At the best of times, I struggle to get past the idea of a grown man, in 2010, talking about virgins giving birth and other magic spells while keeping a straight face. Even if I could get past all that, he’s a fucking right-wing nutjob - on religion, on politics, on race relations, on pretty much anything he opens his slimy little mouth about. That miserable quagmire of bent truths called an article isn’t even about ‘Was Hitler a Christian?’ its about ‘Godless atheists are evil dark-siders, and Jesus Christ is the Truth, the Way, and the Light (and buy my book!).’ What are you reading D'Souza for? He's a full-on Bible thumping charlatan. He might very well be misquoting or quote-mining all manner of things. I wouldn't trust him as far and I could spit at him.
Even if he is using good sources, its beside the point. Even if Hitler did go to those lengths to strip the power away from the Church, it doesn’t take away from the fact that he believed in God, believed he was acting for God, believed he was doing the Lord’s work. And he can mostly justify his whole career as a twisted fuckhead using Christianity's most sacred and revered scriptures. And there is a difference between seizing the power behind the Church and actually outlawing them, which he did do to atheist and free-thinking establishments.
I don´t read d´Souza, I had never even heard about him untill I googled that article, which corresponded quite well with the impression I had gained over the years, from books, articles and television programs about Hitler.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler's_religious_viewsI have skimmed this Wikipedia article about Hitler´s religious views and it seems that one day he would say one thing and another day he would say another thing. (you need not point out to me that anybody can write anything in Wikipedia, so you cannot take it as the Gospel truth, I know that)
About quote mining, aren´t you guilty of that too ? Your want to portray Hitler as a Christian and quote statements that proves this. D´Souza wants to distance him from Christianity and brings quotes like the following :
"Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity."
Goebbels notes in a diary entry in 1939 a conversation in which Hitler had "expressed his revulsion against Christianity. He wished that the time were ripe for him to be able to openly express that. Christianity had corrupted and infected the entire world of antiquity."
"You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"
Historian Richard Overy maintains that Hitler was not a christian, nor was his ideology influenced by Christianity,[43] but believed in Arthur de Gobineau's ideas of struggle for survival between the different races, among which the "Aryan race" — guided by a pantheistic "providence" — was supposed to be the torchbearers of civilization
Unquote
So far as I know Hitler was also a great admirerer of Nietzsce and the übermench idea
The elimination of the worn out shell of the old order, however, is only the first step in the transition to the superman. With the collapse of the old order, humanity in Nietzsche‟s view will be engulfed in chaos and destruction. It will be a period of unparalleled ferocity with wars the like of which the world has never seen.18 While many might find this prospect horrifying, Nietzsche is less concerned about the coming carnage and looks to the future with a new cheerfulness that grows out of his sense of liberation.19 His disgust with late nineteenth century Europe, with the idea of human dignity and the value of labor?the most abysmal forms of slave morality?is profound, and he longs for its destruction in the belief that the resulting chaos and war will promote a new manliness, and help humanity to recover from the weakening, softening, and decadence that Christianity brought about. He is convinced that only in the cauldron of war can humanity be hardened and overcome pity, which Zarathustra refers to as his final sin. This hardening is not merely a mental toughening, but also and primarily the training and disciplining of the body, of the self and its passions. In particular it includes the elimination of sympathy for the suffering of others. Lest one imagine that Nietzsche intends this in a merely metaphorical sense, he specifically points to the brutal heroes of the Norse sagas, whom he praises for their unfeeling hard-heartedness, as models for
19
what he has in mind.20 Contemporary human beings in his view are a herd of consumers; he wants humans who are warriors and beasts of prey. Such men in his view will learn discipline in the midst of war and destruction or they will not survive.21 Out of these ferocious barbarians will grow a new aristocracy, repeating a process Nietzsche believes has occurred many times before. How this process will unfold and modify the barbarism of the ?blond beasts‟ is not something that Nietzsche (in contrast to Plato)considers in any great detail.
http://users.polisci.wisc.edu/polphil/GillespieNietzscheWarriors.pdf Doesn´t sound very Christian to me.
However, whether at the end of the day Hitler considered himself a Christian, I don´t know and I don´t think anybody does.
Topic: Allah's Doomed Slaves