The Root Of All Evil

[poliphilo]

It's refreshing that militant Darwinist Richard Dawkins has been given the opportunity to attack religion- all religion- in his new TV series The Root Of All Evil.

On the other hand there's something a bit stringy and gristly about his case.

While it's quite true that the worldwide revival of fundamentalist religion- Islamic, Christian, Hindu- is one of the scariest developments of recent years, it's quite false to argue that religion has been behind all that is bad in human history.

The greatest atrocities of the 20th century were committed by atheist or areligious regimes- Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Communist China, Communist Cambodia. The First World War had little to do with religion and everything to do with nationalism.

Human beings like to believe. They like to believe en masse. It keeps them warm. But they don't particularly need to believe in God. Any ideology will do.

And Dawkins igonores the good that religion can accomplish. It was evangelical Christians, as I wrote the other day, who broke the slave trade. And- on a different tack- recent research has shown that, as a matter of statistics, believers are more likely to be happy and fulfilled than unbelievers.

Religion is a stalk, a branch, a tendril- not a root.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The holocaust was partly about religion but also, primarily, about the 19th century ideology of race. (And other things too, I'm sure.)
Hitler was a Catholic by upbringing but an atheist by conviction.

Has religion really killed more people than any other ideology? I imagine the casualties caused by the Crusades were small by the standards of modern warfare.

Stalin is credited with something like 30,000,000 deaths and Mao with even more. Those are pretty high figures.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Yes. IT is a proven fact that religion has killed more people than ANYTHING else on earth. of course it depends on what you view as a religious cause. Stalin had people killed BECAUSE they still believed in A God. Same with Mao. And Hitler may have been an athiest but he was afraid of the Jews. Yeah, okay, the Crusades were a minor blip on the radar screen.

Who said "Religion is the opiate of the masses?"

I think what we're differing on here is semantics...

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

Stalin and Mao murdered all those people because they believed in God/had religious beliefs. If they had only been atheist, they would have left them alone.

Is that your logic here? Not being snarky, just genuinely understand what it is you're trying to say.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Stalin and Mao murdered people because they stood in the way. Some of it was pure cack-handedness. Both of them engineered famines through pushing stupid, ideologically driven, agricultural policies.

Both tried to repress religion, but I don't think they killed all that many people specifically because of their religious beliefs.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

that's your opinion, or your interpretation.

And I'm not saying you are absolutely wrong, or that I am absolutely right.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't know if it has any bearing, or who's case it supports, but Stalin spent five years training for the Russian Orthodox priesthood...

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

Hitler was against the Jews as a race, not a religion, I believe. It was race that was his obsession, after all.

And if it's a proven fact, it should be easy to cite some sort of source?

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

Hmm.

"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... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people." -Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

That speech was made in 1922 - before he had obtained absolute power in Germany. I would argue that speech was designed to tap into the anti-semitism many Germans felt in that day. By the mid-1930s Hitler was actively engaged in the persecution of both Catholic and Protestant clergy. In 1941 Bormann (a close aide to Hitler) announced that "National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable". During the war Rosenberg (a pagan) drew up a 30-point program for the "National Reich Church". Point 5 announced that "the Reich Church was determined to exterminate irrevocably the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany".

If Hitler ever professed Christianity, it was purely for political expediency.

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

Sigh. This issue is a particularly complex one, owing to the difficulty in establishing what Reich policies were attributable to which figure and what statements were made and for what audience; in so far as Hitler did attack aspects of christianity like transubstantiation the audience was invariably the anti-catholic Martin Bormann who was simply being told what he wanted to hear; Speer heard precisely the opposite from Hitler while even Bormann heard atheism being denounced by Hitler ("An uneducated man, on the other hand, runs the risk of going over to atheism (which is a return to the state of the animal"). Part of the difficulty is that by the later years Hitler was, to be blunt, completely unhinged; when he made statments attacking aspects of christianity ('negative' versus 'positive' christianity - see below) they have to be read in the context of him describing Germany and the Aryan race as contemptible failures.

It certainly seems to me that the political expediency argument is a particularly simplistic one. Hitler continued to make pro-christian statements of the kind I quoted well after he had come to power (e.g. "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so." -1941) and did so in private as in public.

Himmler, Heydrich and Rosenberg's paganism is a side-issue (not that I really have much wish to defend paganism); Hitler described it thus: "It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to re-establish the worship of Wotan. Our old mythology had ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself." As I recall, this was a theory was cooked up by an especially evangelical US army office after Nuremberg.

It has to be said that it's a distortion to argue that 'was actively engaged in the persecution of both Catholic and Protestant clergy' - he was actively engaged in persecuting any dissident factions within Germany. While that included individuals and churches within those two groups (Bormann's pet project again) it did not include either church as a whole, much of which collaborated quite happily with the Nazi regime. The Protestant Church had been very close to the Nazis before 1933 and largely remained so even up to 1945. The Catholic Church had been very hostile to the Nazis before 1933 but thanks to the Catholic fear of being considered un-German and un-patriotic the Catholics after 1933 became just as Nazified as the Protestants. And thanks to Pope Pius XII the Catholic Center Party, a foe of Hitler, was destroyed.

