Mom! Dad! If I wanted to have this conversation I would just go to the Youtube comments!
Rodrigo
Good one. 🙂
It’s extra funny because Hitler was a devoted christian. Just as Mussolini and also as the Spanish and many Latin-American facists. They all made it very clear in their letters, propaganda and public speachs.
Far
Read Hitler’s Table Talk, he expresses more pagan beliefs than Christian. He makes statements to the effect that the RCC should be a powerless church with a weak leader. He claimed Jesus was an Aryan and other lies. He had an Anti-Christian Martin Bormann in his inner-circle & was an admirer of “God is dead” Nietzsche, thus Hitler’s wish for “Übermensch.”
Mussolini came to power on an Anti-Cotholic ticket, and had to deal w/ the RCC after he was in power. See the book “condemned to repeat it” by Allison, Adams & Hambly.
How do you tell when a politician is lying? There lips move.
Somebody
It would be convenient, but I doubt it.
Brian
@Far The “anti-christianity” of the Nazis was because they rightly saw the christian churches as potential nexuses of dictatorial powers in opposition to their own. Aside from Bormann and Rosenberg (who was heavily marginalised for being too nutty), the Nazi hierarchy didn’t want to destroy christianity but to subvert it to their own use (i.e. do to the cult what Constantine did back in the 4th century, and many rulers since), thus the invention of “German christianity” during the Nazi regime, and the attempt to corral all the protestant sects into it.
And you also have to remember, Hitler did believe in the christian god, he thought he had sent him (Hitler) down to earth to lead his (god) favoured Aryan people to dominance over the world. The table talk snippets denouncing christianity all happened either soon after prominent christians questioned the wisdom of Hitlers varied genocide programmes (we all know how well Adolf reacted to criticism) or when the war was obviously lost (and Downfall showed us how babyish he was when things weren’t going his way). He wanted Germany to be christian, just not the kind of christian it then was.
David M Willis
I’m tickled by the presented incredible savvy of distrusting politicians while defending a 2000-year-old story of guys saying they saw a dead guy once after he died, written forty years after it happened.
ThatGug
I think pointing out his pagan beliefs or what not is in danger of being a “True scottsman” fallacy. as in “he doesnt adhere to what i’d call and X so he isnt an X” which is exactly what millions of christians say bout millions of christians. And conveniently ignore their differences when it comes to “Christians vs Y”.
Cus if we are going to talk about people who aren’t “real” christians i’d point out all the ones who for some weird reason celebrate a pagan holiday in winter dedicated to celebrating the rise of the winter court of Faeries and the astrological continuation cycle in which people hang poisonous plants and decorate evergreen trees to be homes for Faeries.
Cory
Yes but unfortunately both Hitler and Mussolini were Catholic which to folks like Joyce’s parents doesn’t count.
At least Youtube doesn’t have the ‘in your face’ aspect that real life does.
Far
Why go to YuoTube, when Willis will do it here?
Remember, these are Willis’ characters saying what Willis wants them to say. Very much “strawmen”.
Somebody
Um, no. They’re based on people he’s actually met. He was apparently told similar things by his own parents.
David Willis
When you’re on a webpage with like 1000 comments, and a good portion of those comments are from people saying “yes, this was my life, this was my life exactly,” and it’s from content created by a guy who lived this for twenty years, clearly the course of action you’ve chosen here is the best one.
C’mon. Keep on calling all of us liars. Remind us why we left.
NeverAgain
@Cronomatt Well, I grew up in a situation similar to Joyce’s and I remember hearing the rumor that Hitler was partly Jewish. This rumor was connected to a theory that because the Jews were God’s favored people, they either did awesome things or were mini-antichrist’s.
More like control issues and inability to cope with not being able to make their children’s decisions for them forever using Christianity as a shield happened.
Nena
I have seen this happen quite often with controlling religious families.
