I realize that there exists a large number of Americans who feel deprived for missing the thrill of joining Bull Connor in his seething hatred of The Different. Overjoyed by the idea of finding a vulnerable class of people to torment, our latter-day George Wallaces are thriving from Tennessee to Wellesley. In the latter case, people no doubt were already infuriated that students were brought to a mosque. I mean, a Christian gospel concert is acceptable, and I imagine even the idea of a Jewish synagogue trip was given grudging tolerance. But the fact that a few students voluntarily got up and joined in prayers sent them over the edge. If any of these mental midgets had any real measure of courage, I’d fear for the safety of any school or mosque personnel.
Meanwhile, Pope Benedict XVI, a Hitler Youth alumnus, bravely told the Queen of England:
We can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.
I also recall the [Churchill government’s] attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives.
As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a ‘reductive vision of the person and his destiny’
I realize that anyone refusing to join the Hitler Youth during Benedict’s childhood would display titanic moral courage. It’s a shame that titanic moral courage isn’t a requirement to lead the Catholic Church. These days, any relation with morality seems to be optional.
But to compare people who question the package of tax breaks, preferential treatment, fearful tiptoeing, and other privileges awarded religious enterprises to a genocidal mass psychosis is putrid. The fact that a Hitler Youth alumnus told this to an aging hereditary figurehead of a failed empire seems appropriate. The fact that this is deemed less significant than the outrage of any children learning about Islam doesn’t.
Since Earth is our Home
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p>We are Children
Of one Father, sharing one Sky
Sheltering in the same air, warmed by the same sun.
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p>We are Children
Of one Mother, sharing one Earth
Breathing the same air.
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p>We walk together in time
All of us mortal, sharing a certain death
With only one another for company.
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p>We are Together on the long road.
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p>cDeborah Sirotkin Butler 2010
I like how you call for religious tolerance in one sentence while disparaging the head of the worlds largest religion in another. Haven’t you learned anything from Jon Stewart, aren’t we going to commit ourselves as a country to stopping the Hitler comparisons? Seriously dude implying Benedict is a Nazi is about as accurate as calling Barack Obama a socialist or a Muslim. Yes he had a Muslim father, yes he was registered at one point to the IL New Democrats, a labor based social democratic local political party backing Danny Davis against Daley in 94′, and yes he lived near Bill Ayers! If you recall every youth in Bavaria was forced into the Hitler youth because, if you can fathom this, most people when told at gunpoint what to do by the Nazi’s did it. If Gunther Grass gets a free pass for being in the SS, a far more heinous organization, than this guilt by association bullshit about Benedict should also stop, its about as logical, tolerant, and sensible as a teabagger burning the Quran or slandering the President’s faith.
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p>That said, as a progressive atheist you can say you disagree with Benedict theologically and politically, and frankly so do most Catholics in this country so that’s not a controversial statement. But I can’t take your condemnation of religious bigotry seriously when you so frequently express it yourself. The same people that are defending the Muslim’s right to build a mosque, one that is nearly sacrosanct in our Constitution, are the same people that on this site wanted to imprison the pope, strip the Church of Her tax exempt status, and essentially force Catholic hospitals and charities to shut down, or force Catholic nurses and doctors not to practice if they did not conform to the State and its imposition on moral questions, particularly abortion. Some of the same defenders of Islamic freedom on this site were the same people idolizing the burqua banning practices of Europe. If a gay Unitarian minister insists loudly and proudly in a public square that God is gay, he can, if a Muslim wants to build a mosque he can, and hopefully the Pope can also still speak his mind from time to time as well. Like Voltaire I will defend to the death your right to refuse to practice any faith, I hope you would extend the same courtesy to me.
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p>Religious tolerance doesn’t mean accepting victimhood. Tolerance does not mean never offending anyone, or playing a chump for others. I’ve no quarrel with the right of Catholics to have their religion. However, when the head of a religion uses the most inflammatory rhetoric available to attack anyone who disagrees with him, it is not “tolerant” to go along with whatever he says.
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p>Nowhere did I compare Benedict to Hitler…he’s the one who brought up the Nazi thing on day one of his visit. It’s a surprising move to me because for reasons I cited it’s not a place one would expect him to go. It’s like Juan Antonio Samaranch injecting Franco into a discussion.
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p>I’m not implying Benedict is a Nazi, I’m saying outright that he was one. In those days, most everyone in Germany was, and as you say, it was largely under threat. Do I expect every German who was alive in Hitler’s Germany to bravely stand up against genocide and hatred? No…if that happened, the Holocaust would not have. Do I expect every German who who was alive in Hitler’s Germany and now claims the authority to tell everyone Earth what is right and wrong to have done so? Well, it would help me take him seriously — especially when he likes to talk about Nazism.
