Sargon’s parsing of the incident is very similar to that on the Vlad Tepes blog:
…
Let’s parse this a little:
“We believe strongly in freedom of speech and freedom to express unpopular and even offensive views.” But in the very next line they qualify that statement to negate pretty much anything anyone at any time and under any circumstances finds offensive for any reason. The language of cultural-Marxism ensues:
“Divisive, counter-productive (but no standard given for what constitutes productive and certainly no exception was made in the previous statement that all speech must be ‘productive’ on this unnamed standard) and hateful, meaning the organizers hated it so it doesn’t count under the former statement of: “We believe strongly in freedom of speech and freedom to express unpopular and even offensive views.”
This is some of the most blatant Cultural Marxist/Orwellian hypocrisy I have seen from a scientific body of sufficient gravitas that a person like Richard Dawkins would consider speaking to.
…
Yes.
Indeed.
It was such an eye-opening experience for Thunderf00t that he took time from creating “Why do people laugh at creationists” video series to make “Feminism Versus FACTS” video series. Here, he applies, ahm, logic and the scientific method to examining what feminists actually say and write and, it sounds surprisingly like the ravings of intolerant religious dogma.
Aside – he documented the process, as it was happening, in the series “Why ‘Feminism’ is poisoning Atheism”.
Which is exactly the parallel so humorously drawn in the video on which Richard Dawkins had commented – and which made him public enemy #1 (well, for now) of the A+ and their ilk folks out there.
P.S. – I remember posting the lunatic, crude and rude rantings of the feminist caricatured in this video when she first started shrilly calling people out on the street ‘fuckface’ when they disagreed with her. Ah, yes, the good old days…
To sum this all up: I am glad that the SJW’s are finally being called out for the vicious, intolerant, totalitarian, Cultural Marxist pity-whores they are.
All right: just about everyone I have encountered in discussions of both religion and Nazism has claimed that Hitler was an atheist and that all of the people who had died in World War 2 are, in fact, victims of atheism.
Ok, leaving aside that it was not religion itself – or absence thereof – that motivated Hitler’s quest for power, but the ideology of racial supremacy (and that it would thus be just as inaccurate to ascribe WW2 victims to have been killed in the name of any religion – or lack thereof).
So, let us take a look at Hitler and his religious beliefs.
First – theist/atheist, then let’s examine which religion it was that Hitler idealized.
Note: Nazis are often said to have been known to have a decidedly ‘esoteric’ bend: from searching for the ‘Arc of the Covenant’ (as immortalized in the movies) to having searched long and hard for the lost treasure of the Knights Templar in the southern France region around the mountain Bezou (among other places), to hunting down ‘certain’ art pieces (such as Poussin’s ‘The Shepherds of Arcadia’ or ‘et in Arcadia ego’), as well as seeking the mysterious ‘portal travel’ from the castle of Houska (from which Hitler is said to have portalled into Ireland) to other far fetched tales.
There is no denying that the Nazis wished to explore every potential weapon and advantage they could get their grubby little paws on.
This investment in the potential payoff does not, indeed, signify a full ‘buy-in’ by the leadership.
To the contrary: the very variety of the myths pursued proves not one of them was accepted as truth – as they were often mutually exclusive. It just demonstrates that at one point in their existence, the Nazis had sufficient cash to pursue wild myths in the hopes that one of them might just possibly be true enough to give them an edge in the war effort.
And their willingness to throw money and manpower at myths proves their gullibility – and definitely testifies against their so called ‘atheism’.
But, I digress…
First: was Hitler a theist or an atheist? I will let Thunderf00t answer this one.
All right: now that we have, thanks to Thunderf00t, established that Hitler was indeed NOT an atheist, let us look at him and his religious beliefs a little further.
It is a fact that Adolf Hitler was baptized as a Roman Catholic.
It is a fact that while he was in power, the Roman Catholic Church had special prayers said and masses held at the occasion of his birthday.