The fuck happened to all that stuff I learned in Catholic school? Love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, don’t be stupid judgmental dicks (yes, that was an actual lesson I got in sixth grade, exact words), casting stones? Did they stop teaching it?
tiggerpete
They Aren’t Catholic, Though That Is A Lesson I Learned Growing Up (Raised Presbyterian If That Makes A Difference) Seems Fundamentalists Thrive On Hypocrisy.
Kamino Neko
Catholic != Fundimentalist Protestant, and in both cases Actual Doctrine != People’s Interpretation Thereof*, and Interpreted Doctrine != Actual Behavior.
* One of the more infuriating examples I’ve encountered within Catholicism – it’s been said by multiple Popes (notably Pius XII who said it first, and JPII who expanded on it) that evolution is not incompatible with God (basically ‘God gave us souls’ is the important part, and ‘evolution gave us the form we have’ doesn’t contradict that), but I’ve encountered a whole whackload of Catholic creationists, who bust out the idiotic ‘Humans and Dinosaurs coexisted’ and ‘if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?’ crap.
Not Hitler. Hitler used vaguely Christian ideas to help his build to power, but ultimately, the Aryan outlook became a cult of its own with him as its leader, based on a mix of Catholic and Teutonic ideals.
David
Well, it was catholic enough to keep the pope appeased.
Arkadi
He was officially a Catholic, though: he was raised as one and always claimed to be one; whether he was sincere is a different matter.
DT
So he wasn’t much different from all those corrupted “devout Christian” one-percenters we have today….
Arkadi
Probably. Of course, most of those “Christian one-percenters” are happy to wait for their God to do the bombing and ethnic cleasing for them (I think it’s called ‘the rapture’) That’s an improvement.
Oh, I know a few idiots (including former friends, sadly) who think that Nazism was socialist…
kiapdx
@Totz the Plaid
That’s probably because the Nazi party’s official name was “National Socialist German Workers’ Party”. But since they weren’t socialist (by the definition of socialist at any point in time since its creation), a lot of them were not German (Hitler was Austrian)(I mean okay technically Austrians are German it’s just that at the creation of Germany as a country, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Prussia were NOT friends), etc.
If they did appeal to anyone with socialist ideals, it was only because the mark was worth less than the shit they wiped off their asses at the time. And they only got power because Hitler was really charismatic and the party in power thought “oh he’s just a figurehead, if we get him on our council he’ll just be a charismatic puppet” and then it turned out he was a domineering asshole who also happened to be charismatic.
(… Sorry my History Professor last term has his doctorate in Modern European history so he went way in depth on WWII and how it all happened. You do not want to see how many pages of notes I have from those lectures.)
Li
Makes it a lot easier to sleep at night if you pretend no one evil has ever been Christian, huh?
narmenduke
Chill out, Li. Hitler wasn’t Christian, not really. He paid lip service to Christianity because he knew that was what would get him elected, and no, he never officially left the Catholic church (again, probably because it was a better political move to stay there), but he personally disliked religion and did not consider himself religious.
Li
I’m pretty chill, really.
We like to pretend that no one has ever done anything terrible in “our” camp (whatever camp that may be); we tell ourselves that Nazi Germany was atheist and Communist, even though neither of those things are true. (The Nazi party was capitalist, and in America we thought they’d drive out the awful Communist influence from that country, which had been rising of its own accord). In America, “eugenics” had also taken hold, and when Germany first started segregating its population, some in America complained that they were “beating us at our own game”.
We can’t afford to forget shit like this just because it’s ugly. And in our current climate, we can afford it even less.
I reiterate: it’s comforting to pretend that no one can look like us while being vile, because then we ourselves are protected from being vile. But it’s especially egregious to protect ourselves from the idea of a Christian Hitler while foisting the blame for him off onto other persecuted minorities to help give us more reason to hate them.