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p>It’s curious that you’re so outraged by what you see as my hypocrisy on a blog, but you give his hypocrisy a pass when leading a “flock” of about a billion people.
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p>As for lumping me in with “some people” who go unnamed, that’s not worth a response. Speak to them about their ideas, and me about mine.
I am curious as to what victimhood you are referring to. Also I think any serious conversation about religious tolerance and religious differences is wrecked, just like any conversation, when people start throwing the Nazi accusations around.
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p>First of all he was not and is not a Nazi, never held Nazi views, and was never a member of the Nazi party, something a saint who fought against the Holocaust like Dietrich Bonhoeffer cannot say as he did join (as all academics had to by 1934). The unsung courage of an amazing man like John Paul II to actively resist the Nazi’s, help Jews, etc. certainly overshadows the quiet courage of resisting the system from the inside that Benedict did show with his few acts of resistance. Deserting the Nazi army towards the end of the war would have resulted in a death sentence for him had he been caught by the SS which was running amuck around Germany at that point, instead he surrendered and refused to take lives since it conflicted with his conscience. His passive resistance, albeit small, albeit inconsequential, is still laudable. Calling him a Nazi is not.
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p>If he is so intolerant and victimizing for calling the Nazi’s atheists, which they all were by the way, I can’t see what you gain by stooping to his supposedly poor level of name calling instead of engagement.
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p>I would say the substance of his remarks are laudable, ven if the delivery was flawed. Nietzschean atheism certainly played a major role in the rise of Nazism and in their racial theology that supplanted it. It is also important to note that atheist regimes have committed far worse atrocities than theocratic ones, mainly because they supplant religion with other ideologies from the racial theology of fascism to the utilitarianism of communism. Either way it removes the idea of the human soul being a divinely ordained spirit worthy of protection. It is hard to value the human person and their dignity when they are either an undermensch or a number on a piece of paper that is expendable for the sake of the collective. In a godless vacuum from revolutionary France, to Nazi Germany, to Soviet Russia or Communist China, those ideologies thrive. Today’s new atheists are replacing that with a theology of bio-determinism, one that if left unfettered by ethical concerns, which mainly stem from religious morality, that essentially is a latter day version of Neitzschean atheism. Will it lead to Nazi’s and another holocaust? I doubt it. But the world of Gattaca, a world of designer children, humanity altering itself at an alarming rate, and now a physical and biological divide, which will become a racial one overtime, between the haves and the have nots, is right around the corner. It has been his personal mission to stop that. Unfortunately the Church has drawn a line in the sand far too early, opposing life saving condoms in Africa, life saving treatments with stem cell research etc, but it remains one of the few mainstream organizations to even bother drawing a line at all, and I for one am glad Benedict cares more about spreading that Gospel than being PC.
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p>Now feel free to engage me on those ideas, which I am sure you have a strong and worthy opinion about, at least its a debate about ideas, and not a name calling contest.
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p>I’m not sure that that’s necessarily true. Nietzsche’s works were twisted around by the Nazis, to be sure, but anti-semitism unfortunately has a long history among the Germanic peoples reaching back long before Nietzsche wrote, and in the social context of Catholicism as well as atheism.
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p>
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p>Whether or not this statement is true, the Pope’s analogizing state-compelled atheism with attempts to remove religion from official state sanction (as in America) falls flat. There is a world of difference between American pluralism (which sometimes demands that individuals receive protection from dominant faiths) and the ideological quasi-atheism of the Nazis or the compelled atheism of various communist movements.
Not only the Nazis, his sister too.
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p>Nietzsche had some very sharp words on anti-semitism.
You wrote:
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p>I’ll try and step through this, point by point.
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p>It is also important to note that atheist regimes have committed far worse atrocities than theocratic ones …
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p>Nonsense. I encourage you to review your history. The Crusades, the forced “conversion” (and genocide) of the Christian invasion of South America, the extermination of “godless” Native Americans — this claim is utter rubbish.
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p>Are you aware of the events of August 24, 1572 — Saint Bartholomew’s Day — in Christian Paris? Do you recall the horrific events that followed?
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p>Where does protestant John Calvin fall into your panoply of regimes that commit atrocities? How do you characterize the decision of John Calvin to burn Michael Servetus to death? How does the “traditional” practice of executing heretics by burning at the stake fit into your theocratic worldview?
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p>… mainly because they supplant religion with other ideologies from the racial theology of fascism to the utilitarianism of communism.
