The Huffington Post now has a post up from some guy named Rory Fitzgerald reacting to the suggestion that the Pope be arrested for crimes and conspiracies of his organization by urging that Richard Dawkins be arrested for “atheist crimes”…such as those committed by the Nazis and Stalinists. I had no idea that Adolf Hitler was a member of the Richard Dawkins Foundation! You learn something new every day.
But, you know, he’s right. If RDF staffers were running a child-porn ring, and Dawkins was moaning “Oh, this will ruin the reputation of my foundation, I must do what I can to hide these crimes,” then yes, I would agree: arrest Richard Dawkins! No excuses!
Reality interferes, however. Such a crime has not been committed. I know Dawkins well enough that he would be outraged by such wickedness, and that his wrath would fall on the perpetrators, not the whistle-blowers. It’s all very, very silly. In fact, there’s more absurdity there than I can possibly dissect — it’s like an awesome concatenation of every stereotype and ill-founded damning claim about atheists ever made. I thought about linking to it, but the stupid was simply to intense for me, especially as my time is limited as I’m about to brave Chicago traffic again.
So go read Jerry Coyne for his take.
Oh, and I know it’s very inside baseball, but when I saw that Fitzgerald thought Dawkins was a microbiologist, I practically did a spit-take. He’s not. He’s an evolutionary biologist trained as an ethologist. The amusing thing, too, is that I’ve often seen creationists do that — for some reason, they think “microbiologist” is some kind of special term for any biologist who studies the fiddly little details of evolutionary mechanisms, instead of a specific branch of biology that studies the dominant form of life on the planet. (Hint: not people).
Microbiologist? Jesus H. Christ, won’t some one please teach that poor man to Google!!
Whilst the error about Dawkins being a microbiologist is amusing, call it a mistake and move on: It’s the other assertions in Fitzgerald’s drooling that should be disassembled for the nonsense that it is.
WTH!!! The usual fundie creationist lies.
Hitler was a Catholic and a creationist. His millions of willing followers who did all the work and killing were Catholics and Lutherans.
Oh gee. Hitler didn’t much like atheists either. He stamped them out. Fitzgerald would have agreed with Hitler.
If lying was a crime, Fitzgerald would have already been arrested. But it is really just a common fundie xian practice. They must think the commandment says, “thou shalt lie (a lot)”.
If I remember rightly, Dawkins said atheism was no more the reason for Hitler’s and Stalin’s actions than the fact that they both had moustaches.
Stalin’s regime was based on an irrational dogma, from an infallible authority figure, that had to be followed without question and whenever it conflicted with reality – it was reality that was wrong. Doesn’t that rather remind you of organised religion?
Great, if we follow Rory Fitzgerald’s logic, we have no choice but to punish the Pope for the crimes of the crusaders. What a deep rabbit hole he wants to climb down.
As I recall, some people do cite babble’s Romans 3 as saying it’s Ok to lie if it makes the dog happy. (When I read the KJV version, I can’t make heads or toads out of what’s written.)
Well since Hitler was actually a Catholic, by this “logic” we can arrest the Pope with even more vigor!
I presume that, by Fitzgerald’s “logic”, the crusaders didn’t do anything wrong (excepting a few individuals possessed by daemons or faeries or something), and so it should be all the modern-day joos and mooslins and other people not like him who should be punished.
And I with my pottymind read that and thought, well it is in the bible, his daughters did it already, what I am missing. I need better glasses.
The Huffington Post is not by any means a serious news organization, political or otherwise. Just look at the top stories on the right side of HuffPo’s main page. As I write this, they are:
1) Tiger Woods divorce?
2) Kate Hudson breast implants
3) The Wii accident sex addict
HuffPo is a tabloid.
I have to admit that as a microbiologist-in-training I sometimes forget that life even exists on the macroscopic level.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Arrest-The-Pope/112549038762456
Arrest The Pope Facebook Page…1600 and counting
#11 – and it has organelles!
Not only that, but he called microbiology arcane! Microbiology! A science that has almost certainly saved his life!
Nobody appreciates me, I swear. If you [sneer]eukaryotes[/sneer] need me, I’ll be in the lab.
MikeG, I noticed that, too. I’m a microbiologist, and I certainly don’t feel arcane.
PZ,
I’m surprised that you didn’t concentrate any fire on that psychonaut Lazlo for his article “Evolution Presupposes Design, So Why the Controversy?”
At last, religion and biology are reconciled by a concert pianist.
Why has it taken so long for the pianists to weigh in on the issue?
Dawkins studies cats?
To be honest, sometimes, there is a pretty good article in the HuffP. To wit, Michael Ruse’s recent confession:
The Catholic Church: Why Richard Dawkins Was Right and I Was Wrong
Props to Ruse here for honesty and clear thinking.
(Now, that’s something you won’t often read on Pharyngula!)
;-)
He studies whether cats eat bats.
Oh dear. Arresting dawkins for someone else’s crimes. Yup those crimes were bad. But onething Rory is that you arrest and deal with the people who did them!
PZ:
So, Pratchett’s God of Evolution was wrong too, and cockroaches are not the pinnacle of life on the planet? Blasphemer!
So predictable that Fitzgerald brings up Pol Pot.
And that he neglects to mention that it was the evil godless Vietnamese who got rid of him while the good Christian leaders of the world sat around actually vetoing UN resolutions against the Khmer Rouge.
It’s what the mice told him to do.