Narmenduke
I’ve never met anyone who thinks that Nazi Germany was communist; it’s pretty universally known that they were fascists, and anyone who knows the first thing about WWII history knows that they were explicitly out to destroy communism. And it’s also universally acknowledged that the people of Hitler’s Germany were mostly Christians (I can’t speak for Totz the Plaid, but I’m certainly not arguing against that point). So I have no idea where you’re getting “we tell ourselves that Nazi Germany was atheist and communist” from
And nobody’s burying their heads in the sand when it comes to Hitler’s personal anti-religion, that’s just the truth. Again, he may have officially been Catholic, but he was by no means a practicing Christian.
jaimehlers
Hitler was as much a Christian as many Americans, who consider themselves to be Christians, despite not being devout. It is stupid to try to disown him simply because you dislike what he did – that just opens the door for some other charismatic madman to pull the same trick.. And regardless of Hitler, many Germans were devout Christians who were perfectly okay with having the Jews shipped off “for the good of the state”. Maybe they wouldn’t have wanted to see all of them massacred, but that doesn’t help the victims of Hitler’s giant organized pogrom that we now call the Holocaust.
For that matter, it doesn’t help the thousands upon thousands of Jews who were killed by Christians in Europe due to other pogroms. Or the millions of Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, who were killed by other Christians.
Li
What jaimehlers said, with a healthy heaping of “lucky you, you’ve escaped our propaganda machine”. But don’t for a second think that “atheist Communist Nazi Germany” is something I made up. No. It’s a quite popular little lie.
Additionally: fascism is totally unrelated to economic systems. Nazi Germany was both fascist AND capitalist.
narmenduke
I’m not trying to “disown” anyone. I am an atheist. I have no reason to try and sweep Christians who do horrible things under the rug. They disgust me.
But Hiter actually was not a Christian. He may have professed to be so in public, but he made numerous private statements to his associates stating his distrust and his dislike of religion. Yes, he was nominally Catholic, but as someone mentioned below, you have to actually believe in the stuff to be part of it, and it doesn’t appear that Hitler did. That’s what separates him from a “Christmas and Easter Christian.” He actually just didn’t believe it.
And Li, I never said Nazi Germany wasn’t capitalist. I said they weren’t communist. Fascism is opposed to communism. So when I said they were fascist, I meant that that meant the weren’t communist.
Rsteiner
Regardless of whether Hitler was Christian or not, he still used Christianity to control others and convince them to perform atrocities. Regardless of whether he actually believed in God, he still used belief in God to rally other believers under the flag of Nazi Germany. It doesn’t matter if he was sincere or not. Religion is culpable either way, for being a tool that has such power over a person that it can convince them that killing hordes of innocent people is for the best.
Somebody
Yep, no true Scotsman. I knew that would show up eventually.
Somebody
There’s no way to really prove what someone believed either.
I was raised Cath & spent a few years in school, and the Chicago region never taught any such Fundie Jesus riding dinosaurs bullshiit. And I paid attention, because I got kicked out for kickng ass by 5th grade.
My entire family back to the early 1930s all went to cath School in Pittsburgh. Never EVER were they taught such shit. They glossed evolution with “we came from the sea” and taught dinos like a science should be, sticking to “periods” without getting into years, but never once teaching the 6 day creation as a 24 hour human day.
I don’t know where you met the Catholics YOU know, but I’ll bet there is moonshine involved.
They skipped that part when they didn’t read the catholic rulebook.
Seraph
Not only are Joyce’s parents not Catholic, they almost certainly don’t consider Catholics to be Christian. In fact, if they’re anything like most Fundamentalist Christians I’ve known and read, they consider Catholicism to be a Satanic counterfeit of Christianity, designed to fool people into damning their souls while thinking they’re saving them. Sometimes there are implied connections to ancient Babylon.
It’s a scary way to look at the world.
Raen
I’ve always wondered what those people think of Orthodoxy. Reading those anti-Catholic screeds, I usually get the distinct impression the author doesn’t realize that they exist… the closest is typically mention of “Catholics slaughtering true Christians” in the fourth crusade, but in light of the typical claim that things started downhill with Constantine, that just ends up raising further questions.