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p>The research of anthropologists like Pascal Boyer suggests that you have the causality precisely backwards: societies evolve religions that reinforce the ethics and morality that they already have, rather than vice-versa.
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p>Your claim that atheism causes evil regimes is thinly-veiled religious bigotry at its worst — it is analogous to claiming that African-Americans are genetically inclined to be criminal because many criminals are African American. Despicable tyrants choose whatever religious ideology (or lack thereof) that best supports their particular biases.
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p>Either way it removes the idea of the human soul being a divinely ordained spirit worthy of protection.
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p>More bigoted rubbish. The recognition that something precious exists during life and radically changes at death requires no “divine ordination.” If anything, the superstitious assertion that an invisible monarch wills it to be so constrains rather than expands understanding of such matters (not to mention spawning the corollary questions of whether or not Native Americans, negro slaves, and other convenient victims had souls).
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p>It is hard to value the human person and their dignity when they are either an undermensch or a number on a piece of paper that is expendable for the sake of the collective.
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p>Throughout history, blood-thirsty Christians have found millions of non-Christians “expendable” for the sake of “the Church”. Millions of today’s American Christians find gays, lesbians, and — yes ̵ atheists “expendable”.
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p>In a godless vacuum from revolutionary France, to Nazi Germany, to Soviet Russia or Communist China, those ideologies thrive.
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p>As I noted above, it is not hard find god-filled regimes with equally atrocious ideologies. The examples you chose were bad because they were bad, not because they failed to advocate a particular religious belief.
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p>Today’s new atheists are replacing that with a theology of bio-determinism, one that if left unfettered by ethical concerns, which mainly stem from religious morality, that essentially is a latter day version of Neitzschean atheism.
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p>This is, arguably, the most offensive statement I’ve read on this site. The bigotry implicit in this garbage is matched only by its arrogance. How dare you claim that “religious morality” is the sole source of ethical concerns, especially while defending a man whose professional career has been dominated by his role in protecting and enabling clergy sex abusers.
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p>The scientists, researchers, workers, and even business leaders that I encounter every day in the genetics domain are far more aware of and committed to ethics and the ethical dimensions of their work and practices than anyone I’ve met in any theological setting.
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p>If you wish to encourage “mainstream organizations” to take a stronger role in avoiding the abuses you describe, you might start by taking a harder look at your own beliefs and their motivations. You might follow that by learning a bit more — from external sources, rather than your own biases.
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p>A little genuine humility about your own insight into such matters wouldn’t hurt.
Your patience is admirable.
I am not going to argue with someone who calls me a theocrat because I am for from it, and so are most American Christians. Also it is disingenuous to force religious people to account for all the crimes Christians committed in the name of their faith in the past, similarly it is wrong to lump all atheists together as evil people who do not value human life, which if you bothered to read my post at all, or the substance of Benedicts original remarks, is not what I said. What he is arguing is that a culture that forcibly removes religion from the public sphere faces the danger, not the absolute possibility, but the danger of degenerating into an inhumane regime. Similarly he has stated several times that cultures that do not allow for religious liberty, including the right not to believe, will follow the same path. Benedict is one of the strongest small d-democrats the papacy has had. Like the Regensburg speech the substance of his remarks have been distorted by their, admittedly, blunt and ineloquent delivery. The point of Benedict is that state sponsored atheism, or even culturally expected atheism, can be just as toxic as theocracy, and arguably more so.
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p>I’d take Calvin’s Geneva over Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany any day of the week, it is definitely the lesser of two evils.
A theocracy, even benign, wouldn’t be my first choice either, but if Calvin, Stalin, and Hitler were my only choices I’m sure I’d take Calvin too. It was his methods as manifested by Puritanism, for example, that ultimately led to progress and enlightenment.
In my view, they are about the same.
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p>History shows that Christian rulers, believing themselves to be advancing the “will of God”, have shed just as much innocent blood as Stalin, Hitler, or anyone else.
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p>This is a false dichotomy, used to obscure the real truth — ideology, ethics and morality are our concerns, and spring from within us. It is when we attempt to follow the “word” of some external and invisible deity that we fall into the grip of our worst demons. We embrace religions that reinforce our ideologies — rather than vice-versa.
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p>In my view, the heightened secular role played by all three Abrahamic traditions has caused far more violence, oppression, and war than the secular consequences of today’s atheist philosophies. Whether it be Christians actively working to oppress women, gays, and lesbians, and — yes — atheists, or Jews actively working to oppress Palestinian peoples in the middle east, or Muslims working to oppress women and “non-believers, all are bringing far more harm than good in today’s world.
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p>We have tried religion, and it is not working.