@#17
the dominant form of life, not the dominating form…LOL
“Such a crime has not been committed” – How do you know?
HuffPo is weird. Not only do they have all sorts of credulous nonsense, but they also have some good writers, including Michael Zimmerman who has taken on AIG and the DI in the past two weeks.
Raven wrote:
“Hitler was a Catholic and a creationist.”
This sort of muddle isn’t improved by repetition. It also bears stating that the atheists Hitler boasted of suppressing were communists. You could quite safely be an atheist in Nazi Germany, provided you weren’t Jewish, or a communist, socialist, or other opponent of the regime.
If you loved the HuffPo article then you’ll love this article by sanctimonious Toronto Sun columnist Michael Coren.
HuffPo is generally a good source for political news and insight. Many of the bloggers who post columns on religion and living are stupid, ignorant or just plain cuckoo for cocoa puffs but they don’t represent the official stance of the website. Alongside the anti-vaccers and religious accommodationists, there are also plenty of pro-science bloggers and newsarticles too (among others Michael Specter’s TED talk about the dangers of science denialism was posted there recently). The site posts many viewpoints on the liberal spectrum – some are wrong, but the most are correct. Free speech is encouraged and anti-reality views get their share of criticism from readers.
I’d suggest you take a look at the news and articles overall instead of focusing on the fringe idiots. To do otherwise is to misrepresent a fairly good news hub.
(I’m not in any way condoning the nonsense peddled on HuffPo, but I get a bit frustrated when people attack the entire site solely on the basis of anti-science or religious kowtowing. Things like the economy and health care are currently enormously more important than ID or Deepak Chopra’s woo and misinformation, no matter how passionate we skeptics are about those issues.)
And true to their courageous stance for the truth, the vacuous gits at HuffPo close comments on the article after just two pages. Two. Pages.
I’ve seen seven pages of comments on Heidi Montag or Oscar gowns in the past. I don’t suppose it could have anything to do with the very well reasoned criticisms that were mounting up against the article and its host.
I believe that BigMknows is correct, HuffPo is a tabloid at best and a mouthpiece for credulous magical-thinkers at worst.
Sorry, but surely it’s not possible to be so incredibly stupid…? This breaks the boundaries I did not think stupidity was constrained by, it takes the idea of not thinking before saying anything to new levels. This deserves some sort of award.
@29
https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawneFKPEzAZBsanj9me6EOu2PjSlvbqyb8c
Do some research into Ms. Huffington’s relationship to John-Roger and the MSIA cult. The new-agey credulousness flows from the very top of the masthead.
Can anybody recommend a replacement for HuffPo’s Politics page? After this, and endless articles on the front page about ‘OMG who is Michelle Obama wearing THIS WEEK?’ and ‘Look at Hillary Clinton’s HAIR OMG LOL’ I think it’s time to move on.
@Aaron Baker:
Well, he was both, so not sure why you’re calling it a muddle.
And, tell me, was the German Freethinkers Association a Communist organization?
’cause their leader got decapitated by Hitler.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Arrest-The-Pope/112549038762456
Let’s get him arrested!!
Aaron; you can safely be an atheist anywhere as long as you don’t ever tell anyone. Other than that, it’s touch-and-go in almost any human society. You don’t even have to be an atheist; just skeptical of religious claims – Socrates is the primal example.
Back on point, the reason creationists consider any scientist who debunks them is a microbiologist is because microbiology provided the evidence which proved evolution is true. Did you ever notice how much creationists talk about fossils, and how proud they are of being able to say that fossils don’t prove evolution is true? Because they are right; fossils provided evidence of evolution, which is to say common descent with natural selection, but not conclusive evidence, as Darwin himself did not avoid mentioning.
Not the “microbiology” of bacteriology, but the “micro-biology” of cell and molecular biology (and not just genetics, though that most of all), provided additional evidence of evolution, facts that proved conclusive when it was observed that they were entirely consistent with both the fossil evidence and biological theory. But it was those evil “microbiologists” that finally gutted any semblance of a rational scientific argument against the fact that we evolved naturally. Leaving only pathetic tired dumb-asses who insist that evolution demands atheism, despite the fact that both evolutionists and atheists often disagree with that presumption. Doubly ironic because they will never forgive microbiologists for forcing them to say it, because it is the only rational thing they seem to be willing to accept, and they’re often the only ones saying it.
Kieranfoy:
I’ve addressed these issues exhaustively (and exhaustingly), and I don’t wish to repeat myself.
Here are two threads in particular:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/hitlers_library.php
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/04/fafarman_likes_me_he_really_li.php
I must admit I’d never heard of the German Freethinkers League. If Wikipedia is right, its leader, Max Sievers, was a leftwing political activist–at the end, a member of the KPD, the German Communist Party. That fact would have been enough by itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Sievers
This was a dumb article, but where does it say Dawkins is a microbiologist?
@Pareidolius
Right now I’m reading a (year-old) column written by a skeptic about anti-vaccers:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-dickerman/why-do-anti-vaccinationis_b_181557.html
Not something you’d expect from an anti-science lib site, but while we’re trashing the site, I guess we’ll ignore that one and focus on the bad stuff. :)
I checked the Fitzgerald column and while the comment section was indeed closed, most of the comments seemed to be completely against Fitzgerald and his logical fallacies. Why didn’t they remove them if they were against their accommodationist agenda? Besides, I don’t buy for one second that the comment closure was due to pesky dissenters. The HuffPo news article about Dawkins’ & Hitchens’ “crusade” against the pope was allowed to continue for over 60 pages and most of the comments showed support for Dawkins and Hitchens.