Agreed, also because they’re completely wrong. Nazi Germany was (technically) religious, they’re thinking of Soviet Russia, as it was anti-religion due to the communists. I know I sound like a bible-thumping redneck when I say that, but I’m not, and it’s the truth; the USSR grouped capitalists and religious organizations together due to the tendency towards corruption and taking money.
Stalin was an atheist who forged an ego cult for himself, and cut out other religions to keep them from competing with Stalinism… technically Communism isn’t anti-religious.
Ender1200
Like in all things concerning communisem the state is just preserving it’s monopoly.
David
Depends on what you choose to call “communism”. Lenin was using rather scorching terms for religion in general. But of course, “practiced” communism had only comparatively loose ties to the views and theories of its nominal founders.
Arkadi
Communism is based on an atheistic worldview: Karl Marx stated that a society of non-exploited, non-alienated human beings would have no use for religion. It was his followers who went from “no use” to “must be destroyed”, but that may also have to do with the fact that religious institutions of the era -starting with the Catholic church- were often ultra-conservative and basically preached against social reform and workers’ rights.
Somebody
There’s really no such thing as “an atheistic worldview”.
Arkadi
“No such thing as an atheistic worldview?” In which sense?
Somebody
In the sense that it’s just disbelief. It doesn’t require any specific views.
Neospector
This is what I meant. Marx’s creation was close to one of the church’s most heavily abusive eras, and his doctrine was that people would reject all forms of capitalist corruption and greed, let the people control everything, and once people got used to it and relinquished the idea of a person having more stuff than another, government, along with other forms of control over people, would be unneeded and cast aside.
Nazi Germany, on the other hand, was Facist, which is a bad mix of capitalism and totalitarianism. Hitler, in fact, used religion to get people on his side and influence them to come under his regime’s command (the US, also in fact, used this and continues to use this method).
No, not really, communist systems don’t like religion because it threatens their authority and hold on power over the people.
Reepicheep-chan
It is not that so much as that religion tends to actively placate people being exploited by systems not built to protect them from exploitation. The idea is that people will keep their heads down and not make waves even if they are being abused by a feudal or a capitalist or a whatever system if they believe they will be reward in the afterlife, while people who do not believe that will fight harder to make things fair in this life. Communism as Marx imagined it was a socially just system where people would be treated fairy and cared for generously by their fellow man, the idea is that when you have that you no longer need God to fill that role.
I do not really think that religion and social revolution are incompatible, personally, but that is the general idea.
Damn right. I take back what I said a couple nights ago: this is why I can’t stand Christians. As if all atheists are automatically heartless, amoral, murdering rapists, and all Christians are good, innocent people who would never, ever do anything bad. Y’know, fear of god isn’t the only reason to be a good person, and I am very disturbed by Christians who think it is.
1,043 thoughts on “Moral foundation”
Squall
Holy Hell that just happened.
GoldStarz
Stupid.
Squall
Sorry, I’m in shock.
GoldStarz
No, Stupid is what’s happening
Venapax
Mom! Dad! If I wanted to have this conversation I would just go to the Youtube comments!
Rodrigo
Good one. 🙂
It’s extra funny because Hitler was a devoted christian. Just as Mussolini and also as the Spanish and many Latin-American facists. They all made it very clear in their letters, propaganda and public speachs.
Far
Read Hitler’s Table Talk, he expresses more pagan beliefs than Christian. He makes statements to the effect that the RCC should be a powerless church with a weak leader. He claimed Jesus was an Aryan and other lies. He had an Anti-Christian Martin Bormann in his inner-circle & was an admirer of “God is dead” Nietzsche, thus Hitler’s wish for “Übermensch.”
Mussolini came to power on an Anti-Cotholic ticket, and had to deal w/ the RCC after he was in power. See the book “condemned to repeat it” by Allison, Adams & Hambly.
