Response to "Hitler Really Wasn't an Atheist
Note: A rebuttal this this paper is now available. Click here.
Mr. Cliff Soon is a Christian acquaintance of mine. We had a discussion going about Hitler. The topics included whether God should have prevented Hitler’s evil and whether or not Hitler was an atheist. I referenced a Secular Web article, entitled “Hitler Was Not an Atheist.” Hitler did make some claims of “doing God’s work.” Mr. Soon believes there is reasonable evidence that was only “for public consumption” and was in reality an atheist. Though of course nobody can read Hitler’s mind, Mr. Soon made some points that seemed valid, so I offered to post a rebuttal piece on my site should he wish to present one. And here it is.
Mr. Soon’s paper starts in “mid-stream” from our conversations. I contended that God should not have allowed Hitler’s evil. He had said, “I believe that God allowed Hitler to act within certain parameters.” I responded, “well, I respectfully submit that the ‘parameters’ Hitler was allowed ‘to act within’ were unreasonable for an all-powerful God that hates evil.” So, here is Mr. Soon’s response from there:
Mr. Cliff Soon is a Christian acquaintance of mine. We had a discussion going about Hitler. The topics included whether God should have prevented Hitler’s evil and whether or not Hitler was an atheist. I referenced a Secular Web article, entitled “Hitler Was Not an Atheist.” Hitler did make some claims of “doing God’s work.” Mr. Soon believes there is reasonable evidence that was only “for public consumption” and was in reality an atheist. Though of course nobody can read Hitler’s mind, Mr. Soon made some points that seemed valid, so I offered to post a rebuttal piece on my site should he wish to present one. And here it is.
Mr. Soon’s paper starts in “mid-stream” from our conversations. I contended that God should not have allowed Hitler’s evil. He had said, “I believe that God allowed Hitler to act within certain parameters.” I responded, “well, I respectfully submit that the ‘parameters’ Hitler was allowed ‘to act within’ were unreasonable for an all-powerful God that hates evil.” So, here is Mr. Soon’s response from there:
Response to Hitler Was Not an Atheist
by Cliff Soon
I respectfully submit that the parameters were reasonable. The reason we recoil is that it was a stunning demonstration of the darkness of the human heart (even without reference or blame to Satan). Thessalonians tells us that even now, God is restraining the full force of human evil. The misery of murder and torture that was the former Soviet Union is another example. Together with China, you have an estimated minimum of 120 million murdered by government-sponsored, theophobic belief systems.
May I also point out that in a previous post you complained that your free will might somehow be disturbed (by God). Yet now you insist that Hitler's free will was not disturbed enough. So perhaps our free will is indeed sometimes disturbed. (Someone goes to the store to buy a newspaper. The newspaper is all sold out; his will is thwarted. Is this his free will which is denied? Or something else? Didn't want to go off on a tangent, just something to consider on a rainy day.)
by Cliff Soon
I respectfully submit that the parameters were reasonable. The reason we recoil is that it was a stunning demonstration of the darkness of the human heart (even without reference or blame to Satan). Thessalonians tells us that even now, God is restraining the full force of human evil. The misery of murder and torture that was the former Soviet Union is another example. Together with China, you have an estimated minimum of 120 million murdered by government-sponsored, theophobic belief systems.
May I also point out that in a previous post you complained that your free will might somehow be disturbed (by God). Yet now you insist that Hitler's free will was not disturbed enough. So perhaps our free will is indeed sometimes disturbed. (Someone goes to the store to buy a newspaper. The newspaper is all sold out; his will is thwarted. Is this his free will which is denied? Or something else? Didn't want to go off on a tangent, just something to consider on a rainy day.)