(BTW, I completely agree with your contention that the entertainment articles are worthless tabloid crap. Luckily they are sealed behind the Entertainment banner and I don’t have to read them.)
I’m aware of Arianna Huffington’s personal affinity towards woo, but The Huffington Post isn’t her personal pulpet or a closed circle-jerk between her closest friends. I’m not denying the fact that her personal views have an effect on who gets to write columns, but as I said, there are a wide range of (mostly) liberal viewpoints available.
And your defective mind isn’t fixable at all.
Last time you went on for days about this long after everyone decided you were mentally ill and totally lost interest.
Floors yours for the next week to babble on uncontrollably. Don’t forget to quote the forged documents from Bormann’s Table Talk book.
Kieranfoy:
And here’s the other thread (took me half an hour to find it) on which I unburdened myself about Hitler:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/10/i_wish_i_could_have_seen_that.php
If you read carefully the comments of all the contributers to these threads, I think you’ll see that the question of Hitler’s religious beliefs is a lot more complex than can be expressed in a few internet soundbites.
If you’d actually bothered to pay attention to any of these discussions, Raven, you’d have noticed that I nowhere relied on the Table Talk, exactly because of doubts of its authenticity.
As per usual, rather than address evidence, you respond with vicious ad hominems. I don’t think you’re mentally ill, though; you’re just not very bright.
And now the lying sack of shit has corrected some of the more egregious errors, but doesn’t admit that any corrections were made, and comments are closed so no one can point it out.
@Kieranfoy, Aaron Baker:
Hitler’s religious leanings are beside the point – the important thing is that he was crazy.
@Csreid: Yeah, hear, hear.
Cosmos (#31), the appropriate reward for this kind of over-the-top verbal diarrhea is The Golden Banana!
Well, Kieranoy,
that’s not far from my own position: Hitler is important (unfortunately) for reasons that had little (if anything) to do with religion.
Gah, but after reading a bit of Coyne’s take on this, I’m once again infuriated at the thought of evil done because of an “atheist belief systems.”
To use the common leprechaun analogy:
People who actively, truly believe leprechauns exist will go out, try to hunt down the ends of the rainbows, maybe make a pilgrimage to Ireland, in the hopes of being rewarded with a big ole Pot O’ Gold™
Everyone else – the “aleprechaunists,” if you will – will just go about their lives. Lack of belief is not a motivator. I don’t understand why this isn’t abundantly clear to anyone who directs even the tiniest amount of brain power to the issue.
And that banana, of course, is an empty shell made from cheap cardboard and spray-painted to only *look* substantial…
There are also silver and bronze bananas, but the overwhelmng majority of these awards – which I have been handing out on my own so far – have been of the 24-carat variety.
Watch it, Raven, or in six months Aaron Baker will get pissy with you over some comment where he thinks you insulted him. Probably one of those comments where you showed he was full of shit.
Hitler was not an atheist; he was a lousy catholic.
I’m not worried. I googled Aaron Baker and he is a kid. The son of missionary parents.
Explains everything. His mind was warped by pros from birth and he can’t break out of his programming.
I skipped the thread knowing it would be the usual lies and nonsense. IIRC, he claims to be able to read the mind of a German dictator dead for 65 years and really knows what Hitler was thinking all along.
Probably he also has other delusions of adequacy such as being able to leap tall curbs with a single bound half the time.
Thing is, while Hitler’s religious views are kinda foggy, his follower’s views are plain, and that’s something Aaron Baker isn’t taking into account. Whether Hitler was faithful or not, the avergae Joe Smoe Nazi figured Hitler was sent by God himself, and that God wanted the ‘nferior’ people dead.
So, yea, Hitler’s beliefes aren’t relevant, but his follower’s are, and that’s a subtlety that seems to evade young master Baker.
@csreid
ALeprechaunists only don’t believe because they’re mad at leprechauns for not sharing their crappy stale oat and marshmallow cereal.
Well, csreid,
Atheism in isolation is one thing. When combined with other premises in an activist ideology, as in dialectical materialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, it was very much a motivator.
A crucial (and explicit) component of Soviet anti-religious policy, was the furthering of atheism: See, for example, from this standard 1985 reference work:
“1. Anti-Religious Policy of Party and State.
Party organizations are obliged to implement an elaborate system of measures for the strengthening of “atheist education” (CPSU Decrees of 1964 and 1971). Cadres for atheist work are trained, among others, in the Institute of Scientific Atheism, established 1964 in the Academy of Social Sciences of the CPSU Central Committee. To conduct atheist propaganda “on a wide scale” is a task set by the Program of the Communist Party (1961). The “freedom to indulge in cult practices” does not include the right to spread “religious propaganda.” Such a right was, in fact, provided for by the RSFSR Constitutions of 1918 and 1925, but it was revoked in 1929. Since then, only its opposite has enjoyed the protection of the Constitution, namely the “freedom of atheist propaganda” (Art. 52 1977 Constitution). This asymmetry reflects the anti-religious policy of party and state. But it would be wrong to conclude from it that “religious propaganda” is necessarily a criminal act. The law in question is ambiguous.”
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOVIET LAW (2nd ed., Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht, 1985)
Or see article Article 37 of the Albanian Constitution, banning religion entirely, in the interests of atheism:
“The State recognizes no religion, and supports atheistic propaganda in order to implant a scientific materialistic world outlook in people.”