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p>You are conforming to the very dangerous notions Benedict is warning against. Marx, Schmidt, and Neitzsche all argued, eloquently, the same thing. And even today many atheists agree with the basic logic of their reasoning. Religion has caused wars, it is superstitious and men are weak to cling to it, it divides rather than united people, and modern scientific man can surely come up with a better system. Except history has shown that every time people have tried to ban religion or create a non-religious society, those societies have degenerated into massively atrocious bloodbaths. Yes Calvin burned heretics, but he killed far less people than Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, or the other atheist butchers of the 20th century. Sure the wars of the 10th-17th centuries were devastating and fought primarily over religion, they killed a fraction of the people that died in atheist post-religious warfare of the 20th century.
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p>Mass industrial warfare, dehumanizing ideologies, collectivism over individual liberty, that is the ultimate legacy of a system driven by utilatarianism instead of one based around the concept of human rights. Human rights itself is an incredibly Christian concept, one born out of the ecumenical horror and shock at the Second World War, one advanced and articulated by theologians who were the man authors of the original UN Declaration of Human Rights. Churchill and Roosevelt both wrote eloquently in their defense of the UN in horror at how a supposedly Christian people could allow these horrors to happen.
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p>Does secular humanism have a place at the table? Sure, because it is a worldview that essentially embraces Christian morality and strips it of its divine authority, which in my view weakens its power, and obviously to its proponents strengthens it and makes it seem far more rational. But really read Carl Schmidt, the architect of fascist political theory, it takes the Marxist and Nietzschean critiques of religion to their conclusion arguing it weakens men and must be replaced by a greater civic religion, like Rousseau once argued, but a civil religion that is based on national greatness as opposed to enlightenment as Rousseau argued. And it is that kind of atheism that is being attacked by Benedict, one that does not provide for morality and one that subjects human freedom and dignity to utlitarian ends.
Plus you’re forgetting that liberalism and capitalism are descendants of utilitarianism in far more profound ways than marxism. The argument against involving god in the state isn’t that we can come up with something different or better. It’s that including god in the state is the intellectual equivalent of including Charlie the Unicorn in the state. God doesn’t not exist because we’ve tried religion and it doesn’t work, or because some religious people are hypocrites. For the atheist, god doesn’t exist because the evidence that it does is based on faith and there’s plenty of evidence that it doesn’t, therefore, it’s extremely unlikely that god exists, but even more unlikely that Jesus was ‘his’ son.
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p>
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p>Here, Benedict uses Nazism and extreme atheism as the jumping off point to paint all atheists with the same brush. Excluding god and religion is the same as excluding virtue from public life.
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p>
And here you paint fascism as the logical extension of Marxism. Just as I reject the notion that the Crusades negate the teachings of Jesus, so to do I reject the notion that Stalinism negates the teachings of Marx, Hegel or of godless social democracy.
…when people twist it for their ends. Granted that has happened much too frequently in human history, but the fault lies only with mortals for that not with any god or with scripture per se. As jconway pointed out Calvinists burned heretics. Closer to home Puritans hanged witches, but they set up a system that put us on a path toward more enlightened values. Puritans believed in an educated population, especially clergy. They founded Harvard and Yale, and the eloquent statement about public education in our constitution comes from that commitment. They were human like everyone else and as such manifested some distasteful intolerances in our eyes. However just because the Declaration of Independence says that all are created equal and endowed with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness doesn’t mean everyone in the Continental Congress went home and freed their slaves as soon as the document was signed. Yet eventually we as a nation realized that emancipation and abolition, and eventually civil equality was the only logical conclusion that could be drawn from that statement.
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p>This won’t happen in the real world, but imagine a truly Christian society. I don’t care how or if you worship a deity, but think if everyone followed Christian teaching, which in many ways is shared with other religions. Nobody would break the commandments by killing, stealing, cheating, or falsely accusing. We would feed the hungry, clothe the naked, forgive debts every so often, make peace, do justice, love mercy, etc. etc. Our policies would be truly inclusive and strive for social justice. We would look after each other, be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and in sum love one another as we love ourselves. These are the teachings of Jesus and even the Old Testament reserves its harshest words for those who are unjust. To me it is no accident that a state created from the union of two colonies founded by and for Christians became the first state to abolish slavery, and continued its commitment to social justice through its labor laws, and even now can boast being first in the nation in fields such as education and health care. The Puritans may not have dreamed of these specific policies, but I believe they would be happy with where their legacy has led. I also think it is telling that their state and a key successor denomination, the United Church of Christ, became respectively the first state and denomination to recognize full marriage equality. Like slavery and the Declaration these things did not happen overnight, but they are in many ways the logical follow-throughs of the mindset of our forebears, updated for the 21st century.
