PZ is afraid that Obama isn't going to be different enough. He has a post saying Obama is the "same as the old boss" just because Rick Warren is going to deliver Obama's inaugural invocation:
Obama had a chance to set a non-sectarian, progressive tone at this event, and he has chosen to kow-tow to the wretched evangelical movement.
Alas, that wretched evangelical movement represents a lot of voters and the alternative candidate, John McCain, had been paling around with far less savory evangelicals, like Rev. John Hagee.
I'm no fan of Rick Warren, as is apparent in my past posts on him, but I do think he represents an evolution away from the more destructive insanities of the fundagelicals. Even Dan Dennett had some compliments for Warren (see my post "Dealing with religion in a respectful manner" for Dennett's TED talk video on Warren and religion).
There was a Beliefnet interview where Warren equated gay marriage to incest, pedophilia and polygamy and he thought that without Prop 8, conservative preachers could be prosecuted for hate crimes. Rick Warren is not a liberal or even a moderate. He doesn't believe in evolution and he can say really dumb things:
SAM HARRIS: Then God also likes smallpox and tuberculosis.
RICK WARREN: I would attribute a lot of the sins in the world to myself.
SAM HARRIS: Are you responsible for smallpox?
However, unlike many big evangelical names, he doesn't exploit the hot-botton culture war issues in his books. He doesn't refuse communion to people who vote Democratic. He is apolitical in the pulpit. He has his views on those issues but he is more concerned with his message about "getting right with God," not with the Republican party. As such the choice helps to depoliticize those hot-button issues. Also, Warren never endorsed Obama. He just didn't endorse McCain either. He is consciously apolitical and tries to be non-divisive. Thus it is shrewd of Obama to choose him for inaugural invocation.
But I wonder if Obama will regret that choice once he hears Warren's actual inaugural invocation?
I still hope and believe Obama will bring some needed change, but I admit it's not going to be as much as I'd really like to see. That kind of change will require a big change in the American voters.
Yet, so far it looks like Obama will force more change on Warren than Warren will on Obama. Consider, one thing that happened as a result of picking Warren is that we all found out how much of a bigot Warren was and how quickly he tried to hide it.
Before the pick Rick Warren explicitly banned "unrepentant" gays from membership in his church on his website. After the media controversy, that statement on his website went away. The Saddleback website posting that: "Someone unwilling to repent for their homosexual lifestyle would not be accepted as a member at Saddleback" was removed.
Maybe Obama knows what he's doing -- he seems to have picked up a right-wing theocrat he can easily manipulate.
UPDATE 2 I was wrong.
Some time after Warren removed the comments about gays not being accepted in his church, he put up a video at his Saddleback website claiming the media were lying about his past statements. He claimed that he never equated gay relationships with incest or pedophilia. Except, he did. I'm not sure what Warren's malfunction is, but he is also on video saying gay relationships were like a brother and sister marrying, or a an adult marrying a child. So, either he doesn't know that those are incest and pedophilia or he has forgotten saying them. What he didn't do was use the words incest and pedophilia, just examples of them.
In an additional segment, he says that "evil" gays who complained about him (and who couldn't possibly be Christian themselves?) are afraid of Christians and have Christ-o-phobia. I wonder how Andrew Sullivan feels about that?
I was okay with Warren before this, but now he's just gotten too stupid. Obama does have to throw this guy under the bus. I knew Warren would crash and burn eventually, but I had no idea it would be so soon.
Apparently you just can't trust any religious leaders to be either sane or intelligent.
UPDATE 3
Here, thanks to Ed Brayton, is Rachel Maddow doing a nice take down on Warren:
A question is a lie when it is loaded with hidden assumptions and when important premises are buried in code words and euphemisms and when it doesn't reflect the reality of the situation it pretends to address. In that context then, the questions that Rev. Rick Warren asked at his Saddleback Civic Forum on the presidency were mostly lies.