Rightly or wrongly, Lenin & his ideological confreres thought atheism was “a natural and inseparable portion of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism. Our propaganda necessarily includes propaganda for atheism.” (from RELIGION, by Lenin) They were thus strongly motivated to promote atheism.
I think it can safely be said that there’s no necessary connection between atheism and persecution, and that atheism doesn’t motivate persecution in the absence of other propositions. But it seems incontrovertible to me that it nonethless played a role in persecutions carried on by Lenin other communist ideologues.
“I think it can safely be said that there’s no necessary connection between atheism and persecution, and that atheism doesn’t motivate persecution in the absence of other propositions. But it seems incontrovertible to me that it nonethless played a role in persecutions carried on by Lenin other communist ideologues.”
There’s no connection but I’m going to blame them anyway because I’m a tool!
Hitler himself never killed anyone. It was all his millions of willing followers, all Catholics and Lutherans.
Without his followers, Hitler would just be another loon, sitting in a bar babbling, and waiting for the internet to be invented so he could become a troll.
Like Aaron Baker, creepy, pathetic xian death cultist. Kid troll, lying, annoying people, and trying to destroy their lives with a malevolent brand of toxic xianity.
@Raven. Yup, ‘swhat I said. Dude’s a total smeghead.
Which is hardly a terrible thing by local standards, but he’s a stupid smeghead, which is the real crime.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/quotes_hitler.html
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/quotes_einstein.html
Too bad that the comment section was locked over the HP (I’m a member). Perhaps it didn’t take many comments until HP realized how much of it was wrong?
@Aaron Baker
I’m certainly no historian, but just from your post, it seems to me that the persecution was a result of the Marxist ideaology. Perhaps an argument could be made that persecution was indirectly a result of atheism, but only because of the unnecessary conflation of Marxism with atheism.
Or I could be totally wrong. I’ve had only minimal exposure to these kinds of things.
But anyway, we should probably continue in the endless thread. I never like derailed comment threads!
Raven: “I googled Aaron Baker and he is a kid. The son of missionary parents.”
Good Lord, Raven,
you’re even dumber than I thought. The name “Aaron Baker” is hardly unique. I’m 49 years old, once a Classics professor, now an attorney. My parents weren’t even religious, let alone missionaries.
Go back to playing with your kaka; you really have no place in an adult discussion.
Kieranfoy: “Thing is, while Hitler’s religious views are kinda foggy, his follower’s views are plain, and that’s something Aaron Baker isn’t taking into account. Whether Hitler was faithful or not, the avergae Joe Smoe Nazi figured Hitler was sent by God himself, and that God wanted the ‘[i]nferior’ people dead.”
I didn’t take that into account, Kieranfoy, because it wasn’t the subject of discussion. Hitler’s views were. Now that you’ve changed the subject: I suspect the views of the average Nazi are another complex issue, though I don’t doubt that most of them believed in God (I never maintained that Hitler was an atheist either). By the way, do you actually have some tabulation of Nazi attitudes that you’re relying on?
I don’t have that tabulation myself, but I will cite this passage from Christoper Browning’s book, Ordinary Men, about a German police battalion involved in massacres of Jews in Poland. Among the propaganda materials distributed to the “ordinary men” of the battalion was a pamphlet called “The Politics of Race.” According to Browning, who paraphrases it: “[t]he main threat to a healthy awareness of the need for territorial expansion and racial purity came from doctrines propagating the essential equality of mankind. The first such doctrine was Christianity, spread by the Jew Paul. The second was Liberalism . . . The third and greatest threat was Marxist bolshevism, authored by the Jew Karl Marx” (Browning, 2nd ed., p. 180).
Most Nazis (including Hitler) were (I’m sure)theists of one sort or another. But that Nazism was not Christian in its motivations, and indeed was in important respects anti-Christian, has been confirmed again and again by evidence like what I’ve just cited. Evidently the Nazi higher-ups didn’t think the rank and file would be too put off by a sneer at Christianity and “the Jew Paul.”
@ A. Baker:
But, before we go: I think you were responding to the post about aleprechaunists, but combining the ideas therein with the ideas of my post before that. The aleprechaunist post was talking about atheism in isolation, and so was Fitzgerald when he said that Dawkins wants to “breeze over the immense horrors brought about by some atheist belief systems.”
My point was that there is really no such thing as an “atheist belief system,” any more than there is a (to use another popular heathen analogy) methodology for not stamp collecting. Just thought I should clear that up.
@ Ing:
Those aren’t marshmallows. I’m not sure what they are, but marshmallows are soft and chewy, and that stuff is hard, and grainy. I’m not sure how artificial a food can get, but “imitation marshmallow” has got to be close to the boundary
Wow. Fitzgerald is so wrong, so very very wrong. With stupidity like that, it’s easy to see why pope nasty and the church still have their followers and defenders.
It seems, at least in Fitzgerald’s view, that pope nasty simply can’t commit a criminal act. Amazing.
@Caine, Fleur de Mal: Of course he can commit no wrong! He’s the mouthpiece of God!
That, I suppose, is why one can argue this is a skeptical matter. A fancy hat sets the Pope apart from justice, or even blame.
csreid:
“Prhaps an argument could be made that persecution was indirectly a result of atheism, but only because of the unnecessary conflation of Marxism with atheism.”
I don’t really disagree with this. There’s nothing necessary about the inclusion of atheism in a militant, intolerant ideology. I do think, though, that ANY proposition about the world to which people have a strong emotional commitment can then be used as a justification for mistreating others. There’s nothing to my mind inconceivable, say, about murderous vegetarians.