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p>Then I hope you join me in saying that the Pope is wrecking any attempt at conciliation and mutual respect between atheists and Catholics. Because so far in this thread, many people are a lot angrier about me mentioning the Pope’s past than they are at the Pope comparing atheists explaining their beliefs to Nazis. Victimhood is the acceptance of slurs like that, something in which I will not engage.
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p>As said here and elsewhere, I only am upset about Benedict’s past when it is combined with his present habit of condemning and using the Nazi slur when it is more accurately applied to his past than Richard Dawkins’ present.
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p>A lot went into what calls itself Nazism. However, the fact that Hitler persecuted Nazis and said in repeated speeches and writings that he was doing God’s work — and the Christians of Germany by and large went along with so much of it — tells me that atheism was hardly the guiding star to that philosophy. Indeed, the habit of pushing aside any way of thinking that you don’t like is a prerequisite for any type of fascism, whether enforced by genetic selection or concentration camps. Benedict demonstrated that impulse on his visit to England, yet apparently nobody is supposed to mind.
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p>As for “drawing a line”, I have a serious disagreement. I can’t think of a religion or political philosophy that doesn’t draw a line somewhere. The Taliban draws lines — are they worthy of praise? Do you want areligious people to band together in a group and declare what’s right and wrong? We already have an areligious morality code — it’s called the government.
I see nothing in the blockquote above from the Pope calling athiests Nazis. My one objection would be to the fact that the Catholic Church itself did not seem to stand up to Nazism as much as maybe it could or should have.
First, while I’m with you in your outrage over the pathetic reaction over schoolkids witnessing one of the world’s major religions in action, it is unfair to essentially call the Pope a Nazi. It bothers me in the same way that people suggested that Justice Hugo Black and Sen. Robert Byrd were unreconstructed racists because of their early involvement in the KKK. (And, in the Pope’s case, the involvement was absolutely compulsory). It would be unfair to designate Black and Byrd as “racists” during their long career, just as it is unfair to call the Pope a “Nazi” — unless you have some evidence that he actually holds Nazi views, which I doubt will be forthcoming.
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p>Second, I agree that the Pope’s analogy you discuss fails. Nazism was not a societal problem because it was atheist; it was a problem because its adherents sought to replace pluralism with compulsory practice of that ideology. It has more in common with communism (also formally atheist), Islamists (fundamentalist religious), and extreme forms of American Christianity that dominated the South in the period of the KKK and unfortunately still has some strands today (also fundamentalist religious).
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p>Ensuring pluralism is the important thing in a free society, and something that is threatened when ideology — any ideology, whether or not religious — seeks to replace a commitment to pluralistic values with some other, much more narrow, value.
I never said the Pope was an unreconstructed Nazi. Not at all. I did say, and I am saying, that his past willingness to keep himself safe and unnoticed as a member of Hitler Youth does say something. Benedict isn’t a cashier; he’s pope. It’s a position that claim extraordinary moral authority, and is filled by somebody who clearly lacks extraordinary moral courage. And then when he goes further and brings the whole subject up, I think it’s fair game to continue the discussion that he starts.
Unlike Benedict he actually was a member of the Nazi party. He is also a saint who died in a concentration camp and personally believed he was damning himself by trying to kill Hitler for the sake of the greater good.
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p>Benedict also resisted, in passive, insignificant ways, but he did resist by deserting, and risked his life in doing so. Do the match the heroics of JP II or Bonhoeffer? No. But he resisted, he never played along.
please read
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p>I don’t know who told you about the Pope’s youth, but if you want to villify him, stick to the sex abuse scandal. At least that is something you can actually fault him for.
Thank you
Filled with phrases such as “passive acts”, “allowed him to survive” “small gestures”, and “tried to avoid”. This is the papering over of Vichy France, Collaborationist Flanders, and every other place under Nazi rule. Now condemnable, but not lauditory. Ratzinger demurred from considering the active resistance in his town. Horror of horrors, we was “awakened in the middle of the night and pressured to join”! Not doing so would be “risky”!
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p>All this tells me that Ratzinger was a regular German, staying out of trouble, riding out the Nazi regime. Fine if he lives out his life as a regular German. But for him to turn around and declare that he should tell everyone else what is right and wrong and who reminds him of a Nazi, when people in his own village were laying it all on the line by doing something more than listening to a radio, is ridiculous.
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p>Ratzinger acted like an ordinary man, and is now making extraordinary claims about people who don’t think like him, and demanding extraordinary obedience. I find it absurd.
