Religion is Convenient for Those Uncomfortable with Questioning

[thucythucy]

112. Hitler ate sausages? I never knew.

Seriously, though, yes, this strident Christianity is there in the 25 points. Well below the calls to "nationalize all trusts" and for "the confiscation of all war profits" and "profit sharing in all large industries"--none of which were ever taken seriously by Hitler or his inner circle post 1933. The only one of his henchmen at all serious about this "second revolution" was Roehm, who was of course purged in 1934.

If the twenty-five points makes the Nazis a "Christian" Party, then one might as well declare Hitler and his followers "socialists"--since they also kept the original name of the party--"National Socialist German Workers Party." This of course is the justification right wingers like Ann Coulter use to insist that the Nazis were on the extreme left, not the extreme right. Personally, I think Hitler's "Christianity" is up there with his "socialism" as a genuine belief, but from what you've posted I think you already know that.

As for weighing or trying to balance the positive versus the negative impacts of specific religions or religion in general, I don't know how that's even remotely possible. One could just as easily try to balance the good and bad outcomes of atheism. To ask: what good have atheists done in the world that counterbalances, let's say, the millions who died in Stalin's slave labor camps, or the killing fields of Kampuchea? One can at least point to religious architecture, music, literature--to Bach, Raphael, Michelangelo. Have you read any "social realist" literature? Seen Stalin's contribution to the Moscow skyline, or the blocks of buildings in the former East Berlin (commonly referred to by the locals as Brezhnev Baroque)? We've had maybe ten thousand years of religious thought and belief to assess, imposed or otherwise, as opposed to less than a hundred years of society-wide atheism as manifested in the various experiments with Marxism or Marxism-Leninism or Maoism. One might argue that twenty years of Stalin produced about as many corpses as a centuries' worth of religious war, but that would be both crass and unverifiable--so simplistic as to be useless, especially in the context of our politics today.

Nor can I see how one can reasonably tease out what is the direct result of religion, as opposed to being an ancillary to economic or political or social factors. The same works, by the way, for the positive as well as the negative. Would Martin Luther King Jr. or Mohandas Gandhi have been as courageous, had they not had a religious tradition as the context in which to do their work? We have no way of knowing. Would their societies have needed their courage to reform, without religion? Again, impossible to know. So you see, I tend to be an agnostic in matters of history as well as theology. I just thought, when I jumped into this thread, that someone should raise the points I was trying to raise.

And I think that, since we all live in an actual, real world in which religion exists, it makes more sense as progressives to align ourselves with religious progressives, rather than to cast them off as intellectual sloths and troglodytes, as seems to be the case with some of the threads posted here. I have no problem with castigating RWNJs for their extreme hypocrisy (at the very least), for instance in the way they've swallowed whatever Trump dishes out. But I assume most of the people who post here, and probably most of those who read the posts, are in rough agreement with the overall progressive agenda--which includes a strict separation of church and state. So the back and forth here about how having some sort of religious or faith outlook almost inevitably makes one out to be a dolt (or not) seems to me counterproductive.

Probably I should just stay away from the "Religion" forum, which seems so often to come down to this back and forth. My bad for taking this all so seriously.

Best wishes.