I won’t derail the thread further, except to say this: as an unbeliever of several years now, I’ve never been called a Christian death cultist before, and never suspected I might be. Raven, I take back what I said before: you are mentally ill. And Kieranfoy, for a while there, I thought we were having a serious discussion. Since you’ve sunk to Raven’s level, I won’t waste any further time on you; go back to Troll Central.
We were having a serious conversation.And you did sound like a smeghead. They’re not mutually exclusive.
Gee that is too bad. The xian kid Aaron Baker at least has a chance to break his programming and become a normal person.
At 49 you are frozen into a defective personality and won’t get out.
You should have stuck with that mental health treatment program. At this point, you will just get sicker and sicker and one day you will die and all 5 people who have the misfortune to know you will be relieved.
@raven, #3 “Hitler was a Catholic and a creationist. His millions of willing followers who did all the work and killing were Catholics and Lutherans.”
Not only was Hitler Catholic, his birthplace is also less than ten miles away from Ratzinger’s hometown. :D
OK, let’s see here…
Creating a false equivilency between actual, legallly recognised crimes that would be crimes whomever they were committed by, and the made-up category of ‘atheist crimes’ (AKA thought crimes) – check.
Seeking to blame a contemporary prominenet figure of an opposing school of thought for historical atrocities in which he/she had no part whatsoever – check.
Seeking to make massively innappropriate use of the judicial system as a weapon against dissenting views – check.
Citing the most emotive (erroneous) example they can concoct in order to whip their followers up into a frenzy – check.
Well, they say what goes around, comes around. Looks like there are some catholics with a hankering to bring the Inqusition back into fashion. Guess they are thrilled that Ratzi happens to serendipitously be Pope, what with his experience in the Convocation for the Maintainance of the Doctrine of the Faith…
The thing that Fitzgerald ignores is that Dawkins’ accusations against Cardinal Ratzi are regarding a *specific* act, for which there is documentary evidence. Accusing Dawkins of of “atheist crimes” makes about as much sense as accusing Fitzgerald (who is Irish) of terrorism for crimes against the British.
Oh, and while we’re at it, Hitler was a vegetarian, along with everything else.
Sort of like how everyone who’s not a physicist always refer to “particle physicists” when talking about quantum mechanics, as if they’re the only type of physicists that would understand that crazy, wacky stuff.
Ooooo
I love it when PZ says something to piss off Catholics. They usually make a much better class of troll. They seem on average, much more able to write a sentence in English that actually means something and they squawk so nicely when you poke them. Much better for keeping our claws sharp and our coats sniny.
@Otrame: Nah, fish oil for coats, not Catholics.
Raven,
While we’re on the subject of mental illness, I think you must suffer from a written version of Tourette’s Syndrome. Do your parents know you’re out of the basement and tapping away on their computer?
Let me sum it up. I make a substantive case. You ignore it and scream obscenities–climaxing (so to speak) with “Xian death cultist.”
I was joking before, but now I’m not so sure. You really do sound a bit unhinged.
On the Stalinist point, scholars of communist Russia will rightly tell you that Stalin’s politics are vastly different from Lenin and that Stalin removed the remaining Leninists from authority when he rose to power and overturned most of Lenin’s reforms. In fact, there was an entire movement of Leninist anti-Stalinist who were called Trotskyist, after Leon Trotsky, who formed international anti-stalinist organizations such as the ILO. The SWP of England is a communist group that still considers itself strictly Trotskyist. On the American side, American leftists were divided over Lenin, but the Socialist Party of America had a heavy anti-stalinist bent, whereas the Communist Party USA basically institued a Stalinist purity test, driving out many members. The majority of Marxist. contemporaries of Stalin considered Stalin to be unacceptable and to be distorting Marx’s views. This resulted in a huge gulf between the Socialist Party and the Communist Party within the US, whereas prior to Stalin, they had often worked together. This phenomena did not occur accross the board, so, unlike the US where most Anti-Stalinist Marxists still call ourselves socialists and are seperate from the Communist Party USA, in other nations, Anti-Stalinist Marxists are more apt to continue using the communist label as an identifier. Marxist does not equal Stalinist, nor does communist equal Stalinist. The German Communists, prior to being killed off by Hitler, were in particular especially critical of the Russian Revolution and Stalin.
On to the Hitler thing, Hitler does cite God numerous times in speeches and in his book. He was also incredibly fond of playing on pre-existing religious notions to further hate of targeted groups, including using Lutheran and creationist notions to suggest that Jews were the enemy and were agents of Satan. Hitler also utilized the long existing antisemetic sentiment spread by Martin Luther’s book “On Jews and Their Lies”. However, Hitler also used targeted eugenicist propaganda that relied less on religion and more on pseudoscientific racism. Hitler rose to power on anti-communist sentiment and used Marx’s ethinic Judaism and persuant atheism as part of his system of linking the undeserving. Nazism relied in large part on conspiracy theories, so the Jew, commie, atheist links worked well as propaganda. Commies were also seen as ‘anti-family’ and linked with feminists, who were also targeted. The fact that many atheists and feminists were also leftists and/or democracy supports (who Hitler also hated), worked well politically in presenting them as a giant anti-german conspiracy. Only Christian groups who actively resisted Hitler, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, were specifically targeted.
This is rather the limit of stupid. And not even on World Nut Daily or elicited by one of the Faux News Evil Clowns!
