God thread

[MyOneAndOnly]

The Nazi party was a christian organization. They burned non christian texts and demonized non christians, athiests, jews, etc.

[redbreegull]

Originally Posted by scottytheoneand

The Nazi party was a christian organization. They burned non christian texts and demonized non christians, athiests, jews, etc.

the Nazis were not a Christian organization. There were Christian Nazis but most of the head honchos hated the Church and believed it could not coexist with national socialism

[buzzard]

Always ahead of his time, Joseph Goebbels provided his review of ScarJo in the Shell as early as 1942.

The land lacks its own language, culture, and civilization. It has borrowed everything, generally debasing it by Americanizing it, never improving it. Americanization is a kind of kitschification that gives every cultural value an American stamp, turning a mature language into slang, the waltz into jazz, a work of literature into a crime story.

http://research.calvin.edu/german-pr...hive/goeb5.htm

[FoolofaTook]

Yeah sry scotty but no way were nazis christian. didnt they have some weird aryan cult thing? Or was that in indiana jones?

[vixnix]

Originally Posted by Poots

If you're going to believe it, you kind of have to surrender a lot of your other ways of thinking and just have faith in it. He's being a dick about it, but that's kind of the whole deal with this or any religion.

It doesn't seem realistic to me, that a two thousand year old religion with two billion followers across the globe would have one single definition of Christianity.

It's true that being a religious adherent requires faith.

Have you been a Christian since childhood? Are your parents Christian? Did you go to Christian schools? Which denomination are you a part of? Do you go to church regularly?

I know you might choose not to answer those questions though I don't know why you wouldn't.

I just wonder if you are part of a Christian tradition that is very conventional, unquestioning, and rigid.

I haven't met many Methodists or Episcopalian/Anglicans or Lutherans who are as strongly opinionated as you are, about what a Christian is.

I feel fortunate that my own tradition isn't like that. It is literally a dying tradition though. Nobody wants to be a part of it anymore. Well...far fewer people want to be a part of it every generation.

It requires the commitment of attending weekly services without the promise of an afterlife. And we kneel in the pews and pray to God, even though each of us knows that all the evidence so far shows nobody is listening.

We read accounts of religion that describe it as part of human evolutionary psychology, now unnecessary. We accept the scorn of people who assume we are too ignorant or mentally ill to have questioned what we read in the bible just because we are committed reading it.

It sucks. But I suppose the payoff is that for now, we get to be this quirky little village of Christians who gather and are humble and vulnerable with each other, who cry and laugh together, who can't explain the connectedness they feel to something trustworthy and powerful that exists in the universe. Who know that in this community of people there is no condemnation because we are called to forgive one another as we have been forgiven. And who accept that other people might have correctly explained this feeling of connection as a biochemical response to our surroundings caused by a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental conditions.

It's a life of uncertainty but there are still choices. We can choose to just forget the whole thing, because why bother with outdated communities and practices. Or, we can choose to close our minds to any evidence that troubles us.

We choose to trust that even if we can't explain what or why, there is a purpose to us being committed to Christian practices - practices motivated by Christian theology. We trust that drawing the meaning of our existence from the Christian story will help us to navigate through our lives in this complicated world.

It's trust, which is just another word for faith. And we are Christians. Just...different to you.

[Trotskilicious]

Originally Posted by redbreegull

the Nazis were not a Christian organization. There were Christian Nazis but most of the head honchos hated the Church and believed it could not coexist with national socialism

they definitely used christian doctrine & symbolism to their advantage, whether or not they believed i suppose is up for debate but this idea that the "head honchos" (that would be hitler, goering, goebbels, speer and few others) were a bunch of atheists is incorrect afaik

i suppose you can hate the church as a separate institution but that in no way means they didn't recognize the usefulness of religion intertwining with the state or were even slightly atheist.

pfeh, why do you think they hate commies so much

[redbreegull]

Originally Posted by Trotskilicious

they definitely used christian doctrine & symbolism to their advantage, whether or not they believed i suppose is up for debate but this idea that the "head honchos" (that would be hitler, goering, goebbels, speer and few others) were a bunch of atheists is incorrect afaik

i suppose you can hate the church as a separate institution but that in no way means they didn't recognize the usefulness of religion intertwining with the state or were even slightly atheist.

pfeh, why do you think they hate commies so much

I don't think anyone said they were atheists

Goebbels explicitly believed the Church would eventually have to yield entirely to the State, the only true source of authority. He saw their existences as ultimately incompatible.

As for what the official Nazi stance on Christianity was, it's complicated. There were Christian Nazis, but Hitler was not a Christian by any normal measure and neither were most of his inner circle. Obviously the Nazis did a lot to construct a civic religion which tapped into Judeo-Christian tradition, the occult, etc... but the actual relationship between the party and the church as a group of institutions was tenuous at best. They were not allied and the Nazi party was absolutely not a Christian institution.

[Trotskilicious]

i feel like you're swinging too far in the opposite direction, hitler's anti-semetism was based in luthers own writings & german christian culture

[redbreegull]

I think I remember at one point the Nazis backed an invented denomination which was basically thought up to sap power from the existing churches

[myosis]

whether nazis were christians or not, was scotty dense enough to believe he was making a point about the book burning reference?

[Trotskilicious]

that's a political move not a spiritual one

[redbreegull]

Originally Posted by Trotskilicious

i feel like you're swinging too far in the opposite direction, hitler's anti-semetism was based in luthers own writings & german christian culture

yeah of course Germany was still a very Christian country in the Nazi era

but being influenced by or being the cultural product of are not the same thing as being part of or endorsing....

[Trotskilicious]

i mean i see republicans being about as "religious" as nazis were

[Trotskilicious]

i just want people to credit COMMUNISM not liberalism or fascism for bulldozing churches and telling people god is a lie

[redbreegull]

Hitler was probably also influenced by Rousseau's ideas, a lot of which might be considered proto-fascist in some ways, but he would never cite a French motherfucker

[vixnix]

So...which denomination?

[vixnix]

I dunno. I kinda think that where we go, it's just what Christian faith looks like in the 21st century.

Fear of breaking with tradition definitely doesn't motivate me, I can't speak for others. But my parents never once took me to church and didn't have me christened or anything. And their childhood churches (Presbyterian/Wesleyan) had totally different traditions to the one we're at now (Anglican/Espiscopalian).

It's not a fearful group. It's a funny group. We tend to find the church in the area that most resembles the Vicar of Dibley and then worship there.

[Shallowed]

Does God have a therapist?

[FoolofaTook]

The sda church in germany openly collaborated with the nazis. still a major embarrassment for them.

lol i love it!

[FoolofaTook]

Worse shit happened in Rwanda. Ah seventh day adventiss!

[redbreegull]