I find it absurd that you have such ridicule for a 14-18 year old because he didn’t do enough to get himself killed by the nazis.
I believe that sabutai directs his ridicule at the 83 year old man who attempts to conflate atheists with Nazis, not the 14-18 year old “regular German”.
I’m not particularly fond of Ratzinger, so my defense of him won’t be particularly robust. I will, therefore, confine myself to a simple refutation of your argument that says the 14 year old is the sole father to the man. Personally, I do not find young men of that age either willing or able to exercise “titanic moral courage”. To fault the obviously intelligent and decidedly very learned 84 year old for acts committed, or omitted, at the age of 14 strikes me as a blow beneath your acumen and decidedly outside your reading of the situation. Especially when there is so much more recent things to fault him for… While I would find a great deal of justification from any revelation that Ratzinger is an unreconstructed Nazi, I would not assume such, merely for the sake of justification.
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p>I’m also slightly amiss as to your rather furtive reading of Ratzingers statements as an attack on the separation of church and state. He was, you’ll recall, speaking to Queen Elizabeth who, tho’ titular, is both the Head of State and the Head of the Church. So, I don’t know what he was getting at, to be honest.
I am not sure if any of us would have been willing to truly risk our lives in Nazi Germany and possibly subject ourselves to the Gestappo’s atrocious torture chambers. He gets a pass because he did risk his life to resist, mainly be deserting, and also because few of us would have done even that in his situation. Also if you are going to set such a high standard than Pope John Paul II deserves a lot of love.
We shouldn’t blame the talking heads. They just do as they’re told. Not their immediate writers or managers. The demonization of groups comes from the top. You don’t believe the different voices of the main stream media just happen to sing the same songs at the same time in the same key is a coincidence, do you?
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p>To what purpose? Is it because a General speaks of ten more years in Afghanistan? Is the war party afraid that people will turn against war on muslims? Do we have to build the hate now so the seven year old kids will want to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan in ten years? (Pakistan, Iran, Ethiopia, or you-name-it.) Isn’t news as controlled in the “Free World” as in totalitarian countries?
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p>We just went through a media event staged against a proposed mosque in lower Manhattan. There was world protest and violence. I think about the same amount of violence as if the mosque had been a Christian church or a Jewish temple. but, oh the news reports…
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p>Does no one read a history book? Where do we live now? Did he win?
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p>“Where will he go next, this phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare – Chicago; Los Angeles; Miami, Florida; Vincennes, Indiana; Syracuse, New York? Anyplace, everyplace, where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. He’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town. Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He’s alive because through these things we keep him alive.” –He’s Alive, The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling
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I feel like I’m living on Opposite Planet. The tendency to internalize too much of the absurdity, injustice, and hypocrisy of this nation’s contemporary narrative requires that I withdraw, in large measure, in order to preserve what remains of my sanity. The brouhaha over the Wellesley school field trip is beyond the pale (ha, couldn’t resist), and if one unrolls the carpet to view the larger design at the national level, it’s so hideous, so soul-crushing as to be unbearable.
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p>I resign. There are too many books to read (the new David Mitchell, the new Gary Shteyngart, the new Per Petterson) and I don’t want to spend every day seething with frustration and contempt. I feel real and simmering hatred towards these people–the Palins, the O’Donnells, the Becks, the tea-partying nitwits who couldn’t solve a fiscal crisis small enough to fit inside a paper bag.
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p>Adding insult to injury, I’m now on the English Language Arts Curriculum Committee in my high school that is tasked with “transitioning” our literature-based curriculum into one that is Weekly Reader-based. Nonfiction, baby. That’s the road to success. EoR.
That is truly horrible lightiris, you and I disagree on several things, but I have always respected your continued love of classical liberal arts education and your ongoing battle to maintain it in the public schools. It is sad how many of my peers go on to soulless careers without ever really touching upon the true moral power of literature, and the creative and imaginative sparks it unleashes. That is how we get really smart morons like the BP CEO and most of the dipsticks running Washington, they read too much non-fiction and never bother to stir the soul. Every WWII general was a reluctant warrior, Patton and MacArthur were accomplished poets, and I am sure having to read Homer let alone the Red Badge of Courage made them appreciate the horror as well as the glory of war.
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p>Don’t give up, and if it won’t risk your livelihood tell the curriculum to go to hell. This doesn’t sound like a race to the top to me, more like breeding another generation of ignorant citizens who lack ethical reasoning or compassion for their polis.
There are two points here that are being conflated.