There has been a concerned citizens initiative, cosponsored by lots of scientific institutions, representing over 125 million Americans that have been calling for a science debate. Alas, instead of that debate we are getting yet another religious debate that just muddies the waters and makes secularists like the Rev. Barry W. Lynn declare that Barack Obama should not have agreed to do this.
I don't agree with Lynn that Obama should have refused this debate, but I do think, as a partial secularist, Obama got screwed by the dishonest questions Warren asked. Don't underestimate the audience, Barry, we can see how Rick Warren screwed Obama over.
Rick Warren's questions played directly into the talking points McCain has been spouting on the campaign trail for months. He gave simplistic, almost infantile answers and the bleating sheep at Saddleback loved it. His answers were mostly sound bites. They were loaded with key words and phrases that were calculated to resonate with an evangelical audience. There was not much thought or substance to his answers. Since the sheep are only trying to decide which of the two is the more "Jesusier" McCain won on that score. However, I hope that is only a minority opinion nationally and that for those outside the evangelical shadow the questions and answers will ultimately damage McCain and Warren more than they did Obama.
Warren is slowly revealing himself to the nation as just another religious huckster without any kind of real integrity.
I was disappointed to see that neither candidate pointed out just how loaded Rick Warren's questions were. One of the more glaring examples of a dishonest question was the one Warren asked about abortion:
... abortion; 40 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. As a pastor, I have to deal with this all of the time, all of the pain and all of the conflicts. I know this is a very complex issue. Forty million abortions, at what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?
My answer would shock Warren's evangelical audience because my answer is "never." There is no point in time when a baby gets all human rights. Does Warren think that a fetus has a right to drink alcohol and vote? If there is a single point in time when we get rights then shouldn't that include all the rights? Warren's question is a fraud, loaded with simple minded evangelical assumptions. Warren should never have used the word "rights" in plural because there is only one right in question, the right of a fetus to continue living and developing. To use the plural is to subtly lie and suggest a fetus is more human than it is. It simply can't do anything else besides grow and develop. There is also a conflict between this right of the fetus versus the rights, plural, of the mother. Warren's question totally ignores the other human being, the mother; what about her rights?
The real question Warren should have been asking was "when do the rights of a fetus supercede the rights of the woman carrying the fetus?" Or, more precisely, "when does a fetus' right to continue living and developing supercede the rights of the woman carrying the fetus to deal with whatever issues her pregnancy introduces into her life by terminating that pregnancy?"
Ask the question that way and suddenly you're dealing with more nuance. What issues exactly is the woman dealing with? Is her life in danger from the pregnancy? Was she raped? Is she a teenage girl who doesn't even want her parents to know she got pregnant?
Obama really disappointed me when he failed to see that the question itself was a loaded, dishonest fraud. He just tried to cop out of it by saying "whether you're looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade."
Bullshit, it's not a theological or scientific question, it's a legal question about the rights of two parties that are in conflict. Science can inform that question, but Warren's theology should not inform our legal position. Obama gave up an important secular principle by even suggesting that one's theological views have any baring on the answer.
I think anybody who tries to deny the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion issue, I think, is not paying attention. So that would be point number one.
Great, but why, Mr. Obama, don't you have the balls to tell Warren he did just that by framing the question in the way Warren did?
I am pro-choice. I believe in Roe v. Wade, and I come to that conclusion not because I'm pro-abortion, but because, ultimately, I don't think women make these decisions casually. I think they wrestle with these things in profound ways, in consultation with their pastors or their spouses or their doctors or their family members.
But Warren never mentioned mothers, did he? He wanted them to become as invisible as possible. So, Obama just answered the question Warren should have asked without pointing out what was wrong with the original question.
... how do we reduce the number of abortions? The fact is that although we have had a president who is opposed to abortion over the last eight years, abortions have not gone down and that is something we have to address.
