Quote:
Originally Posted by Cheese
https://richarddawkins.net/2014/10/t...talin-pol-pot/
“Besides that, I believe one thing: there is a Lord God! And this Lord God creates the peoples.” [1] ~Adolf Hitler
“We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations; we have stamped it out” [2]~Adolf Hitler
To begin, here are just a few of Hitler’s Christian confessions:
“ My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.” [3]
“The greatness of Christianity did not arise from attempts to make compromises with those philosophical opinions of the ancient world which had some resemblance to its own doctrine, but in the unrelenting and fanatical proclamation and defense of its own teaching.” [4]
Prior to Constantine’s legitimization of the Christian religion in the fourth century, Christian anti-Semitism was confined to the canonical and non-canonical works of Christian authors and Church fathers. From the fifth century onward, the fantasies of the ante-Nicene fathers began to manifest into brutal violence.
In the first volume of my three volume book series, (I Am Christ), I trace the concentration camps of World War II all the way back to the Gospel of “John.” In that book, I said:
From all of the evidence available in the volumes of historical works, both Christian and non-Christian, it is clear that there is an unbroken chain of hatred, intolerance, and racism toward the Jews, which began with “John’s” Gospel (see also the Synoptic gospels) and continued all the way down into the twentieth century, ending with Hitler’s bloody campaign against the Church’s most despised enemies. [7]
Stalin was raised as a Christian under the religious influence of his mother, who enrolled him in seminary school, and that Stalin later took it upon himself to study for the priesthood, as Hitchens and others have pointed out, Stalin merely stepped into a ready-made religious tyranny, constructed by the Russian Orthodox Church and paved with the teachings of St. Paul.
Pol Pot, possibly not even an atheist, but almost certainly a Buddhist, believed in the teachings of the Buddha, no matter how perverted his interpretations may or may not have been. His violence, much like the violence of many earlier religionists, wasn’t the result of a lack of belief in a god, whether Zeus, Osiris, Yahweh, or the god-like Buddha of Mahayana Buddhism, but in the megalomaniacal belief that heaven or destiny was guiding him to improve the state of affairs for all those who could be forced to share his misguided utopian delusions. Not only was Pol Pot a Theravada Buddhist, but the soil in which his atrocities were sewn was also very Buddhist.
Caesar also looked at himself as a God and murdered those who disagreed. No discussion of his using atheism as an excuse.
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You are completely wrong on all of this to a ridiculous level. I'd love to rip this apart but I'm sure I will be called out for straying off topic. At the same time I can't let you post this nonsense unchallenged, so I'll point out a couple things.
Hitler was not a Christian at all, did he try to coop Christianity to achieve his political aspirations, absolutely. Many leaders that have an agenda have successfully done this, that doesn't mean that religion or Christianity is to blame for these actions. Religion is merely a tool that can be used for good or evil, that is on the user. As pointed out earlier, Hitlers beliefs were racially motivated. Hitler himself was rumoured to be part Jewish. You do know that the old testament is based largely off the Hebrew Bible?
Communism is rooted in a secular or atheistic belief. Actually try reading some Marx, he openly states that Christianity is naturally resistant and an enemy to the Communist Ideology. Stalin was an atheist until his dying breath, that is well documented. Think about it, who needs a God belief system when the State will fill that role. Have you ever noticed how most atheists are GENERALLY very left leaning politically, that is not by accident.
I know atheism is having a big resurgence now but it has been around for a long time, and for the most part rejected by most societies. In the absence of a God belief, men will make themselves out to be God's, look no further then North Korea for a modern day example of this, or look back in time to the Nations that followed Marxist doctrine.