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p>The pope’s membership in Hitler Youth (HJ) is not significant other than that it confirms the obvious that he was boy in Nazi Germany. On the other hand his claim that somehow a Nazi effort to eradicate God from society was in any way a significant cause of the annihilation of Jews makes no sense and functions as an intellectually dishonest attack on atheists.
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p>I would recommend that the author of the post concede that membership in HJ does not in any way indicate that the pope was a ‘Nazi,” but I also think that the many respondents concede that the Pope has no grounds to link atheism with the Holocaust.
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That bringing up Ratzinger’s past occluded my argument for a lot of people. However, I thought it worthwhile to point out how baffling it is that not only would he make such a foolish comparison, but that he of all people would be best off avoiding it. Unfortunately, even mentioning Ratzinger’s past brought out lots of people who would rather deny, rationalize, or excuse it rather than acknowledge it.
Nowhere did he say all atheists are Nazi’s, he did say all Nazi’s in high leadership were atheists, which is a valid point. Similarly all Al Qaeda members are Muslims, but not all Muslims are Al Qaeda members. Any ideology, however benign, can be twisted into fundamentalism and extremism. Atheism that claims modernity has made God an obsolete notion, but acknowledge that religion teaches valuable lessons about morality and ethics that should be adopted without the downsides of extremism and fundamentalism, is valid and welcome in the public sphere. Most atheists fall into that category of moderate atheists, or secular humanists, that at least value moral ideals and think they can be obtained without dogmas or creeds. Now whether that can truly be obtained without religion is a debatable point, but people holding that philosophy are not dangerous. Those that hold the view, as the Nazi’s did, as the Communists did, that religion needs to be wiped out and replaced by a better system, one ruled either by racial theology, utilitarian collectivism, or the new breed of biodeterminism which is eugenics by another name, those are the atheists we need to watch out for. They There are a lot of atheists on BMG, few would qualify as the extremists Benedict mentioned. Obviously bringing the Nazi’s into it, and speaking in generalized terms is never a good strategy to get people to actually listen to what you say, and we can definitely agree that its Benedict’s own fault his remarks were misinterpreted. But he is right, atheist extremists are dangerous and a threat to human freedom and morality. And you are right to argue most atheists do not fit into that equation, just like most Christians are not crusaders, or most Muslims aren’t terrorists.
Benedict quite clearly compared the fact that Richard Dawkins et al writes books and gives lectures with Hitler’s genocidal and war-mongering policies. That is unacceptable, and I wish you’d admit that. I don’t see how that’s a “misinterpretation”.
Historian:
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p>Sabutai:
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p>And on we go. Sadly, concessions are becoming a lost art, even at BMG. Is it any wonder we can’t get anything done in Washington? When did “Never give an inch” become the overarching directive for intellectual discourse in this country? How much energy is wasted when people are more concerned with not losing a point in debate instead of addressing the essential issues?
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From the ratings, it’s clear that you don’t like my argument. But to engage in histrionics because I won’t let you tell me how to make it is ridiculous.
Also it is unfair that Catholics are forced to defend the actions of their church hundreds of years ago during the Crusades, the Inquisition, the wars after the Reformation, and even recently in the sex abuse scandal, while Muslims and atheists get a free pass from the bad people within their belief systems. You cannot get around the fact that the Nazi’s were directly influenced by Schmidt, Nietzsche, and other atheist philosophers. You cannot escape the fact that Hitler, Himmler, and Goereing were outspoken in their contempt of religion and religious people. Does that mean sabutai, lightiris, BrooklineTom, or other outspoken atheists here have to defend them? Of course not. And that is not what Benedict was saying. That said, everytime I defend my church those same people bring up all of those facts and want me to account for them personally. That has to stop, and its something no Muslim or Jew has been asked to do on this site.
Anybody who would is historically ignorant or plain hateful. Yes, Nazis were influenced by atheist philosophers, even though they banned “All writings that ridicule, belittle or besmirch the Christian religion and its institution, faith in God, or other things that are holy to the healthy sentiments of the Volk.” and even though the Cardinal of Munish held a celebratory mass when Hitler’s assassins failed, even though Hitler declared in 1936 that “I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.” I’ll grant you Stalin’s atheism, but Hitler’s is on shaky ground.
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p>Nobody asked you to defend these atrocities. The fact that you’re choosing to defend Benedict’s use of highly inflammatory rhetoric while stridently disagreeing with my milder historical review is what I can’t understand. It is possible to condemn some baffling remarks by one man without condemning a religion.