How do you tell when a politician is lying? There lips move.
Somebody
It would be convenient, but I doubt it.
Brian
@Far The “anti-christianity” of the Nazis was because they rightly saw the christian churches as potential nexuses of dictatorial powers in opposition to their own. Aside from Bormann and Rosenberg (who was heavily marginalised for being too nutty), the Nazi hierarchy didn’t want to destroy christianity but to subvert it to their own use (i.e. do to the cult what Constantine did back in the 4th century, and many rulers since), thus the invention of “German christianity” during the Nazi regime, and the attempt to corral all the protestant sects into it.
And you also have to remember, Hitler did believe in the christian god, he thought he had sent him (Hitler) down to earth to lead his (god) favoured Aryan people to dominance over the world. The table talk snippets denouncing christianity all happened either soon after prominent christians questioned the wisdom of Hitlers varied genocide programmes (we all know how well Adolf reacted to criticism) or when the war was obviously lost (and Downfall showed us how babyish he was when things weren’t going his way). He wanted Germany to be christian, just not the kind of christian it then was.
David M Willis
I’m tickled by the presented incredible savvy of distrusting politicians while defending a 2000-year-old story of guys saying they saw a dead guy once after he died, written forty years after it happened.
ThatGug
I think pointing out his pagan beliefs or what not is in danger of being a “True scottsman” fallacy. as in “he doesnt adhere to what i’d call and X so he isnt an X” which is exactly what millions of christians say bout millions of christians. And conveniently ignore their differences when it comes to “Christians vs Y”.
Cus if we are going to talk about people who aren’t “real” christians i’d point out all the ones who for some weird reason celebrate a pagan holiday in winter dedicated to celebrating the rise of the winter court of Faeries and the astrological continuation cycle in which people hang poisonous plants and decorate evergreen trees to be homes for Faeries.
Cory
Yes but unfortunately both Hitler and Mussolini were Catholic which to folks like Joyce’s parents doesn’t count.
Plasma Mongoose
At least Youtube doesn’t have the ‘in your face’ aspect that real life does.
Far
Why go to YuoTube, when Willis will do it here?
Remember, these are Willis’ characters saying what Willis wants them to say. Very much “strawmen”.
Somebody
Um, no. They’re based on people he’s actually met. He was apparently told similar things by his own parents.
David Willis
When you’re on a webpage with like 1000 comments, and a good portion of those comments are from people saying “yes, this was my life, this was my life exactly,” and it’s from content created by a guy who lived this for twenty years, clearly the course of action you’ve chosen here is the best one.
C’mon. Keep on calling all of us liars. Remind us why we left.
NeverAgain
@Cronomatt Well, I grew up in a situation similar to Joyce’s and I remember hearing the rumor that Hitler was partly Jewish. This rumor was connected to a theory that because the Jews were God’s favored people, they either did awesome things or were mini-antichrist’s.
Aizat
Idiocy and bigotry happened.
Squall
Don’t forget inflamed argumentative assumption.
DudeMyDadOwnsADealership
More like control issues and inability to cope with not being able to make their children’s decisions for them forever using Christianity as a shield happened.
Nena
I have seen this happen quite often with controlling religious families.
Jim
Brolaf was the shit, dude
Tunaro
The fuck happened to all that stuff I learned in Catholic school? Love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek, don’t be stupid judgmental dicks (yes, that was an actual lesson I got in sixth grade, exact words), casting stones? Did they stop teaching it?
tiggerpete
They Aren’t Catholic, Though That Is A Lesson I Learned Growing Up (Raised Presbyterian If That Makes A Difference) Seems Fundamentalists Thrive On Hypocrisy.
Kamino Neko
Catholic != Fundimentalist Protestant, and in both cases Actual Doctrine != People’s Interpretation Thereof*, and Interpreted Doctrine != Actual Behavior.
