Jews would cling to centuries-old beliefs and be alienated from social and intellectual progress was proof of their being less than fully human. Thirdly, with the increasing emphasis on nationalism as the source of human identity, the Jews were seen increasingly as aliens, outsiders, who corrupted healthy German values.

Since Stöcker represented the religious version of anti-Semitism rather than the secular (of course these two versions mingled with each other in different ways), and since it was the secular version that we find in such anti-Semites as Wagner and H. S. Chamberlain, whose ideas about Jews were often identical to Hitler’s, blaming Stöcker for ideas that had emerged earlier in the century seems rather odd. Yet, in his A History of the Jews in the Modern World (New York 2006) Howard M. Sachar states it was Stöcker’s campaigning in the 1870s that managed “to transform social anti-Semitism into an increasingly formidable political issue inGermany . . . it was Stöcker who awakened right-wing politicians to the functional utility of anti-Semitism as a party issue” (245).

Was it really the case, then, that this individual was to blame for awakening the demon of anti-Semitism in Germany? Sachar agrees that Stöcker’s ideas “bore little relation to the wild nihilism of his successors” (p. 245). Sachar also makes some comments on Karl Lueger, the mayor ofVienna, who (in Sachar’s words) “institutionalized” previously social anti-Semitism in Austria and made it “politically functional” (229).

Sachar also mentions Georg von Schönerer, another Austrian anti-Semite “who pioneered many of the propaganda techniques later to be used by the Nazis” and was “the first demagogue who understood the potential of anti-Semitism,” arguing among other things that Jewishness was not a question of religion (as in traditional religious anti-Semitism) but of race (252-253).

H. S. Chamberlain, the racial and anti-Semitic ideologue who publicly endorsed Hitler, dismissed religious anti-Semitism as outmoded superstition. His anti-Semitism was “scientific” and “philosophical,” and centered not on God’s wrath on the Jews but on Jewish corruption of German racial purity and on the unhealthiness of Jewish ideas as expressed in Torah itself. Since it was this anti-Semitism, traceable (with many variations) back through Lagarde and Langbehn to Fichte, Kant, and the German “Enlightenment,” that emerges in Mein Kampf, pointing the finger at Stöcker seems inadequate.

If we really want to understand the mystery of anti-Semitism, this strange force of irrational hatred which persists unwavering through the centuries and across borders but assumes many different guises and expressions according to various situations, then it seems obvious to me that the first question we need to ask is “Who and what are the Jews?”

If God did not appear to Moses on Sinai, and the Torah is merely a book of myths and legends, then there is no rational explanation for the pointless existence and strange survival of the Jews, nor for the strange hatreds continually directed against them. If God did appear to Moses on Mount Sinai and gave the Jews divine laws, and if he did use them to reveal his truth to the world through the prophets, and through Jesus Christ and the apostles, then we can explain persistent but varying forms of Jew-hatred as the work of the devil, and of human sin.

This is at bottom a spiritual question, and I know how much most contemporary scholars want nothing to do with such things. This is to their detriment.