Carl Schmitt–“tt” not “dt”–began his work deeply rooted in Catholic philosophy. He broke institutionally with the Catholic church during the Weimar era, partly because of conflict over his wanting a divorce, but early writings of his from his Catholic period (such as Political Theology) are among those that are often read as proto-fascist or as evidence of the affinity between his intellectual orientation to the world and his eventual decision to join the Nazi party and to propagandize for Hitler. Some readers also think that much of his later thought was still animated by his original religious impulses. Just so you know.
In making this point, I am NOT (really, really not) saying that Schmitt became a Nazi BECAUSE he began as a Catholic thinker (an absurd contention) or that we should view Christian theology, properly understood, as compatible with serving the Nazi state. I am not taking a position on whether Schmitt remained bound by his original Catholic commitments, or even whether it makes sense to see his later thought as religious at all. There is a long and complex philosophical and historical debate to be had about whether or not the later Schmitt is properly called an “atheist,” but I very much doubt that any of us on this thread (I include myself, though I do teach Schmitt on occasion) are competent to conduct it. I AM saying that even a nodding acquaintance with Schmitt’s actual writings shows that it is utterly useless to say, “Secularism is dangerous–see Schmitt and the Nazis.” Blaming Nietzsche is still less helpful. And I would also suggest that these instances offer a broader cautionary tale about what is simplistic and misleading about the kind of self-serving story offered by the Pope. Such self-serving stories are common enough. Although I am not in the least a believer, I believe that the members of the recent cohort of so-called New Atheists have also served up plenty of dogmatic, simple-minded, and self-congratulatory proclamations of their own. But then I tend to doubt that “God: for or against?” is really the terrain on which American progressives want to pitch our more pressing battles right now.
I have never argued that atheism automatically leads to Nazism, neither did Benedict. I also did not argue that Nazism was free of Christian influence or support, but Benedict is right to say that atheism did play a part, and a significant one, in the creation of that racial theology which consciously sought to supplant God with the Fuherer and supplant religion with a fundamentalist nationalism. Any church not under the control of the Nazi’s was suppressed, its members forced underground, and its priests and ministers sent to die with the Jew, gypsies, communists, and gays at the death camps. One of the points of the ‘first they came for the Jews’ poem is that the ultimate goal of Nazism was to control and coerce people of all faiths and no faiths into their racial theology. Schmitt was certainly a part of this, particularly his theories regarding racial mythos and the mystical qualities it has. Hitler used religion, but he laughed at it in private and ridiculed priests. But anyway I appreciate your familiarity with a brilliant albeit disturbing political theorist, and your civil engagement with the ideas I present. And again to sabutai, I think we can both agree the Pope’s remarks were overly generalized and simplistic which has certainly made our discussion more difficult. But the substance of the remarks, that atheism can also turn to extremism, and the consequences can be far worse for everyone involved, is still very true.
Every ideology can “turn to extremism” with awful consequences. You continue to single out atheism, while steadfastly denying the equally abhorrent consequences of religious extremism.
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p>Surely the evidence suggests that it is extremism, whatever its ideology, that we must manage. This is the ultimate irony of Mr. Ratzinger’s misguided comments: he pursues an increasingly extremist vision of Catholic participation in secular affairs, and describes the entirely appropriate resulting secular opposition as “increasing marginalization of religion.”
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p>He says, for example:
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p>In other words, he complains that Catholics who hold elective office are required by their constituents or the constitution to vote against Catholic restrictions on birth control and abortion, vote against Catholic attempts to demonize gay and lesbian sexuality, and vote against Catholic opposition to gay marriage.
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p>I wonder if those who embrace Mr. Ratzinger’s position would feel as supportive if it were, instead, a Muslim leader complaining that Muslims in public roles are required at times to act against their conscience by, for example, allowing women to appear in public without a burka.
as much as you would like to think of it that way. Atheists simply do not believe in a god, but may have arrived at that conclusion through any number of paths. Atheists do not share a common philosophy of life. Making blanket generalizations about atheists/atheism based on the behavior or beliefs of some particular subgroup is bogus and is in fact deeply bigoted and offensive to atheists who don’t fit your conception.
lost is the issue of students attending a mosque.
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p>Merging the 2 topics, while peripherally related to how irrational this debate has become is grossly unfair.
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p>When visting cathedrals in Europe, tours cease when worship begins. And it’s publicly posted. Regardless of your “God,” it seems reasonable that a certain amount of respect, dignity and privacy is expected.
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p>If you regularly worship at say Notre Dame, do you want a bunch of noisey tourists admiring the stained glass, speaking loudly, taking pictures and disrupting your worship?
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p>I am baffled that a sacred ceremony would invite, schedule and permit a tour to intrude. In an effort to provide openness, maybe the Muslim leadership sacrificed the dignity and respect their observance deserves.