[PJ] You might misinterpret the following... The following is a bit of info about Hitler not being an atheist. Of course I'm fully aware that even if the following is correct, and even if he claimed to be doing God's work, clearly he was not acting in accordance with Christianity. The only point of the following is simply to attempt to dispel the notion that Hitler was a professed atheist. From the article "Hitler was not an Atheist" John Patrick Michael Murphy:
[JPMM] Hitler seeking power, wrote in Mein Kampf, "... I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews. I am doing the Lord's work." Years later, when in power, he quoted those same words in a Reichstag speech in 1938. |
Most atheists seem to have a sort of selective blindness when it comes to Hitler, and a sort of touching naivete and gullibility regarding his statements of piety. I can't blame them. But outside of their fantasy world where Hitler's statements can be taken at face value, Hitler's devotion to Darwin and hostility to the Church is quite apparent:
"The Nuremberg trials of leading Nazis conclusively proved that they attempted genocide against the Jews, resulting in the Holocaust, in which some six million Jews were killed. But one senior member of the US prosecution team, General William Donovan, compiled a huge amount of documentation that the Nazis also planned to systematically destroy Christianity.
"Donovan's documents-almost 150 bound volumes-were stored at Cornell University after his death in 1959, and are now being posted online at the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion. This 'criminal conspiracy' involved the very top Nazis, including Adolf Hitler and propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, as well as Hitler Youth leader and Nuremberg defendant Baldur von Schirach. "These documents show that the Nazis, right from the beginning, realized that the church would have to be neutralized because of its opposition to racism and aggressive wars of conquest. So they planned to infiltrate the churches from within; defame, arrest, assault or kill pastors; reindoctrinate the congregations; and suppress denominational schools and youth organizations." (From http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/docs/v24n3_nazis.asp) |
"Much of the opposition to the eugenic movement came from German Christians. Although Hitler was baptized a Catholic, he was never excommunicated, and evidently 'considered himself a good Roman Catholic' as a young man, and at times used religious language. He clearly had strong, even vociferous, anti-Christian feelings as an adult, as did probably most Nazi party leaders. As a consummate politician, though, he openly tried to exploit the church. Hitler once revealed his attitude toward Christianity when he bluntly stated that religion is an:
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His beliefs as revealed in this quote are abundantly clear: the younger people who were the hope of Germany were 'absolutely indifferent in matters of religion'. As Keith noted, the Nazi party viewed Darwinism and Christianity as polar opposites. Milner said of Germany's father of evolution, Ernst Haeckel, that in his Natural History of Creation he argued that 'the church with its morality of love and charity is an effete fraud, a perversion of the natural order'. A major reason why Haeckel concluded this was because Christianity:
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Does this cast a whole new light on the subject? I mean, do your atheist friends also believe Torquemada was "doing God's work," simply because he said so? Is this sort of unquestioning, unskeptical gullibility necessary for belief in evolutionism? And is it cause or effect? (Note: Perhaps this article might help shed some light on this phenomenon: "If you took a group of conservative Protestant ministers and a group of scientists, which group would contain the most open-minded researchers? Honestly, who do you think would do the most empirical research before reaching a conclusion, and be the least likely to cling to that conclusion in the face of contrary evidence?" See http://www.arn.org/docs/hartwig/mh_rigiddogma.htm)
[JPMM] Hitler's Germany amalgamated state with church. Soldiers of the vermacht wore belt buckles inscribed with the following: "Gott mit uns" (God is with us). His troops were often sprinkled with holy water by the priests.
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Does Murphy mean like the Inquisition was sprinkled with holy phrases?
[JPMM] It was a real Christian country whose citizens were indoctrinated by both state and church and blindly followed all authority figures, political and ecclesiastical.
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Murphy has a strange notion of what a "real" Christian country should be. Their intense indoctrination with evolution, and their adoption of racist policies which, as Haeckel recognized, were opposed to Christian teaching, would not be my idea of such.
"Sir Arthur Keith was a British anthropologist, an atheistic evolutionist and an anti-Nazi, but he drew this chilling conclusion:
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We continue:
[CS] it is a lesson on what happens when the lie of Darwinism is followed to its logical end.
[PJ] The real problem I have is that Christians often seem to lie evil at the foot of Darwin's grave.