This is a worthy point, but it is an old saw. The problem is that if it is just about reducing the number of abortions then the evangelicals are right to make abortion illegal. That will reduce them the most. The problem is that I don't think this should be the most important goal in our policy.
Obama simply panders to this fraud telling us that he wants limits on late-term abortions, if there is an exception for the mother's health. He tells us how he respects pro-life views:
... if you believe that life begins at conception, then -- and you are consistent in that belief, then I can't argue with you on that, because that is a core issue of faith for you.
What I can do is say, are there are ways that we can work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, so that we actually are reducing the sense that women are seeking out abortions. And as an example of that, one of the things that I've talked about is how do we provide the resources that allow women to make the choice to keep a child. You know, have we given them the health care that they need? Have we given them the support services that they need? Have we given them the options of adoption that are necessary?
That can make a genuine difference.
Obama is right here, but that point isn't going to sink in for the evangelicals because Obama just pandered to a fraud by offering another fraud. He talked about the rights of women to a man who never asked about the mothers, who quite nakedly ignored them in his question and missed the whole point in this controversy: This is about two entities and their conflicting rights.
What I think is good about Obama's answer is that providing resources that allow women to keep children, give them the health care and support services that they need, is that this improves the quality of our next generation of children. That old saying, "the children are our future," is true. They are a product we produce that is ignored by estimates of our gross national product, our GNP, the total market value of all the goods and services produced by a nation during a specified period. Yet they will be selling their services in the job market and they should be taken into account. If that policy helps reduce abortions it is only a side effect, not the real purpose of the policy. To suggest that it is, well, that was Obama's fraud.
McCain's answer to the same abortion question, like George Bush's before:
At the moment of conception. I have a 25-year pro-life record in the Congress, in the Senate. And as president of the United States, I will be a pro-life president. And this presidency will have pro-life policies. That's my commitment. That's my commitment to you.
And that was it. Warren then asked McCain to define marriage and dropped the subject of abortion. But think how McCain would have struggled if the question were the one Obama answered, but didn't actually hear: "When do the rights of a fetus supercede the rights of the woman carrying the fetus?"
McCain's answer: at the moment of conception the fetus' rights supercede all the rights of the mother to terminate the pregnancy?
Maybe he wouldn't give the same answer if he had been asked the real question. When Obama didn't challenge the question he guaranteed that McCain would be asked the fraud question.
If Obama were really smart he might have asked pastor Rick this question:
That's only one example of a dishonest question. If nothing new grabs my attention I may write about some of the others in my next posts.
Dan Dennett gave the above talk as a response to Warren. However, Dennett doesn't really address Warren's talk but rather he addresses the subject of religion and Rick Warren's book, "The PurposeDriven Life." In many ways that book, as far as I can tell from Dennett's use of quotes, seems to betray the same abysmal ignorance of evolution I wrote about in my previous post about Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort.
Note how Dennett first introduces us to his own understanding of religion as a powerful set of social institutions that are subject to natural selection, like the cow, and that have, also like the cow, been influenced by human tinkering. He then compliments Rick Warren for his tinkering with religion. Dennett calls it a "brilliant book," and a redesign of traditional religion.
At no point does Dennett call Warren ignorant, but that charge is still heavily implied. Dennett does it by calling Intelligent Design a fraud and then pointing out that Warren endorses Intelligent Design, Warren perhaps even believes in Noah's flood and creationism. I also doubt whether Warren thinks he is "redesigning" Christianity, but I'm pretty sure the facts will bare out Dennett's view. Religion, when you focus on metaphors and symbolic meaning as Warren did in his talk, teaches whatever a believer wants to be believe. It just depends on how the believer cherry picks it.
Also note how it is only towards the end of his talk, after Dennett has explained his view of religion and then heaped on the compliments, that Dennett gets into what he sees as flaws in the book. He starts by merely saying, "I have some problems with the book... I don't think some of the bits are true." These problems then turn out to be monsterously significant no matter how much Dennett down plays them. Warren's book discourages scientific thinking, it argues against evolution and for intelligent design and then the book uses arguments like "don't argue with the devil, he's better at it than you," thus discouraging reason itself.
