I am from Kansas, so...

shalomsteph

Critical Thinker
shalomsteph
Joined
Dec 25, 2005
Messages
363
I just want to say that we are not all idiotic dolts. I found this website that I thought was pretty good:
http://www.kansasmorons.com/

I have my kids in a private religious school, and they learn evolution, but the kids in public school can't because of the religious extremists in the western part of the state.

Only in the bible belt....
 
There is foolishness everywhere, and people fighting the good fight for critical thinking everywhere.
There have been Canadian nutjobs featured in the commentary, but I know I'm not one, assuming that a persons geographical region dictates their IQ, sounds a little Wooish :D

BTW, I like the quote in your sig. Makes me think of a guy in the pub tonight, who claimed that all the crazy mass murderers (he used Hitler and Stalin as examples) were athiests and that Christans could never do such things.
 
Glite said:
There is foolishness everywhere, and people fighting the good fight for critical thinking everywhere.
There have been Canadian nutjobs featured in the commentary, but I know I'm not one, assuming that a persons geographical region dictates their IQ, sounds a little Wooish :D

BTW, I like the quote in your sig. Makes me think of a guy in the pub tonight, who claimed that all the crazy mass murderers (he used Hitler and Stalin as examples) were athiests and that Christans could never do such things.
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I don't know about Stalin, but I DO know that Hitler AND most of the Nazis were, indeed, Christians. Hitler talked about his faith frequently, as did the Nazis, and they believed they were doing "God's work" Wish I had been in the bar...I would have told him all of the wonderful things Christians are responsible for....hmmmm....The Crusades....The Inquisition....The Salem Witch Trials....The Holocaust.....and those are just off the top of my head...
 
shalomsteph said:
I don't know about Stalin, but I DO know that Hitler AND most of the Nazis were, indeed, Christians. Hitler talked about his faith frequently, as did the Nazis, and they believed they were doing "God's work" Wish I had been in the bar...I would have told him all of the wonderful things Christians are responsible for....hmmmm....The Crusades....The Inquisition....The Salem Witch Trials....The Holocaust.....and those are just off the top of my head...
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Hitler only spoke of it publically, privately, it seemed to be a different matter.

Also, remember the First Crusade was in response to militant Muslims overtaking Jerusalem and slaying/enslaving the pilgrims.
 
shalomsteph said:
I just want to say that we are not all idiotic dolts. I found this website that I thought was pretty good:
http://www.kansasmorons.com/
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I like the Amazon review of Connie Morris's book quoted on the site:
53 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
[one star] Why Individuals with serious personality disorders should not write books, September 26, 2005
Reviewer: C. B. West (Albuquerque,NM) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
The book is a badly written attempt by a narcisstic, borderline
personality disordered woman to do a "Charles Colson"--at the time the"Devil Made Me Do It".The "Devil" made her pose nude but
she fought him back by "...never again by posing that way."
This woman is now supporting Intelligent Design in her state.
I cannot image why I was asked to review this piece of utter trash.
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Glite said:
BTW, I like the quote in your sig. Makes me think of a guy in the pub tonight, who claimed that all the crazy mass murderers (he used Hitler and Stalin as examples) were athiests and that Christans could never do such things.
Click to expand...
Stalin, IIRC, trained for the priesthood as a boy.

"Hitler Was An Atheist" is covered by the SkepticWiki, which provides the following quotes from Mein Kampf.

* I believe to-day that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.

* The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following: (a) Lowering of the level of the higher race; (b) Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness. To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator.

* A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.

* It is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if ... Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions.

* When He [Jesus] found it necessary He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God; because then, as always, they used religion as a means of advancing their commercial interests. But at that time Christ was nailed to the Cross for his attitude towards the Jews; whereas our modern Christians enter into party politics and when elections are being held they debase themselves to beg for Jewish votes. They even enter into political intrigues with the atheistic Jewish parties against the interests of their own Christian nation.