On anther note, bashing mentally ill people on a thread that mentions Hitler, who mass murdered them based on their ‘unfitness’ is pretty repulsive. No, brutal murders are not insane, they are not crazy, they are no more likley to have a mental illness than the rest of the population. Stigmatizing the mentally ill as violent does great harm, it causes people to be locked up without their consent and denied child custody, housing, education, medical care and employment. In the US, mentally ill people were sterilized for eugenics purposes as late as the 1980’s in some states, so maybe when discussing eugenics and genocide, you should fucking stop saying your opponents are ‘crazy’, ‘mentally ill’ ‘have tourettes’ etc.
Jerry Coyne now has a link to the ORIGINAL article.
Well the crazy are predictable. I predicted hours ago that you would just babble on uncontrollably and incoherently.
Since then that is all you have done.
Look, just make sure you have plenty of methamphetamine and whiskey and have another 3 day trollathon. I have better things to do then watch you go through your wacko with an internet connection act. The floor is really now all yours and this thread is trolled to death and over.
You have proved to everyone that you are, in fact, psychotic. But that won’t stop you.
Aaron Baker
I am unsure how your position on whether or not Hitler could be classed as an atheist has relevence to PZ’s post about Huffpo acting as a platform for Rory Fitzgerald to ‘Godwin’ away and try to assert that contemporary atheists are responsible for the atrocities of Stalinist communism and Nazi fascism.
Even if Hitler periodically used a form of pseudo-atheism to justify his genocidal policies, this does not make Nazism an atheist project, anymore than his various invocations of Christianity as a basis for anti-semitism make it a Christian movement.
Hitler was, most probably, insane. He was certainly an obsessive megalomaniac and genocidal racist. The nazism he in part created (along with his fellow travellers) could easily be argued to have much in common with organised religion. The same could be said of Stalinism. Both ideologies functioned by ascribing the status of an unassailable, unquestionable source of political, social and moral authority to an ideological construct.
Essentially, they created a religion sans an actual godhed, and replaced the deity with the idea of the Fatherland and the Communist Worker’s Utopia respectively. Both leaders then sought to directly identify this supposedly overriding moral imperative with their own person. The leader came to embody the state.
Looking at things this way, the idea that either ideology can be directly identified with contemporary atheism seems strange to say the least. Rory Fitzgerald’s ranting makes no logical sense whatsoever, and your ongoing line of discussion relating to the religious stance of Hitler and the Nazi party seems to be on a hiding to nothing in relation to the subject of the thread, unless of course you are actually arguing that an equivilency can be drawn between contemporary atheism and Nazism/Stalinism, and as such it is reasonable to put Dawkins (and, one assumes, all atheists) on trial for everything from the Gass Chambers to the Goulags.
Perhaps I am missing the obvious here, but would you mind explaining to me how going over the arguments pertaining to the relationship, or lack thereof, between atheism and nazism during the ’30s and ’40s contributes much of worth to the discussion relating to the patently ridiculous idea that Dawkin’s should be put on trial today for the legal non-category of ‘atheist crimes’?
@GRegory Greenwood: He probably got off topic. We all do that.
Hitler definitely seems like a creationist.
-Mein Kampf, vol. i, ch. xi
This passage could have come right out of a Hovind lecture. You’d have to do some impressive mental gymnastics to interpret this as anything other than the tripe creationists put out.
Kieranfoy @ 81;
Fair enough. Wandering off topic does indeed happen to us all, including yours truly. I was just hoping that he was not planning to hop on his somewhat threadbare hobby horse and derail the thread.
Sorry, Gregory Greenwood, I let myself fall victim to SIWOTI: Raven’s confident assertion of one of the dumber memes to appear on freethought blogs proved irresistible. I also had a pretty good idea of what Raven’s response would be: groundless assumptions and incoherent ranting; so I’m at fault for provoking that.
I do think it fair to ask you though: what of worth exactly does Raven’s comment “Hitler was a Catholic and a creationist” contribute to “the discussion relating to the patently ridiculous idea that Dawkin’s should be put on trial today for the legal non-category of ‘atheist crimes’?” Do Raven’s eructations ever prompt that sort question on this blog?
But I still apologize: I went off-topic and I knew what I was provoking.
I promise I’ll just say one more thing on this threadbare hobbyhorse, if you will, to Khantron: I went over the German in another text, similar to the one you mentioned, and I expressed my conclusions in http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/04/fafarman_likes_me_he_really_li.php, already cited.
As for the actual topic: of course it’s rediculous that Dawkins would be put on the same moral footing as the Pope for alleged atheist crimes–(whether one believes in “atheist crimes” or not). But I think you have to admit that this is so damned obvious, that there’s not much more to do but nod in agreement, and wonder why Arianna Huffington publishes some of the stuff she does. It’s also obvious that the crimes of Hitler, who (as I’ve repeatedly said) was NOT an atheist, would be irrelevant to any such discussion.
Well, it demonstrates that Hitler was no atheist, therefore his deeds aren’t atheist crimes. That might be it!
And with this, detrius (#68) win this thread’s Most Egregious non sequitur Award.
Yeah, but it only clouds the issue by suggesting (incorrectly) that Hitler’s crimes were religiously motivated. To try to make my own position as clear as possible: I don’t think religion, or anti-religion, or atheism played a significant role in Hitler’s crimes. So the comment was relevant but wrong.