Well, we have already seen that their foot-laying is justified. Even the lowly sadistic jailers of Communist Rumania understood that Darwinism absolved them of their atrocities; children in our schools understand that much earlier than we suppose: "Evolution -> no need for God -> no moral accountability"; "All beliefs equally valid -> no beliefs valid or binding". Unfortunately we treat them like idiots, but they understand. Without God, "all things are permissible."
We are told that Darwin was simply following where the evidence led him. But was Darwin's whole purpose, decided in advance, actually to undermine Christianity? He and his father were Unitarians, if I recall correctly; and he could not accept that his deceased father might be in Hell. Thus his crusade to rid the world of Christianity's God. At least that's the thesis of Ian Taylor's In the Minds of Men; you decide. (Note: I think Taylor considered Archaeopteryx a fake; I don't agree, but don't let that distract you from the real issue of Darwinism's origins.) And if that is indeed the case, he was consciously responsible for the results of his crusade: hollow moral relativism.
[PJ] I don't think Hitler said, "I'm doing Darwin's work".
See above for proof to the contrary, and below:
[CS] it is a lesson on what happens when the lie of Darwinism is followed to its logical end.
[PJ] The real problem I have is that Christians often seem to lie evil at the foot of Darwin's grave.
Well, we have already seen that their foot-laying is justified. Even the lowly sadistic jailers of Communist Rumania understood that Darwinism absolved them of their atrocities; children in our schools understand that much earlier than we suppose: "Evolution -> no need for God -> no moral accountability"; "All beliefs equally valid -> no beliefs valid or binding". Unfortunately we treat them like idiots, but they understand. Without God, "all things are permissible."
We are told that Darwin was simply following where the evidence led him. But was Darwin's whole purpose, decided in advance, actually to undermine Christianity? He and his father were Unitarians, if I recall correctly; and he could not accept that his deceased father might be in Hell. Thus his crusade to rid the world of Christianity's God. At least that's the thesis of Ian Taylor's In the Minds of Men; you decide. (Note: I think Taylor considered Archaeopteryx a fake; I don't agree, but don't let that distract you from the real issue of Darwinism's origins.) And if that is indeed the case, he was consciously responsible for the results of his crusade: hollow moral relativism.
[PJ] I don't think Hitler said, "I'm doing Darwin's work".
See above for proof to the contrary, and below:
'The Germans were the higher race, destined for a glorious evolutionary future. For this reason it was essential that the Jews should be segregated, otherwise mixed marriages would take place. Were this to happen, all nature's efforts "to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being may thus be rendered futile" (Mein Kampf).'
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You wrote:
[PJ] Most atheists I know are not mass murderers.
Most people cannot live with the logical implications of evolution. Is the mother who is gunned down by a mugger just "not fit enough to survive"? No, most human beings know innately that there is more to life than the hollow chants of Darwinism.
I once posted a challenge on a "freethinkers" [sic.] forum. Their motto was something along the lines of: All beliefs are equally valid; find your own light." I challenged them to convince a Darwinist killer (who had just drugged them, and whose self-made belief system involved killing others to maximize his gene pool) not to kill them. There was an initial flurry of responses along the lines of "Serial killers can't function normally in society", "I shoot him", and so on. I reiterated the logical underpinnings of his mindset (he is not your garden variety, unbalanced serial killer, but rather just an eminently reasonable Darwinist), and pointed out the non-cerebral nature of the responses that involved somehow escaping physically. Was not the intellectual force of their arguments sufficient?*
That was many moons ago. No one has yet succeeded, and last I checked, there have been no new earnest attempts.
(Besides, only a few can be mass murderers. The others are usually "just following orders" - and, if they have bought into the true implications of a Godless, futile universe, some actually enjoy it. Some kind of catharsis for their perceived - and logically correct - meaninglessness of life, I suppose.)
[PJ] But the fact is, I've never heard of people killing 'for the sake of Darwin'.
