FunctionalAtheist
Hammer of Reason
I have no idea. Please do tell me.
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Does it Matter that Hitler was a Theist?
- Thread starter Sunstone
- Start date
FunctionalAtheist
Hammer of Reason
I'm a bit confused here as well. Every passage you point out is in the form of "you heard......but I say...." Is this saying you need to do the OT things I'm reminding you of, and then even more? Or is it saying that was the rule, but now this is the rule? How do you interpret it?
Any statement requires interpretation. "Interpretation" is our term for deriving meaning from communication. If you're deriving meaning from a statement, then you're interpreting.
Even a straightforward literal interpretation is an interpretation. At the very least, you have interpreted the statement to be non-figurative.
Pegg
Jehovah our God is One
simply that shellfish and pork were not restricted... Noah could eat it all. So the parts of the mosaic law that do not apply to christians are those parts which were specifically given to Isreal.
Pegg
Jehovah our God is One
Jesus reiterated the 10 commandments as binding...so they were still the rule but he took them further and helped people to see what causes a person to break the law in the first place.
'you heard it was said you must not murder'.... but Jesus tells them that if you continue wrathful or angry with your brother, you will be held accountable. Why? because anger is what leads to hate and hate to murder (as in the case of Cain who murdered his brother Abel)
So to really obey this law, a christian must let go of anger...and in that way they will not even come close to murder.
'You heard it was said you must not commit adultery'... this law means you must not sleep with another person if you are already married. Yet Jesus takes it further and gets to the heart of the problem - Lust. He says "everyone who looks at a woman so to have a passion for her has already committed adultery"
Again he's getting to the heart of the problem of adultery... it never starts with sex, it always starts with looking lustfully at a woman. Then it progresses until sexual intercourse takes place.
So he wasnt ending the moral laws of God...he was reiterating them and solidifying them. That is why Christians still hold to the moral laws of God. Those laws do not change.
oldbadger
Skanky Old Mongrel!
Hello LuisDanta.
Plx excuse me for reducing your post.
You may have read Dingbat's post, (a page back) which explained that the belt buckle 'God with us' was the old German Army buckle, and that the SS replaced it with one marked "Meine Ehre heißt Treue" ("My Honour is Loyalty"). As you can see, it's not religious at all. More importantly, Hitler did not introduce the old belt buckle, it seems.
I don't understand this, 7 decades after this murdering monster was put-down, it being such an important factor (to some) to prove that Hitler
was religious. And yet it seems to me that the evidence is just falling down, dissipating, collapsing.
Round hole..... square peg......... the evidence just won't fit.
oldbadger
Skanky Old Mongrel!
Numbers 25 1-13 So people did bad things, and Moses had the Judges order their executions. And Phinehas speared an Israelite man and his Midianit woman. Nasty stuff, but pretty accurate repirting?
Number 31 1-19 So the Israelites warred against the Midianites, killed all the men and (eventually) the women, save for virgins. A case of gene mixing if ever there was one. Mix the genes and the race gets stronger? Anyway, the report was very accurate.
Deuteronomy 20 10-20 If foreign cities seek peace, just exact a tribute. If they resist, take them and kill all but the women. Don't cut fruit tress down during a seige, cos you need the food they give! A very pro report. Clear as crystal.
Matthew 10 34-39 Jesus restating that..... His way was one that would cause turmoil in families. That the 'togetherness' of followers was of more value than 'family'. Lives that did not follow were lost, and those that followed were found. This is not a historical report. This is a message (in metaphor) explaining what it cost/gained to follow him.
Luke 19 27 A Parable about a nobleman, who demanded good returns from his subjects, and what he did to useless ones. Probably intended to wake people up, spiritually? Because their level of spirit was equal to a dumb lazy fool?
So the first three were reports of a successful race, culling out the weaker groups and taking their genes for advancement. Yes, Hitler would have loved to have been as successful, but I for one am glad that he was not. The last two show (to me) an exasperated Jesus trying to wake up a spiritually 'asleep' people.
Question:- Was this post supposed to win this debate? We read all this and then, Bingo! ........... believe that Hitler was driven by God...... and Jesus? I think that you need to produce some 'evidence' that Hitler's crimes were fuelled by his belief in God. Otherwise, your argument to propose that it did matter (Does it Matter that Hitler was a Theist?) fails. It also fails to find that Hitler was a believer!
That information is not really consistent with that of other sources. Either way, it is an illustration, hardly a deciding piece of evidence.
Because, Oldbadger, those who fail to learn from History are bound to repeat it.
I am sorry to say that I just don't see how you can say such a thing.
There is no way to "win" this debate because people will not accept any evidence presented, Oldbadger. If they did, the Mein Kampf alone would be plenty enough.