By the same token then, simply to correct that comment, was not in my view to derail the thread. Putting red meat in front of Raven (though any disagreement from me is, for some reason, red meat to Raven) did derail the thread, and I admit I could have foreseen that.
Richard Dawkins was 4 when WWII ended. The likelihood that he cut out of pre-school to assist in genocide is slight. Admittedly he was 11 when Stalin died so he might have been complicit in some of Stalin’s horrors, but even then he would have been a minor and would not have been tried in an adult court…
People are responsible for their actions. If an alleged action is against the law then the courts are the appropriate venue to determine innocence or guilt. I realize I will be held accountable for what I do. I am not above the law. Nobody ought to be above the law. If I were to have acted the way Ratzi appears to have acted I would (assuming I lived long enough to be tried) have spent the rest of my life in prison. Maybe Ratzinger wasn’t in any way connected to this atrocity-it’s a possibility though I strongly doubt it-but someone, or more like several individuals in the hierarchy were aware, and they condoned these acts. In effect, because of their desire to suppress information that would have protected countless children, acted as procurers for the perpetrators. They need to be brought to justice. Now! If Ratzinger is in any way responsible he ought to be dealt with the same as any of the rest of us would be.
And as for the idea that Dawkins be arrested… What Fitzgerald absurdly is using to deflect attention from an egregious dereliction by members of the Church hierarchy of their responsibility to their parishoners is pure and simple collective guilt, something that they used quite effectively against the Jews for two millennia, a concept which in no small degree helped fire the ovens of the Holocaust. Catholics as a group are no more responsible for the Inquisition (which Ratzi led for several years) than atheists are for the horrors of Pol Pot. However, if individuals are aware of crimes against humanity and cover them up, then they must be brought to trial, regardless of who they are or what organization they belong to.
Robert H wrote:
“However, if individuals are aware of crimes against humanity and cover them up, then they must be brought to trial.”
The Pope’s conduct was even worse than awareness followed by a cover-up. The recent smoking gun letter shows that he guaranteed further sexual abuse under the auspices of his church by not allowing that priest to be defrocked.
There is, of course, not even the ghost of a parallel with Dawkins.
Aaron Baker @ 85;
Thank you for clarifying your position. I do not wish to come off as some kind of humourless ‘thread puritan’ who has a hissy fit over any slight deviation from that which I consider to be the appropriate parameters of the topic at hand, but the whole was-Hitler-an-atheist thing is a highly charged topic that can very easily send a thread into a tailspin that pretty much ensures that the original topic is lost in the crossfire (if I may so egregiously mix my metaphors). You must admit that you are…something of a known quantity in regard to your position on that particular topic.
As for Raven’s comment that “Hitler was a Catholic and a creationist”, I think that this was intended to demonstrate that, since Hitler was apparently a theist, it is a little unreasonable to lay the crimes of his regime at the feet of atheists and atheism, and thusly inappropriate to talk of prosecuting Dawkins for such so called ‘atheist crimes’. I fear that I know too little about Hitler’s personal theology or world view on religion to evaluate the accuracy of Raven’s statement, but I can see its relevence to the topic at hand as a means of refuting a fundamental element of Fitzgerald’s claims that the crimes of Nazism were atheist in nature. Since you yourself did not seem to be adopting the counter position that nazism was atheist, thus bolstering Fitzgerald’s position, I found it difficult to discern the linkage back from your argument to the topic at hand.
Gregory,
I should just have said that Hitler struck me as a complete red herring (how’s struck by a red herring for mixed metaphors?): neither an atheist nor some sort of theistic crusader–quite simply irrelevant to the very stupid argument Fitzgerald was making.
I took things too far, and I don’t think you’re a thread puritan for calling me on it.
Struck by a red herring… hmmm, have to find a way to work a fishmalk into that.
Regardless, I suppose we all agree on one thing, and that’s that Fitzgerald’s suggestion was fatuous.
Another question: was he merely being sarcastic? A lot of Pharyngulaic ire seems to be coming from the assumption that he was serious; he might have been employing a rhetorical device. A stupid one, yes, but rhetorical.
Kieranfoy,
Sheesh, have you read the piece in question?
I grant that anything not impossible is possible; I might break my wrist by tripping when I get up off my chair to get a drink, in the next minute or so…
Likely? Not so much.
A YouTube video by Nonstampcollector sums up the whole guilt by association meme that atheists somehow share some guilt over Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. Not as hilarious as most of the rest of his material, but worth a look (or at least send this link to the next smug smarmy religious nitwit who makes this asinine argument).
How many times do we have to say it, hitler was a christian.
http://atheism.about.com/od/adolfhitlernazigermany/a/HitlerJesus.htm
ooops I just posted this on the wrong thread above
Hitchens has hired a solicitor (lawyer) to explore the legalality of having the Pope arrested in Britain.
Geoff Berg interviewed him on KPFT last Friday, here’s the MP3, it begins around 30 minutes in.
http://archive.kpft.org/mp3/100416_150001pg.MP3
Aaron Baker @ 92;
I understand where you are coming from. In relation to your ballistic fish problem, may I suggest you invest in a Shield of Herring Deflection +5? Available from all good stockist. Limited time offer.
;-)
Fitzgerald’s rant is a tu quoque argument. “Maybe the Pope covered up child rapes and protected the rapists but atheists killed millions? Dawkins shouldn’t be upset about a little kiddy-diddling because ATHEISTS KILLED MILLIONS!”