* Whoever would dare to raise a profane hand against that highest image of God among His creatures would sin against the bountiful Creator of this marvel and would collaborate in the expulsion from Paradise.

* For it was by the Will of God that men were made of a certain bodily shape, were given their natures and their faculties.

* Of course, one doesn't discuss such a question with the Jews... Their very existence is an incarnate denial of the beauty of God's image in His creation.

* Anyhow, the Jew has attained the ends he desired... the enemy of Aryan humanity and all Christendom is laughing up his sleeve.

* And only for such action as is undertaken to secure those ends can it be lawful in the eyes of God and our German posterity to allow the blood of our people to be shed once again. Before God, because we are sent into this world with the commission to struggle for our daily bread.

* The most devoted Protestant could stand side by side with the most devoted Catholic in our ranks without having his conscience disturbed in the slightest as far as concerned his religious convictions. The bitter struggle which both waged in common against the wrecker of Aryan humanity taught them natural respect and esteem.

* Almighty God, bless our arms when the hour comes. Be just, as Thou hast always been just... Lord, bless our struggle.
 
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shalomsteph said:
(snip)
Only in the bible belt....
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Not necessarily. Here in Ontario they stopped directly teaching TOE in public high-schools in 2000, so as not to 'offend' anyone.

But we also have a fully tax-funded "Separate" (read, Catholic) school board.

Seeing as how the Vatican accepts TOE as being acceptable, ain't it funny that our religious schools (here, at least) are providing a more fully-rounded curriculum than the 'Public' board?
 
shalomsteph said:
I don't know about Stalin, but I DO know that Hitler AND most of the Nazis were, indeed, Christians. Hitler talked about his faith frequently, as did the Nazis, and they believed they were doing "God's work" Wish I had been in the bar...I would have told him all of the wonderful things Christians are responsible for....hmmmm....The Crusades....The Inquisition....The Salem Witch Trials....The Holocaust.....and those are just off the top of my head...
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Ah, but no TRUE Christian could do such things. ;)
 
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Xeriar said:
Hitler only spoke of it publically, privately, it seemed to be a different matter.
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Hitler, though originally raised a Catholic, was more of an occultist; and a large part of his expressed beliefs for the "ubermenschen" would probably be best described as "New Age". They were supposed to have expressed the next stage in spiritual as well as physical evolution; at which point they would be above petty things like religion, becoming god-like themselves. For a short while, the Nazis promoted German Neo-Paganism (Asatru) far more than Christianity. For them, religion was a tool, and they said and did whatever it took to get the majority of Germans to support them. They believed it was a "regressive" belief that would die away on it's own in their brave new world.

"So it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advance of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that's left is to prove that in nature there's no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds - perhaps inhabited worlds like ours - then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.

"But one must continue to pay attention to another aspect of the problem. It's possible to satisfy the needs of the inner life by an intimate communion with nature., or by knowledge of the past. Only a minority, however, at the present stage of the mind's development, can feel the respect inspired by the unknown and thus satisfy the metaphysical needs of the soul. The average human being has the same needs, but can satisfy them only by elementary means. That's particularly true of women, as also of peasants who impotently watch the destruction of their crops. The person whose life tends to simplification is thirsty for belief, and he dimly clings to it with all his strength.

"Nobody has the right to deprive simple people of their childish certainties until they've acquired others that are more reasonable. Indeed it's most important that the higher belief should be well established in them before the lower belief has been removed. We must finally achieve this. But it would serve no purpose to replace an old belief by a new one that would merely fill the place left vacant by its predecessor.

"It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to reestablish the worship of Odin. Our old mythology had ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself. Nothing dies unless it is moribund. At that point the ancient world was divided between the systems of philosophy and the worship of idols. It's not desirable that the whole of humanity should be stultified - and the only way of getting rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.