That specific post was meant as a reminder that Hitler, far from having a general atitude incompatible with the Bible's, was in fact difficult to distinguish from many people that claim inspiration from it and end up being accepted at face value.
Hitler is, of course, dead, so it does not particularly matter whether he was a believer (although I just can't figure how he could not be), but it is a serious matter indeed that we have either forgotten or failed to learn outright why he was wrong and should have been confronted earlier.
The accuracy is not nearly as important as the fact that the praised leader of early Abrahamites was, in fact, reported as being a genocidal commander with no further comment from the scripture itself - or, apparently, from God.
Are you claiming that Nazis wouldn't agree with that behavior, then? Because again, I'm not sure that can quite be made to work with the historical evidence.
In fact, I don't know which point you expected to present with this answer at all.
FunctionalAtheist
Hammer of Reason
Ok, so I take it that I may now presume you admit the point that interpretations is required? For many many Christians, they seem to insist that interpretations is required.
FunctionalAtheist
Hammer of Reason
I must seem rather dense. But I think my main question has gone unanswered. How do you know which laws were moral and which just served some purpose? You provided shellfish and evidently thought it should be self-evident?
Another question. God's will (laws, commands, instructions) were given before the OT covenant (e.g. noah), within the OT covenant, and withing the NT covenant. (Or were all of them given by the OT and the NT just reiterated and expanded?) Did god leave any of the moral commands out of the OT covenant with the jews? Did the covenant contain all the moral laws?
And isn't sin going against god's will? So how can there be some moral commands and some not moral commands? If god's will is the opposite of sin, and sin is the opposite of morals? I guess, where the jews 'sinning' when they ate shellfish? If they were doesn't that mean it was a moral law? If not, then not doing what god tells you to do is not the same as sinning.
I'm glad I've got someone that knows these things to help me.:help:
Desert Snake
Veteran Member
I don't think so, I think it was just incidental, my main argument against this idea is that that are so many factors that one could focus on, they only matter when grouped as a whole, each factor in and of itself has to be deemed insufficient out of necessity. We can always guess which factor is the most influential in his reasoning, but it remains guesswork. The arguments for this concept are not sufficient IMO, if we suppose there was no religion in Europe for example, there is no way of telling if leaders would act any differently, it could be argued that without the morality of religion things might be far worse, in fact.
gnostic
The Lost One
sunstone said:
No it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if he was theist, religious, atheist or non-religious.
However, Christians frequently say that he was atheist, which is not true. He was theist and a Christian, and it is quite possible that he mixed Christianity with polytheistic Teutonic religion, but it is most likely he used Teutonic-Norse myth as propaganda for nazi politics and not real belief.
oldbadger
Skanky Old Mongrel!
Hang on! I can agree with some of your points here. (I'll take an aspirin!) As a kid at school, I always wondered how Miss W--dy could positively glow with pleasure as she explained how God's chosen were allowed to cheat, lie, deceive, overrun, steal, plunder, murder, rape and most other bad things. But it was ok, 'cos God was on their side and was the 'good' God. Equally, she positively raved at how the heros could cheat brothers out of birthrights..... you know..... the whole bad thing. However, since I am neither a (proper) follower of either Christ or Judaism, that should not surprise you.
But.......here is the point you wondered about. The above shows that you are wrong! Let me explain, as best I can.
Do you think that Hitler was happy to mix Aryan blood with other races? That maniac was murdering young and old from other cultures, races, etc., both genders! He was not doing what the Israelites were doing, or Genghis Khan, or any of the leaders whose vocation was following evolution's call (yes! nature's demand!) to move across land, and mix blood.
In fact,most dreadful 'surges' like this are caused by nature's demands of blood mixing? Look at this point..... Goering actually defended himself and his military role quite well at Nurenburg, and one of his arguments which the prosecution found to be so embarrassing and upsetting was the re-population of the Americas by Europeans, and how they went about it. That was not religiously driven either.
Hitler's attempt to produce a new world, an aryan world, had nothing to do with religion. But it was slightly different in that Hitler raged about a pure race, a strange concept really, since his own features didn't really look as if they fitted it!
What about the atheist nutters who have overrun, conquered, massacred? Do you think an atheist world would be a more human world? I don't think it would make any difference.
I think he could easily rationalize that and probably did, as long as the context presented it as display of superiority and "selfless granting" from the "superior" race. While I can hardly be positive about it, word got me that Nazi officers were encouraged (or maybe simply willing) to impregnate lots of women.
Too subtle a distinction for me to understand, sorry.
I don't think I ever heard of that idea in quite that form.
That is arguable at best. Here in South America there was for a long time a perception that Native Americans probably lacked souls and were therefore fair game for killing or slaving.
