(October 12, 2014 at 10:56 am)Drich Wrote: In short hitler rewrote the bible. He did cut out and burned the OT. He changed the dynamic of christianity to serve his germany.All he did was recognize that he could use religious faith to further his political goals; by presenting himself as a devout Christian, he would make himself more appealing to the Christian population. Hitler made it pretty clear that he felt that a mass of people could be pretty easily manipulated by propaganda if it was packaged and presented in a specific way. It didn't matter if his claims were outrageous lies-- as long as he hit the right emotional notes, the crowd would follow.
He didn't just do this with religion, of course. His message initially and primarily was about restoring national pride and getting back at the people who had sold the nation out in the first world war. But he knew that the population was heavily religious, and he knew that he could use that religious devotion as a tool to help him achieve his aims. I think it is notable that he used religion in exactly the same way he used nationalism and in a similar way to how he used racism. And it had exactly the effect that he intended, too.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
