How do most christians use christianity?
To better their lives and the lives of those around them, I'd hope. Though use is a funny word to attach. Hitler wasn't a Christian, of course, so like a great many who don't inhabit the context he held them in contempt and used rhetoric to attempt to move them toward his ends, to the extent he could manage it. He was a top tier manipulator.
So you know you can only rely on atheists not to be using a religious mythology in this way.
And I am very glad not to be forced to be typing in German to you now. But that was the work of the Allied forces, despite all the prayers the opportunistic Catholic church sent to Hitler on his birthdays.
That was my advice to you. I suppose you think Stalin remained Orthodox too.
As I understand it they had no choice. It was either accept Hitler's terms or see some kind of dismantling or rearrangement along Nazi lines. Hence the RCC took the convenient route and the nuncio to Berlin would send birthday greetings every year.
| Positive Christianity was primarily the brainchild of Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. Hitler's relationship to Christianity was complex. He was raised Catholic and even thought of becoming a priest at one point (a claim denied by Goebbels), but later came to despise the Roman Catholic Church (though he never officially left it). At the same time, however, he associated atheism with Bolshevism and "Jewish materialism". Rosenberg, meanwhile, was far more overt in his rejection of Christianity, viewing it as a religion of weakness that trapped the Aryan race under original sin (he believed that Germans were "born noble") while declaring all races to be equal before God, and called for a new "religion of the blood" derived from ancient pagan faiths that would elevate the "Nordic soul" as the master race and God's chosen people. This was in contrast to Hitler, who viewed paganism with disdain and often ridiculed the mysticism of Rosenberg and Himmler. Furthermore, the ideology and rituals of the Nazi party were themselves quasi-religious and, in some senses, a competitor with Christianity. At the very least, Nazism included elements that are incompatible with Christianity as it is usually taught, some of which were derived from other religions. Many leading Nazis, such as Rosenberg and Martin Bormann, viewed Christianity as incompatible with Nazism, owing chiefly to its Jewish influences. Nevertheless, practical politics made it desirable for Hitler to make his "peace" with Christianity and specifically with the Catholic Church. The primary appeal of the Nazis was to conservative/populist middle and lower middle class Germans and Austrians, who also tended to be observant Christians; for example, over half of the Waffen-SS were Catholics. As a result, Hitler made frequent public affirmations of Christian faith, stating in 1928 that the Nazis "tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity ... in fact our movement is Christian." |
Just goes to show the kind of thinking that must lead you to, and out of, the seminary. Stalin became a zealot for a different kind of corrupt ideology.
It's no problem to me if you wish to argue that people who self-identify as christian aren't really christians.
Indeed. No need to equivocate there.