* One of the more infuriating examples I’ve encountered within Catholicism – it’s been said by multiple Popes (notably Pius XII who said it first, and JPII who expanded on it) that evolution is not incompatible with God (basically ‘God gave us souls’ is the important part, and ‘evolution gave us the form we have’ doesn’t contradict that), but I’ve encountered a whole whackload of Catholic creationists, who bust out the idiotic ‘Humans and Dinosaurs coexisted’ and ‘if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?’ crap.
Raen
You know who WAS Catholic?
Totz the Plaid
Not Hitler. Hitler used vaguely Christian ideas to help his build to power, but ultimately, the Aryan outlook became a cult of its own with him as its leader, based on a mix of Catholic and Teutonic ideals.
David
Well, it was catholic enough to keep the pope appeased.
Arkadi
He was officially a Catholic, though: he was raised as one and always claimed to be one; whether he was sincere is a different matter.
DT
So he wasn’t much different from all those corrupted “devout Christian” one-percenters we have today….
Arkadi
Probably. Of course, most of those “Christian one-percenters” are happy to wait for their God to do the bombing and ethnic cleasing for them (I think it’s called ‘the rapture’) That’s an improvement.
Totz the Plaid
Oh, I know a few idiots (including former friends, sadly) who think that Nazism was socialist…
kiapdx
@Totz the Plaid
That’s probably because the Nazi party’s official name was “National Socialist German Workers’ Party”. But since they weren’t socialist (by the definition of socialist at any point in time since its creation), a lot of them were not German (Hitler was Austrian)(I mean okay technically Austrians are German it’s just that at the creation of Germany as a country, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Prussia were NOT friends), etc.
If they did appeal to anyone with socialist ideals, it was only because the mark was worth less than the shit they wiped off their asses at the time. And they only got power because Hitler was really charismatic and the party in power thought “oh he’s just a figurehead, if we get him on our council he’ll just be a charismatic puppet” and then it turned out he was a domineering asshole who also happened to be charismatic.
(… Sorry my History Professor last term has his doctorate in Modern European history so he went way in depth on WWII and how it all happened. You do not want to see how many pages of notes I have from those lectures.)
Li
Makes it a lot easier to sleep at night if you pretend no one evil has ever been Christian, huh?
narmenduke
Chill out, Li. Hitler wasn’t Christian, not really. He paid lip service to Christianity because he knew that was what would get him elected, and no, he never officially left the Catholic church (again, probably because it was a better political move to stay there), but he personally disliked religion and did not consider himself religious.
Li
I’m pretty chill, really.
We like to pretend that no one has ever done anything terrible in “our” camp (whatever camp that may be); we tell ourselves that Nazi Germany was atheist and Communist, even though neither of those things are true. (The Nazi party was capitalist, and in America we thought they’d drive out the awful Communist influence from that country, which had been rising of its own accord). In America, “eugenics” had also taken hold, and when Germany first started segregating its population, some in America complained that they were “beating us at our own game”.
We can’t afford to forget shit like this just because it’s ugly. And in our current climate, we can afford it even less.
I reiterate: it’s comforting to pretend that no one can look like us while being vile, because then we ourselves are protected from being vile. But it’s especially egregious to protect ourselves from the idea of a Christian Hitler while foisting the blame for him off onto other persecuted minorities to help give us more reason to hate them.
Narmenduke
I’ve never met anyone who thinks that Nazi Germany was communist; it’s pretty universally known that they were fascists, and anyone who knows the first thing about WWII history knows that they were explicitly out to destroy communism. And it’s also universally acknowledged that the people of Hitler’s Germany were mostly Christians (I can’t speak for Totz the Plaid, but I’m certainly not arguing against that point). So I have no idea where you’re getting “we tell ourselves that Nazi Germany was atheist and communist” from
And nobody’s burying their heads in the sand when it comes to Hitler’s personal anti-religion, that’s just the truth. Again, he may have officially been Catholic, but he was by no means a practicing Christian.
jaimehlers
Hitler was as much a Christian as many Americans, who consider themselves to be Christians, despite not being devout. It is stupid to try to disown him simply because you dislike what he did – that just opens the door for some other charismatic madman to pull the same trick.. And regardless of Hitler, many Germans were devout Christians who were perfectly okay with having the Jews shipped off “for the good of the state”. Maybe they wouldn’t have wanted to see all of them massacred, but that doesn’t help the victims of Hitler’s giant organized pogrom that we now call the Holocaust.