I can't say if what Dennett did was fair to Warren's book, I haven't read it, perhaps the quotes are taken out of context? I also wonder if Warren would object Dennett's ideas about teaching the "facts" of every religion to our children. If Christianity is true it should be able to stand on it’s own two feet when compared with other religions. I suspect Warren thinks he has studied other religions enough, but I'll bet it was a heavily spun "Christian" education in the "facts" of other religions that Warren got. I expect him to be as ignorant of other religions as he is ignorant of the theory of evolution.
Dennett doesn't have to explain much about the problems he sees in Warren's book because the TED audience is already clued in. This isn't the first time Dennett has spoke at TED. It was, I think, Rick Warren's first time at TED, and maybe his last. I've only found this one 2006 TEDtalk by Warren and I'm not sure he will return for another.
The heart of Warren’s message, which is that you can find purpose (and meaning and significance) in helping people, was not harmed by Dennett's talk, in fact, Dennett commended Warren for that part. Yet, if you think about the implications of what Dennett has said in the past, and hinted at here by reminding us of viral memes and the lancetfluke, certain aspects of Warren's religion still have that "fluke-like" quality of hijacking another organism for the benefit of the fluke.
When Dennett first talked about viral memes and lancet flukes the most comparable religious phenomena at the top of everyone's mind were the Islamic, Jihadist hijackers who crashed planes into the twin towers on 9/11. Just like the ant after its brain has been commandeered by a tiny parasite, a lancet fluke, the Jihadists did something suicidal for the benefit of another "organism," if we can think of a religion as a kind of cultural super-organism.
However the ant that climbs a blade of grass and waits to get eaten does so in order to get itself into the stomach of a sheep or cow in order to complete the reproductive cycle of the parasite. But what good did the Jihadists do for their religion? Maybe when such suicidal and combative behavior helped spread the religion it did some good, but it is more likely a maladaptive behavior now. The net result was the Taliban will likely be destroyed and that much damage has been done to Islam's reputation.
Dennett actually thinks that religion often serves a useful social and cultural function by bringing out just the kind of behaviors that Rick Warren wanted to preach on. Religion survived and spread because it was, at least at one time, an aid to survival. This is religion as a product of evolutionary psychology, based on aspects of human nature favored by natural selection over many thousands of years.
Religious people were favored by natural selection, and let's not forget artificial selection since heretics could get burned, because the religious tended to survive better. Religion is not so much parasitic, but rather symbiotic, conferring advantages on those who are infected. Recall how Dennett ended his earlier talk about the ant and the lancet fluke:
And, as with germs, the trick is not to try to annihilate them. You will never annihilate the germs. What you can do, however, is foster public health measures, and the like, that will encourage the evolution of avirulence. That will encourage the spread of relatively benign mutations of the most toxic varieties.
Dennett seems to consider Warren one of the more benign mutations of religion and not the most toxic type. In some respects I think he's right. Warren seems to be the up and coming new voice for the evangelical movement in politics and so far he isn't as bad as the old guard were, by that I mean people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. After seeing that both Obama and McCain showed at Warren's Saddleback church for what was essentially the first presidential debate and how friendly Warren got with each candidate I'm pretty sure Warren will become as much, if not more so, a fixture in future politics as Falwell and Robertson ever were. It looks like for those who care about politics we're going to have to start watching this guy carefully.
Here is Rick Warren's TEDtalk:
Working backward through Warren's talk, and not being as gracious and polite as Dan Dennett, I note how at the end Warren seems to shift away from the standard Christianity I was raised with. I think it's Warren's version that is more unbiblical than the version I rejected. In what verse of scripture did Jesus teach any of what Rick Warren was telling the people at TED? Warren says things like, "God smiles when you be you," and, "God gets pleasure watching you be you." (But, of course, it's not about you.) Did anyone ever ask, "is God smiling down on Dan Dennett when Dan is being the ultra atheistic Dan Dennet?" Did God wire Dan Dennett to be an atheistic philosopher?