Well, now you have. And you are now another of a select few, since for some strange reason Hitler's Darwinist motivations are not usually trumpeted for public consumption. I suppose some think we can't handle the truth.
Doubtless many object that (er ... former atheist) Stephen Jay Gould was not a mass murderer and so on. That is not the point (See: "Most people cannot live with the logical implications of evolution.") The point is that such a belief system - killing others (the unfit) for perceived evolutionary advancement - is not only logically consistent, but unassailable in the evolutionary context. And perhaps the point should be stronger - if Gould really bought into evolutionism, he really should have been a murderer. In that sense, Hitler was certainly one of the great Darwinists; and some historians have rightly recognized him as such.
There is a reason that philosophers - and now biologists - throughout the ages have failed to define morality without reference to God. It is because without God, there is no universal morality. There is also a reason not all evolutionists become murderers: we all have at least a trace of knowledge of this true morality within us. Our revulsion to the logical outworkings of evolutionism, as demonstrated by Stalin and Hitler, and the desperate struggle to hide this connection, is a clue to the existence of an absolute morality, and therefore of God.
If I may, some recommended sites:
[PJ] Most atheists I know are not mass murderers.
Most people cannot live with the logical implications of evolution. Is the mother who is gunned down by a mugger just "not fit enough to survive"? No, most human beings know innately that there is more to life than the hollow chants of Darwinism.
I once posted a challenge on a "freethinkers" [sic.] forum. Their motto was something along the lines of: All beliefs are equally valid; find your own light." I challenged them to convince a Darwinist killer (who had just drugged them, and whose self-made belief system involved killing others to maximize his gene pool) not to kill them. There was an initial flurry of responses along the lines of "Serial killers can't function normally in society", "I shoot him", and so on. I reiterated the logical underpinnings of his mindset (he is not your garden variety, unbalanced serial killer, but rather just an eminently reasonable Darwinist), and pointed out the non-cerebral nature of the responses that involved somehow escaping physically. Was not the intellectual force of their arguments sufficient?*
That was many moons ago. No one has yet succeeded, and last I checked, there have been no new earnest attempts.
(Besides, only a few can be mass murderers. The others are usually "just following orders" - and, if they have bought into the true implications of a Godless, futile universe, some actually enjoy it. Some kind of catharsis for their perceived - and logically correct - meaninglessness of life, I suppose.)
[PJ] But the fact is, I've never heard of people killing 'for the sake of Darwin'.
Well, now you have. And you are now another of a select few, since for some strange reason Hitler's Darwinist motivations are not usually trumpeted for public consumption. I suppose some think we can't handle the truth.
Doubtless many object that (er ... former atheist) Stephen Jay Gould was not a mass murderer and so on. That is not the point (See: "Most people cannot live with the logical implications of evolution.") The point is that such a belief system - killing others (the unfit) for perceived evolutionary advancement - is not only logically consistent, but unassailable in the evolutionary context. And perhaps the point should be stronger - if Gould really bought into evolutionism, he really should have been a murderer. In that sense, Hitler was certainly one of the great Darwinists; and some historians have rightly recognized him as such.
There is a reason that philosophers - and now biologists - throughout the ages have failed to define morality without reference to God. It is because without God, there is no universal morality. There is also a reason not all evolutionists become murderers: we all have at least a trace of knowledge of this true morality within us. Our revulsion to the logical outworkings of evolutionism, as demonstrated by Stalin and Hitler, and the desperate struggle to hide this connection, is a clue to the existence of an absolute morality, and therefore of God.
If I may, some recommended sites:
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and the ones which will finally convince you all I'm nuts - and maybe make you think twice about "scientific objectivity":
* On the other hand, note that (as Strobel attempts to show) a cogent intellectual case can be built up to convince a rational killer ("rational" precludes holding on to cherished, unproven materialist assumptions for dear life) that since he will be accountable to God, he should not kill. Now that's intellectual force.
- Cliff Soon, 12/2002
- Cliff Soon, 12/2002