For that matter, it doesn’t help the thousands upon thousands of Jews who were killed by Christians in Europe due to other pogroms. Or the millions of Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, who were killed by other Christians.
Li
What jaimehlers said, with a healthy heaping of “lucky you, you’ve escaped our propaganda machine”. But don’t for a second think that “atheist Communist Nazi Germany” is something I made up. No. It’s a quite popular little lie.
Additionally: fascism is totally unrelated to economic systems. Nazi Germany was both fascist AND capitalist.
narmenduke
I’m not trying to “disown” anyone. I am an atheist. I have no reason to try and sweep Christians who do horrible things under the rug. They disgust me.
But Hiter actually was not a Christian. He may have professed to be so in public, but he made numerous private statements to his associates stating his distrust and his dislike of religion. Yes, he was nominally Catholic, but as someone mentioned below, you have to actually believe in the stuff to be part of it, and it doesn’t appear that Hitler did. That’s what separates him from a “Christmas and Easter Christian.” He actually just didn’t believe it.
And Li, I never said Nazi Germany wasn’t capitalist. I said they weren’t communist. Fascism is opposed to communism. So when I said they were fascist, I meant that that meant the weren’t communist.
Rsteiner
Regardless of whether Hitler was Christian or not, he still used Christianity to control others and convince them to perform atrocities. Regardless of whether he actually believed in God, he still used belief in God to rally other believers under the flag of Nazi Germany. It doesn’t matter if he was sincere or not. Religion is culpable either way, for being a tool that has such power over a person that it can convince them that killing hordes of innocent people is for the best.
Somebody
Yep, no true Scotsman. I knew that would show up eventually.
Somebody
There’s no way to really prove what someone believed either.
Totz the Plaid
…the following comment was meant to be part of this thread. Oops:
Oh, I know a few idiots (including former friends, sadly) who think that Nazism was socialist…
Sili
So he was bad Catholic. The RCC doesn’t exactly let you leave once you’re baptised into the Church. Nulla salus and all that.
Jojo
What do you mean? Plenty of people have been ex-communicated.
TFC
And you can always use the apostasy proceeding (though it’s complicated to do).
Andrusi
John Paul II?
Plasma Mongoose
Do Popes shit in the woods?
Ivan
I was raised Cath & spent a few years in school, and the Chicago region never taught any such Fundie Jesus riding dinosaurs bullshiit. And I paid attention, because I got kicked out for kickng ass by 5th grade.
My entire family back to the early 1930s all went to cath School in Pittsburgh. Never EVER were they taught such shit. They glossed evolution with “we came from the sea” and taught dinos like a science should be, sticking to “periods” without getting into years, but never once teaching the 6 day creation as a 24 hour human day.
I don’t know where you met the Catholics YOU know, but I’ll bet there is moonshine involved.
Squall
They skipped that part when they didn’t read the catholic rulebook.
Seraph
Not only are Joyce’s parents not Catholic, they almost certainly don’t consider Catholics to be Christian. In fact, if they’re anything like most Fundamentalist Christians I’ve known and read, they consider Catholicism to be a Satanic counterfeit of Christianity, designed to fool people into damning their souls while thinking they’re saving them. Sometimes there are implied connections to ancient Babylon.
It’s a scary way to look at the world.