When the ancients were building the Tower of Babel to "make the world a better place," was God smiling down on them and thinking how happy he was about that tower? If he was, then why destroy the tower and confuse their languages? Was God smiling down on the people he destroyed with a world-wide flood? The God of the Bible seems very unhappy with people just being people and doing things like worshiping golden calves or preaching the wrong gospel. Is he smiling down at all the people he condemns to hell because they were being what they were wired to be?
The symbolism of "what's in your hand" seems to be the kind of loose metaphoric, symbolic thinking that allows a believer to find whatever they want to be believe in the Bible. Then you can more easily cherry pick it and stretch it into all sorts of new shapes and meanings.
And is it about trying to be good, or is it about actually being good? I ask because I suspect that people like Tomás de Torquemada, the first Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition was trying to do good. President Bush was probably trying to do good when he authorized unlawful interrogation methods. If you think you can do good without spending a lot of time learning about how the world and people really work you're deeply misguided.
Then there were the odd comments like "I never met a pastor in it for the money." Well, I guess that Rick Warren never met Peter Popoff, Robert Tilton or Benny Hinn (which is actually quite probable since Warren isn't yet a televangelist or Republican and so he isn't hanging with that crowd). However, I wonder if when Rick Warren does met the other rich preachers whether he'd be able to tell if they are in it for the money. Then there was that old and moldy line, "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist" (even Kirk Cameron used that line) and even a hint at Pascal's Wager, "Everybody is betting their life on something."
As far as the whole concept of a "purpose driven" life goes, it strikes me that the idea of some singular purpose is flawed from the get go. Human beings have more than one purpose, and none of them require any God or religion. Today I'm writing this blog post and even this act serves multiple purposes. On one level I'm sharing information in the hopes of educating others, on another level I'm doing this for myself, educating myself about how the world and people work, on another level I'm trying to get noticed by lots of people because I want to write professionally, for money. I don't have to succeed in each purpose or goal to gain something that way.
Perhaps what Warren is really talking about is some supposed "cosmic purpose" for human life. However, whatever Warren means, this is obviously where the "brain hijacking" that Dennett's metaphor describes takes place. This is where, because it's not about you, your goals are subverted into achieving the goals of the social organism, the religion.
When Warren gives a million dollars to the poor, the AIDS victims, whatever, those people will remember it was also his religion which he claims instructed him to do it. That religion will then be deemed valuable to the person helped. Look around at the hospitals, the soup kitchens, asylums etc.. You will see many are Baptist Hospitals, Methodist Hospitals, Jewish Hospitals, Catholic Hospitals, etc., etc. "Where are the Atheist's hospitals?" many ask. There are rebuttals to that loaded question, but there is also a grain of truth to it. Religions often actively promote their good works loudly, they've been doing that since before Christianity existed. In ancient Egypt we find they left, in their tombs, resumes of a sort to provide their gods with information about the good deeds of the dead. They give us information on what the ideal for ethical values was perceived to be, even if this ideal was not always achieved. Protecting the weak, giving bread to the hungry, respecting parents, etc., all the supposed good Jesus would have preached was believed to be good by the Egyptians too, and it was also done for the gods sakes.
In ancient cultures, religion and medicine and charity were more heavily linked. The earliest known institutions that attempted to provide health care were Egyptian temples. Greek temples dedicated to the healer-god Asclepius might admit the sick, who would wait for guidance from the god in a dream. The Romans adopted this system also.
Part of what we have here is an image issue, or a propaganda issue, who puts out the humanitarian efforts? Do they come more from religious faith? Is it one of the positive fruits of a good religion? It may not convince you to believe in Christianity to know that Rick Warren gives 90 percent of his money to charity, but it may motivate you to, as Dan Dennett has said before, believe in belief.
