(July 6, 2015 at 11:07 am)abaris Wrote:(July 6, 2015 at 10:29 am)Dystopia Wrote: I have argued that nazism is anti-religion not because nazis can't be religious but because it promotes the worship of the State and an ideal of purity that makes religion incompatible since it requires worshiping a more supreme being.
No, it isn't. Not for the reasons you're giving. Nazism was a and still is a racist ideology. The state isn't worshiped but the race and the people belonging to it. The people as a whole, not the individual. Individuality has no place in nazism.
In many aspects it is compatible with religion, in other aspects it isn't - at least if you take the happy go lucky parts of christianity.
For a nazi State religion is a useful tool to unite the people and promote nationalism, but let's not be naive - A great deal of nazi policies were either incompatible or completely not based on religion. The eugenics scientific program that sought to create a perfect human being was not based on the bible but gross misinterpretations of Darwin and "science" - These programs of eugenics were actually popular and being discussed in Europe and the US, and Sweden even had compulsory sterilization for some people until 2013.
My argument is not that you can't be religious and a nazi, but to some degree you need to sacrifice your religion and do the worst, most irrational cherry pickings to satisfy the State. If you want to go the Love Thy neighbor path then the State will stop you because that means you have to be nice to Jews. If you want to say Jesus was most likely ethnically Jewish and totally not white you're gonna get into some trouble. If your church is pro-democracy and supports human dignity it's going to be in trouble. In the end, it's not openly anti-religion, but it's anti-religion when religion requires some kind of commitment that is incompatible with the ideology and the State, the nation and the Law. Even if you go for the most horrible parts of Christianity and justify killing Jews, nothing justifies the "scientific" racism and eugenics - Didn't Jesus pretty much help the weak, the poor and said rich men would not get into heaven?
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you