In any case, Goering claiming that Nazi behavior was not too different from that of mostly Christian settlers is hardly evidence that Nazism had no Christian motivation.
Despite Hitler claiming the opposite, quite consistently, at various times?
That is likely a major reason why he was so adamant. Hitler was a classic overcompensator and his racism is probably a desperate attempt at denying his own ethnicity and family trouble (Hitler's father was illegitimate, married three times and divorced by his wife due to adultery, which I believe would be rather shameful at the time).
What about them?
Why, yes, I do.
Hard to say with so much left to guess. We do however know that Atheists do not present themselves as the flaming sword of God's will nearly as easily as Theists do.
Pegg
Jehovah our God is One
that fact that Noah was told that he could eat from 'all the animals' is evidence that eating shellfish or pork is not immoral.
There is also the statement of Jesus where he said "not what enters into the mouth is what defiles a man, but what comes out of his mouth does"
You should be able to deduct that for these two reasons, the food restrictions given to Israel had nothing to do with what was morally right or wrong. So there must have been another reason for the restriction.
The time between the Garden of Eden and when the Mosiac covenant was given, God had only given one direct law to Noah...it was the law regarding blood. It was told to Noah "only flesh with its blood you must not eat"
Other then that law, people only really had their own consciences to go by. Their inner instincts about what was right and wrong. Some, like Noah, Abraham & Job, used their conscience as their guide and for that, God looked upon them with favor. It is said that Abraham observed Jehovahs commands, statutes, and laws which were based on righteousness and judgment. And these righteous morals were also generally understood and partially reflected in the laws of other nations at that time. For example, the Pharaoh of Egypt knew that it was wrong to take another mans wife (Ge 12:14-20)
When Moses wrote the laws, it reiterated what most people already knew about right and wrong...but it went a little further because for the first time, it made people accountable to God for not following through on his laws.
Also some extra laws were given to Israel which went beyond moral laws... the dietry restrictions may have served another purpose for which we dont fully understand. Its been suggested that they were may have been for health reasons or perhaps some of the animals were being used by other nations for sacrificing and offerings to their false gods... so to ensure the nation stood out as different, God imposed other restrictions.
In the NT, it was the moral laws that remained... other restrictions such as dietry and clothing were not considered important to christians. So they kept only the moral laws.
If God gives us a requirement, and we fail to abide by it, then it is a sin because we have disobeyed him.
Thats why eating shellfish for an israelite was a sin. It was in violation of something they were told not to do. It is an act of disobedience.
But when Christ came, things changed. The requirement was for people to follow Christ by obeying Christ. Christ did not demand obedience to the dietry restrictions of the mosaic law so it is not a sin to eat shellfish.
FunctionalAtheist
Hammer of Reason
I appreciate your position. But it leaves me with disturbing conclusions which seem to contradict other understandings I thought I had just established.
First, violating god's laws is sin, however not all of god's laws are moral, therefore god's will is not representative of morality. Therefore any punishments for violating non-moral laws, are not morally justifiable. The justification for killing someone for picking up sticks on the sabbath must be something other than moral justification. I find that rather disturbing as there are numerous stories of pain and suffering being dished out for what evidently was a sin, but was not immoral.
Second, in another thread I started called 'NT Covenant' I thought I had just understood that there were no legal requirements except to love. I can accept your version as well. I will just have to chalk it up as supporting my regretful conclusion that John in fact was teaching differently than Paul.
Thank you for your response.
Pegg
Jehovah our God is One
FunctionalAtheist
Hammer of Reason
I did not conclude that these horrific punishments were not justified. I concluded that they were not morally justified.
This is based on your direct statements.
For Jews,
Eating shellfish is not immoral, and
Eating shellfish is a sin
Therefore sin and immorality are not equal.
Sin is equal to opposition to gods will.
Therefore immorality is not equal to opposition to gods will.
Since sin is defined as opposition to gods will, immorality cannot be defined as opposition to gods will.
Punishment for sin, is not equal to punishment for immorality,
Therefore punishment for sin can not be assumed to be morally justified.
This logic, which has no prepositions other than your direct statements, would apply to any requirement that was not moral. Such as eating shellfish, wearing blends, and failing to observe the Sabbath.
Yes, I accept your answer. In the thread I started regarding the subject http://www.religiousforums.com/forum/religious-debates/142076-new-covenent.html I held that in fact all the law was in fact applicable. It appears that the spirit gives different reqierments to different followers, even in Pauls day. Im not sure if I like your answer better or the answer I got there. That one seems more .god-like, but it is impossible to say mine, yours, or theirs is wrong, as the source is inconsistent. Its just a matter of which verses the spirit tells you is the right one.
Thanks again.