The National Reich church to which you allude was not pagan, it was an attempt to unify the German churches in the mould of Hitler's personal vision of what he called 'positive christianity' (e.g. lacking the presumably too Jewish Old Testament or any 'Bolshevist' elements - the latter presumably the target in some of his conversations with Bormann e.g. "Christ was an Aryan, and St. Paul used his doctrine to mobilise the criminal underworld and thus organise a proto-Bolsevism."). Not so much an attempt to persecute churches as to nationalise them; "If positive Christianity means love of one's neighbour, i.e. the tending of the sick, the clothing of the poor, the feeding of the hungry, the giving of drink to those who are thirsty, then it is we who are the more positive Christians. For in these spheres the community of the people of National Socialist Germany has accomplished a prodigious work." (1939)

In short, the nature of Hitler's christianity will remain an obscure area but I'm afraid arguments about atheism, paganism and political expediency seem like wishful thinking to me. I doubt he had a consistent relationship to christianity but it seems fairly clear that it was quite a close and longlasting one.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. Thank you for the documentation. I've learned something.

[solar-diablo.livejournal.com]

"Sigh", back at you. You seem to have latched onto a single aspect of my post (I said Rosenberg was a pagan). This was not intended as some "Nazis were pagan!" indictment, merely pointing out that a significant number of Hitler's closest advisors were anti-Christian in general, or specifically anti-Catholic, and put those sentiments into Reich social policy.

Secondly, I never said the Reich church was pagan, I said it was anti-Christian. The bullet points specifically demand the cessation of the publication of Bibles in Nazi Germany, removed crosses from the National Church altars, and stated no clergy were to be allowed in the Church. Whether it used Teutonic myth and imagery is irrelevant; it may not have been pagan, but it was decidedly anti-Christian.

Finally, you yourself note that Hitler was actively engaged in persecuting ANY group that threatened his power, and that his relationship to Christianity was inconsistent. That is, simply put, political expediency, and if Hitler was willing to abandon his Christian beliefs whenever they challenged his power, then frankly it's wishful thinking to call him Christian.

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I'm going to have to sigh again. The subject of the relationship of Hitler and the Third Reich with christianity is a deeply complex one that is not susceptible to simple interpretations from either side.

"You seem to have latched onto a single aspect of my post"

Given that I wrote six paragraphs, of which only one was concerned with the paganism issue, I would have to politely disagree with this assertion.

"merely pointing out that a significant number of Hitler's closest advisors were anti-Christian in general, or specifically anti-Catholic, and put those sentiments into Reich social policy."

I do not dispute this and believe I did previously note this to be the case with Bormann (though to be clear, his is probably the one and only name in the Reich of whom this can be said). But it would be dishonest not to note that there were many figures in the Riech who were christian (such as William Kube and Walter Buch, the head of the Nazi Party Court), many self styled 'positive christians' (Goebbels and Hitler, I would argue), plus the aforementioned lunatic fringe of pagans. These individuals did have a strong effect on Riech policy, with the outcome that much of the German Catholic and Protestant churches found Nazism a highly congenial counterpart to their faith.

"The bullet points specifically demand the cessation of the publication of Bibles in Nazi Germany, removed crosses from the National Church altars, and stated no clergy were to be allowed in the Church. Whether it used Teutonic myth and imagery is irrelevant; it may not have been pagan, but it was decidedly anti-Christian."

I'm not sure I haven't already dealt with this one (adn given that you complained that I'd seized on him before I'm a little puzzled as to why you come back yet again to the rather sorry figure of Rosenberg). The Reich certainly sought to create a national church, partly as a means of suppressing dissent, partly as a means of national unification. Nonetheless, suppression of some churches for political reaons does not mean that christianity as a whole was being attacked (since whether you like it or not, the Reich church was a christian church; certainly christian enough for Hitler to have taken communion from it). To take the example of Bibles, what you neglect to mention is that the Reich did publish the 'Himmler Bible' in line with their vision of christianity. Ditto the other two examples.

"if Hitler was willing to abandon his Christian beliefs whenever they challenged his power, then frankly it's wishful thinking to call him Christian."

The problem here is that you're starting from a set of a priori assumptions about what is a christian and then assume that anything not cognate with that must qualify as un-christian or anti-christian. Europe has changed church structures and doctrines to suit the religious and political ideologies of its elites for centuries; the fact that political expediency motivated Henry or Elizabeth during the English reformation (or Cromwell later) is not normally considered as grounds for characterising the theology and doctrines that were produced as not being christian - it seems rather inconsistent not to apply the same principles to the Reich, even if its regime was of a quite different moral complexion.

In the case of Hitler, he very clearly appears to have identified as a christian and saw the reich church as consistent with his vision of 'positive' christianity. It might not have been consistent with your vision of christianity (though I certainly wouldn't have said it was entirely inconsistent with many aspects of Lutheranism) or most visions for that matter, but I'm not relly sure why that should be relevant.

*It reminds me of the risible argument that islam is a religion of peace and strains like wahhabism are somehow disqualified from being manifestations of exactly the same religion - and typically with more doctrinal justification than the moderate version. But then if you start off with the assumption that religion is a good thing then anything that falls outside is automatically considered to be incompatible with religion...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Jolly interesting.

But my reaction is that Hitler was a politician and told people what they wanted to hear. I think that, like many others of his kind, he regarded religion as a useful tool.

I also note that this is an early speech. I don't believe that full blown National Socialism went in much for this kind of Christian rhetoric.

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

See above. My impression is that Hitler certainly saw himself as a christian and certainly saw his ideologies as consistent with those of Luther (who he revered alongside Frederick the Great and Bismarck). Equally, he wished to purge christianity of element he saw as incompatible with Nazism. It was certainly a much more complicated relationship than political expediency alone would lead one to expect.