On Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:19:18 -0400, Warp wrote:

> John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
>> They were by no means "undeniably" Christian.  There is good ground to
>> deny.
> 
>> When contacted by American chaplains, many German prisoners-of-war
>> professed either atheism or nature-worship.  It is true that most were
>> nominally Christians (specifically, either Lutheran or Catholic), but
>> they had long abandoned whatever faith they had acquired from either of
>> these churches.
> 
>   The problem with the claims that nazis were atheists is the implied
> correlation-implies-causation. In other words, nazis did what they did
> *because* they were atheists (and they would not have done it if they
> had been christians). This is unjustified.

Yep, that's the point I was getting at.

>   Nevertheless, whether the nazis were religious or atheists, it doesn't
> really matter. The *origin* of antisemitism is largerly religious.
> Religion caused the spread of antisemitism and prejudice against the
> jews. Without the Catholic church it's very possible that the nazis
> would have not been antisemitic (for the simple reason that there would
> have not been a widespread negative notion of the jews).

Agreed.  At the very least, Naziism had an undercurrent of "Jews = Evil 
because they killed Jesus", which to some extent was until *very* 
recently something the Catholic Church supported (The Pope only in the 
last year renounced that idea, certainly it was considered a 'valid' 
position by some within the Catholic church in the 40's.)

But more to the point, who gets to define what is Christian (which was 
the point of asking for an explanation of that statement), as throughout 
history a lot of things are done in Christianity's name - so who gets to 
decide "yes, that's a Christian thing to do" and "no, that's not a 
Christian thing to do and one who does it isn't Christian".

Jim

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