It's not just the minds of believers that are hijacked, if you pay taxes and you're an atheist, then your money is hijacked too by things like the faith-basedinitiativeprogram. These programs funnel federal tax dollars to local religious groups to help them provide services to the poor, to addicted persons and to others in need of support and religion gets the credit even though you, a non-believer, helped pay for it.
In spite of the religious label, most religious hospitals are more public than most people realize. They get revenue from Medicare, Medicaid, county appropriations, investments, and only a small part from charitable contributions that are not necessarily religious. While the 90 percent of Warren's book sales given to charities will, I imagine, do much good it is in the end a drop in the bucket compared to all the charity that goes down in this world and I don't think Warren will become another Norman Borlaug.
It's not too hard to name two atheists who have both given more than Rick Warren; Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. Warren Buffet is the world’s second richest man and he gave $31 billion (not million) to Bill Gates' "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation." However, I don't think either of them is giving 90 percent... maybe, what else can you do with tens of billions of dollars? Even if Gates and Buffet did give more than 90 percent they probably aren't living like Rick Warren, driving an old car, not taking a salary and such.
The point of all that is that Rick Warren's charity isn't really that impressive to me, and neither is the history of religion as a charitable institution nor Rick Warren's idea about purpose, meaning and significance being found in what we can do for others.
What does interest me, what even impresses me, is how Rick Warren has used his book and life style to become the newest big voice in evangelical politics. Even Dan Dennett is trying to be nice to the guy. While he isn't endorsing any candidates yet (as far as I can tell) he is shaping the opinions of both in ways I don't like. But I'll say more about that in a later post.
Questions to think about in the meantime are how Rick Warren tries to understand the nature of the world in which we are living. Does he see it as a world of miracle, magic and divine intervention, not a world of order, natural law and precise mathematical formulas that will enable us to predict with a degree of accuracy the evolutionary pathways of AIDS, poverty and political decisions? He may know that we can send spacecraft to the moon and to the planets because we know the laws by which such things as motion and gravity operate, but does he know that we also have insight into the problems we all want to solve?
Will Rick Warren carry forward the same misunderstandings and mistakes that have led to things like abstinence-onlysex education and suppressing information about birth control. Will he, just like the Christian right of yesterday, take life as an absolute regardless of the consequences. Regardless of the life of the mother? Regardless of the quality of life Terry Schiavo did not have?
Then why did Nazi soldiers ware belt buckles inscribed with "Gott mit uns," which translates to "God is with us."
I caught the tail end of Bill O'Reilly's interview of Richard Dawkins. Billo's arguments were remarkably stupid and clueless, like, "I'm a Catholic and that's truth to me." He also made the tired old claim about Stalin and Hitler being atheists and thus tried to stereotype atheists as immoral.
What makes the "Hitler was an atheist" claim so clueless is the fact that there is such overwhelming evidence against it. Just type the words "Hitler, atheist" into goggle and you get 928,000 sites listed and at least most of the first ones provide evidence that Hitler called himself a Christian. It takes an incredibly clueless sucker to believe Hitler was an atheist today when the facts can be easily checked.
Sam [Harris] is overlooking the 20th century. Because the truth of the 20th century is more people were killed in the 20th century by atheist governments than all Christian ideas throughout history combined. When you look at the godless communism, and Nazism, which in itself we’re the ruler—tens and tens of millions, maybe a hundred million people were killed in the 20th century by atheists, not by believers. So yes, you can go back to the Crusades, and they were wrong. They were flat out wrong. But let’s take the most recent history. Atheists were what caused the most people—Stalin was an atheist, Mao was an atheist, Hitler was an atheist. He was an occultist, actually. And, and so let’s just make sure that history is told.