This is simply not true. Read translations of Hitler’s speeches. He used the word ‘God’ more often than George Bush. His pronouncement that the Germans were chosen people protected by God is an obvious tactic to motivate people to do his bidding.
Whatever Hitler actually believed is unknowable because he was a manipulator and incessant liar, but he did argue from a theistic appeal to a god constantly in order to bolster his master race ideology.
Obviously it was the ‘christian’ god. He sure as hell wasn’t promoting judaism or islam.
I believe that the ferocity of Nazi anti-semitism was partly fueled by the fact that it was a competing ‘chosen people’ belief system.
Within a monotheistic construct, you can only have one ‘chosen people’, this is at the root of holy wars, and the holocaust was partly holy war in my opinion.
You kidding me? It was an hour before my bedtime. I didn’t need nightmares from the smug, sanctimonious asshattery.
Nazism was not Christian in its motivations, and indeed was in important respects anti-Christian
It’s perfectly Christian.
Just like Jesus talking about dividing people, even from their own families. He displayed psychotic mean-spiritedness (sane people don’t punish trees for not having fruit), and was consistently rude to his mother. He used and manipulated everyone he came across, like making sure he rides into town on an ass by stealing one first, or by roughing up a married couple because they didn’t hand over all of their money.
It’s a violent, despicable religion built around a violent, despicable man.
The few good things he says does not negate the fact that Jesus is an asshole.
So why shouldn’t Nazism come from Christianity? Why wouldn’t a manipulative, ill-tempered megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur come from Christianity, when the religion worships a manipulative, ill-tempered megalomaniac with delusions of grandeur? Who had made hating Jews a feature not a bug of its philosophy more than Christians?
Scooter and Aquaria:
I don’t want to participate in any further thead-derailments.
If you care to, pls read the 3 threads I referenced above, repeated here for your convenience:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/hitlers_library.php
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/10/i_wish_i_could_have_seen_that.php
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/04/fafarman_likes_me_he_really_li.php
Since the thread is already derailed (any mention of Hitler seems to do that…..)
Since people use the almost same facts to quibble over Hitler’s “Xtainity”, one might ask “How would Hitler (or any leader) have to behave so that you would accept or acknowledge that he did have Xtian beliefs and/or acted on Xtian beliefs?
Or, to rephrase it, which despots or totalitarians (if any) would you not dispute acted out of their Xtan beliefs?
I’ve heard Rory gets out speeding tickets by pointing to other people speeding. This blows the cop’s mind so bad, he can then drive away to speed some more.
Hypatia’s Daughter:
It would help me a great deal to accept Hitler as a Christian despot if:
1) he had not, as is well-documented, repeatedly expressed contempt for Xnty;
2) he had attempted to support or expand the power of the Catholic Church (or some other church) in Germany, rather than eliminating the Catholic political party (the Zentrum), shutting down parochial schools, and instigating criminal prosecutions and other harassment of Catholic (and other) clergy;
3) he had not tolerated official propaganda attacking Xnty (“the Jew Paul” and all that) and had not had associates like Alfred Rosenberg, whose anti-Xnty was quite pronounced, or like Himmler, who tried to revive a kind of pseudo-pagan religion;
4) he had not secretly ordered the T-4 program for the mass killing of the mentally and physically handicapped, knowing when he did that it would be vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church (already on record for its opposition to euthanasia) and by many Protestants (the program was secret for just this reason);
5) he had justified his antisemitism in Christian terms (the Jews as killers of Christ and of Christian children), rather than insisting on “scientific,” i.e. racist, antisemitism;
6) he had justified his militarist/imperialist aims in Christian terms, rather than in terms of Lebensraum, the spurious but secular idea that Germans were running out of space within Germany. (As to the last point, there may (for all I know) be references to “Godless communism” in Nazi anti-Soviet propaganda. More common, I think, is the notion of Bolshevism as a Jewish, and therefore pernicious, doctrine.)
Without what I’ve enumerated having happened, I’m inclined to say the available evidence favors regarding Hitler as a secular leader and Nazism as a secular, though not atheistic, phenomenon.
I would not dispute that Philip II of Spain or Francisco Franco were Christian despots–because of their active support of a favored Xn church, their oppression of that church’s enemies, and their personal commitment in each case to the form of Xnty they favored–very different from Hitler’s occasional (and cynical) public nods to Xnty.
The true scandal of the Christian churches in Nazi Germany is this: most German Christians, for the twelve years of Hitler’s regime, ranged in their attitudes from passive acquiescence to unrestrained enthusiasm for the regime (with more people, I think, expressing the latter). This fact doubtless owed a great deal to their fear and hatred of Godless Communism; but it also arose from their bellicose nationalism. From weakness and humiliation, Germany became for a while (thanks to Hitler) the mistress of Europe. Most Germans liked this state of affairs just fine; and it wasn’t until German armies started experiencing great defeats (like Stalingrad) that the regime began to lose popular support.
I’ve made my opinions about Christianity abundantly clear; and how I could ever be mistaken for a Christian apologist (as ‘Tis Himself knuckleheadedly persists in thinking), is utterly mysterious to me.
Plonk Baker. He’s a historical ignoramus. He’s completely annoying. He’s clogging up the threads. In other words, the image of a apologist.
Shorter Jeep-Eep:
I don’t know what I’m talking about; but look, I can spell “ignoramus.” Yay!
Another interesting take: HHDQ > SGD
http://paleoerrata.blogspot.com/2010/04/agnostic-secular-humanist-morality-hhdq.html