Raen
I’ve always wondered what those people think of Orthodoxy. Reading those anti-Catholic screeds, I usually get the distinct impression the author doesn’t realize that they exist… the closest is typically mention of “Catholics slaughtering true Christians” in the fourth crusade, but in light of the typical claim that things started downhill with Constantine, that just ends up raising further questions.
Pat
Some Christians don’t like the Christ bits.
KB_SBI
These things always go hand in hand.
Lokitsu
It’s really unfair to the readers when the cartoonist invokes Godwin’s Law before we can. Damn you Willis!
podian
You know WHO else had something to do with the Godwin’s Law before us?
Endest
Yeah. I cant believe joyce’s family are such dicks.
Yotomoe
Ok. Fuck Joyce’s parents. You heard me. I am past jokey mad and legitimately hate these fictional people.
EvergreenFir
Amen
Aizat
Do you need a barb-wired baseball bat?
Neospector
Agreed, also because they’re completely wrong. Nazi Germany was (technically) religious, they’re thinking of Soviet Russia, as it was anti-religion due to the communists. I know I sound like a bible-thumping redneck when I say that, but I’m not, and it’s the truth; the USSR grouped capitalists and religious organizations together due to the tendency towards corruption and taking money.
Vinom
Stalin was an atheist who forged an ego cult for himself, and cut out other religions to keep them from competing with Stalinism… technically Communism isn’t anti-religious.
Ender1200
Like in all things concerning communisem the state is just preserving it’s monopoly.
David
Depends on what you choose to call “communism”. Lenin was using rather scorching terms for religion in general. But of course, “practiced” communism had only comparatively loose ties to the views and theories of its nominal founders.
Arkadi
Communism is based on an atheistic worldview: Karl Marx stated that a society of non-exploited, non-alienated human beings would have no use for religion. It was his followers who went from “no use” to “must be destroyed”, but that may also have to do with the fact that religious institutions of the era -starting with the Catholic church- were often ultra-conservative and basically preached against social reform and workers’ rights.
Somebody
There’s really no such thing as “an atheistic worldview”.
Arkadi
“No such thing as an atheistic worldview?” In which sense?
Somebody
In the sense that it’s just disbelief. It doesn’t require any specific views.
Neospector
This is what I meant. Marx’s creation was close to one of the church’s most heavily abusive eras, and his doctrine was that people would reject all forms of capitalist corruption and greed, let the people control everything, and once people got used to it and relinquished the idea of a person having more stuff than another, government, along with other forms of control over people, would be unneeded and cast aside.
Nazi Germany, on the other hand, was Facist, which is a bad mix of capitalism and totalitarianism. Hitler, in fact, used religion to get people on his side and influence them to come under his regime’s command (the US, also in fact, used this and continues to use this method).
Plasma Mongoose
Communism like so many utopic ideas tended to fail in practice due to not fully tking in account human nature.
Roborat
No, not really, communist systems don’t like religion because it threatens their authority and hold on power over the people.
Reepicheep-chan
It is not that so much as that religion tends to actively placate people being exploited by systems not built to protect them from exploitation. The idea is that people will keep their heads down and not make waves even if they are being abused by a feudal or a capitalist or a whatever system if they believe they will be reward in the afterlife, while people who do not believe that will fight harder to make things fair in this life. Communism as Marx imagined it was a socially just system where people would be treated fairy and cared for generously by their fellow man, the idea is that when you have that you no longer need God to fill that role.
I do not really think that religion and social revolution are incompatible, personally, but that is the general idea.
kiapdx
Meanwhile the Nazis preached that all Russians were actually Jews. Which is why more than 70% of Russian POWs were executed.
spaceinvader42
Damn right. I take back what I said a couple nights ago: this is why I can’t stand Christians. As if all atheists are automatically heartless, amoral, murdering rapists, and all Christians are good, innocent people who would never, ever do anything bad. Y’know, fear of god isn’t the only reason to be a good person, and I am very disturbed by Christians who think it is.
TheLuggs