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.... When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom to-day this poor people is plundered and exploited." - Adolf Hitler, in his speech in Munich on 12 April 1922
German Christian Movement Badge. Hitler backed The German Christians movement (DC) with the party's organizational support.
"We are a people of different faiths, but we are one. Which faith conquers the other is not the question; rather, the question is whether Christianity stands or falls.... We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity... in fact our movement is Christian. We are filled with a desire for Catholics and Protestants to discover one another in the deep distress of our own people." -Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Passau, 27 October 1928, Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf
Note the "Cross of Christ" standing atop the Swastika, indicating its higher supremacy.
"We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out." - Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933
Hitler Youth Day Badge 1933
"National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary it stands on the ground of a real Christianity.... For their interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against a Bolshevist culture, against atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for a consciousness of a community in our national life... These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles! And I believe that if we should fail to follow these principles then we should to be able to point to our successes, for the result of our political battle is surely not unblest by God." - Adolf Hitler, in his speech at Koblenz, to the Germans of the Saar, 26 Aug. 1934
Nazi Army (Heer) chaplain's hat with silver Christian cross.
"God the Almighty has made our nation. By defending its existence we are defending His work...." - Adolf Hitler, in a radio address, 30 Jan. 1945
Priests giving the Nazi salute. Atheists have been the targets of a vicious smear campaign for years that uses big lies, illogical arguments and Orwellian manipulations. It has been highly effective and according to a University of Minnesota study, atheists are America’s most distrusted minority. Atheists rank even lower on the charts than Muslims, immigrants, homosexuals, and every other minority group. Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry. Bill O'Reilly, Rick Warren, Ann Coulter and many of the media's Christian spokespersons claim to believe Adolf Hitler was an atheist. Do they know something we don't?
Hitler's claim to be a Christian might have been a lie, in which case the Christian followers of Hitler were clueless suckers. And we can't say for sure that Bill O'Reilly, Rick Warren and Ann Coulter believe the things they say about Hitler's atheism. So, they are either idiots or liars, or perhaps both.
"Another indication of Hitler's beliefs about religion comes from his private library of numerous books. Although most of Hitler's books came as gifts from writers and publishers, those where he penciled and underlined sections reveal, not only the books that he read, but also those that he commented on and had an interest in. Timothy W. Ryback, who examined Hitler's books, found more than 130 books devoted to spirituality and religion including the teachings of Jesus Christ. Some of the titles included, Sunday Meditations; On Prayer; A Primer for Religious Questions, Large and Small; Large Truths About Mankind, the World and God; a German translation of E. Stanley Jones's 1931 best seller, The Christ of the Mount; and a 500-page work on the life and teachings of Jesus, published in 1935 under the title The Son: The Evangelical Sources and Pronouncements of Jesus of Nazareth in Their Original Form and With the Jewish Influences. Ryback also found a leather-bound tome -- with WORTE CHRISTI, or "Words of Christ," embossed in gold on the cover -- According to Ryback, it "was well worn, the silky, supple leather peeling upward in gentle curls along the edges. Human hands had obviously spent a lot of time with this book.... I scanned the book for marginalia that might suggest a close study of the text. A white-silk bookmark, preserved in its original perfection between pages 22 and 23 (only the portion exposed to the air had deteriorated), lay across a description of the Last Supper as related by Saint John. A series of pages that followed contained only a single aphorism each: 'Believe in God' (page 31), 'Have no fear, just believe' (page 52), 'If you believe, anything is possible' (page 53), and so on, all the way to page 95, which offers the solemn wisdom 'Many are called but few are chosen.'"
We know what books were in Hitler's library, and it contained plenty of Christian theology and those books had notes in the margins, in Hitler's hand, indicating he'd read them and thought about them a lot. The evidence is there and if you can look at all that evidence, the words Hitler wrote and said, the Christian symbolism of the Nazis, etc. and still say Hitler was an atheist, then you are willfully ignorant and simply prefer your delusions to reality.