"If in the course of 1-2,000 years science arrives at the necessity of renewing its points of view, that will not mean that science is a liar. Science cannot lie, for it's always striving, according to the momentary state of knowledge, to deduce what is true. When it makes a mistake, it does so in good faith. It's Christianity which is the liar; it's in perpetual conflict with itself.

"One may ask whether the disappearance of Christianity would entail the disappearance of a belief in God. That's not to be desired. The notion of divinity gives most men the opportunity to concretize the feeling they have of supernatural realities. Why should we destroy this wonderful power they have of incarnating the feeling for the divine that is within them?" --Heinrich Himmler
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Dr Adequate said:
Stalin, IIRC, trained for the priesthood as a boy.

"Hitler Was An Atheist" is covered by the SkepticWiki, which provides the following quotes from Mein Kampf.
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Part of this has already been addressed in another post; but a couple of points on the SW page need to be addressed. The Germans weren't "demonstrably Christian", they were nominally Christian, what we would likely term "culturally" Christian now. That is, they were raised in an official church, but had no real ties to the faith aside from that; in a church that was far more political than religious.

Large numbers of Christians were interned in the concentration camps along with Jews, for openly opposing the Nazis; and church groups that did not support them were often forcibly dissolved. Two notable examples are Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was one of the key figures in the anti-Nazi resistance in German, and was executed at Buchenwald; and Martin Niemöller, wrote the oft-quoted and paraphrased poem "First the came for the Jews...". He also spent much of the war at Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Most of the organizations hiding Jews and smuggling them out of German occupied areas were run by the various churches that did not acceed to Nazi domination.

Hitler's "Christianity" was a specifically Nazi variant that they terms "Positive Christianity", and which was focussed on the German people as a sort of "chosen race". It was contrasted heavily with "Negative Christianity", which was the traditional Christian belief system. The official churches in German were required to promote the "Positive" Nazi version, and were forcibly dissolved if they did not.

In this particular case, "no true Scotsman" certainly doesn't apply, since Hitler's and the Nazi's theology, though possessing much of the same terminology and symbolism, is demonstrably not Christian.
 
didnt mean to derail the thread into a "was hitler a christain" thread, although it does seem to be interesting. this guy was more or less saying that religious people would never hurt others and if we were all more so, the world would be a super happy place.
 
luchog said:
Part of this has already been addressed in another post; but a couple of points on the SW page need to be addressed. The Germans weren't "demonstrably Christian", they were nominally Christian, what we would likely term "culturally" Christian now.
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Right, they just said they were Christian, went to church, sang in the choir... and put salt in their porridge.

Large numbers of Christians were interned in the concentration camps along with Jews, for openly opposing the Nazis; and church groups that did not support them were often forcibly dissolved
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As noted by the wiki: "On the other hand, much of the Nazi-created mythology harkened back to a pre-Christian (and largely Norse) paganism, and he was unrelentingly hostile to any power groups that might threaten his Nazi hegemony, including religious groups both inside Germany and outside (such as the Pope, whom he made plans to kill)."

In this particular case, "no true Scotsman" certainly doesn't apply, since Hitler's and the Nazi's theology, though possessing much of the same terminology and symbolism, is demonstrably not Christian.
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If you're going to decide that Hitler was No True Christian on a theological basis, where do you stand on Jehovah's Witnesses?

But that is by the by. For him to have any theology rebuts the claim that he was an atheist.
 
Dr Adequate said:
I trust you gave him the full list from the First Crusade down to 9/11.
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Full list? That leaves out four thousand years of history!

(Polytheistic religions tend to be more amenable to pluralism, but that certainly didn't stop them killing one another.)
 
Dr Adequate said:
If you're going to decide that Hitler was No True Christian on a theological basis, where do you stand on Jehovah's Witnesses?
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Must...resist...urge...tasteless...joke...
----

Given that the deity of Christ is a basis tenet of the Christian faith, and that that tenet is rejected by Jehovah's Witnesses, then I presume they are No True Christians?
 
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