And it is a fact that, despite his (apparent) suicide, he was buried as a Roman Catholic, in a consecrated Roman Catholic cemetery.
It is also a fact that, following the fall of the Third Reich, the Roman Catholic Church had smuggled SS officers out of Europe and into the Americas.
I have personal knowledge of this.
When I was in high school, I started dating my best friend’s older brother. As such, I often came into their home. Their mother was Italian, their father was Croatian. The kids came late in their marriage, much to their delight.
Since this was not too long after my transit through Croatia on my way to Canada, and since I have a knack for languages, I could speak to the dad in Croatian – something neither the mother nor the children could do.
Soon, the dad would open up to me. He was a theist – because of pascal’s wager. And, in WW2, he was an SS officer. He even pulled out a photoalbum and showed me pictures of him in his SS uniform.
Mind you – none of his family knew this…certainly not any of the four kids. He explained himself to me: “They came to my village and said that if I did not join, they would shoot my mother. So, I joined!” This kind of explained the Pascal’ wager bit…
And, yes – coming out of a totalitarian system, I actually understood: the one thing Nazism and Communism had in common was that they were both forms of socialism and thus stripped choices away from a person, leaving them as nothing more than a tool of their totalitarian regime.
Yet, when WW2 came to an end, my boyfriend’s dad was in trouble. Serious trouble. Everyone in Europe was hunting for Nazis – and especially for SS officers, as he had been. But, he was saved.
The Roman Catholic church had smuggled him to Rome (yes, Rome) and hid him at the home of a family of a young Roman Catholic priest. He had stayed there, in hiding, for almost two years.
It made me think back to the Pascal’s Wager argument he had made when he told me that the young priest had a younger sister – so, he did the honourable and expected thing and repaid the family’s hospitality by marrying her. And I could respect that…
At the same time, it made me shudder: the wife was much, much younger than the husband and I truly and honestly hope she never did find out that he married her out of a sense of duty, instead of love – because even decades later, she was clearly still in love with him. But, I also understand him: in every respect, though it tears me apart to admit it.
But, I lived in a totalitarian system and understand how it could rid people of choices, force them into doing things they would never do of their own accord. And the more they loved their family, the more they could be exploited…the more their humanity could help turn them into sub-human animals!
But, enough of me and my emotional ranting and back to supportable, historical facts.
Hitler was, officially and publicly, a model Roman Catholic.
In private, however, he held the Christian faiths in contempt, considering it to be too meek and not warrior-like enough to lift the Germanic peoples to their proper place in history.
Here are just a few of the things Hitler has been documented to have said about Islam:
You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion [Islam] too would have been more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?
Quoted by Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, pg. 115
I can imagine people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mohammed, but as for the insipid paradise of the Christians! In your lifetime, you used to hear the music of Richard Wagner. After your death, it will be nothing but hallelujahs, the waving of palms, children of an age for the feeding bottle, and hoary old men. The man of the isles pays homage to the forces of nature. But Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery. A n***** with his taboos is crushingly superior to the human being who seriously believes in transubstantiation.
“Hitler’s Table Talk”, p. 143, translated by N. Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Enigma Books (1953)
Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers -already, you see, the world had already fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing Christianity! -then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism [Islam], that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so
Adolf Hitler’s Monologe im Führerhauptquartier (Monologue with Headquarters of the Führer). Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus, 1980.
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 advances of science… The instructions of a hygienic nature that most religions gave, contributed to the foundation of organized communities. The precepts ordering people to wash, to avoid certain drinks, to fast at appointed dates, to take exercise, to rise with the sun, to climb to the top of the minaret — all these were obligations invented by intelligent people. The exhortation to fight courageously is also self-explanatory. Observe, by the way, that, as a corollary, the Moslem was promised a paradise peopled with sensual girls, where wine flowed in streams — a real earthly paradise. The Christians, on the other hand, declare themselves satisfied if after their death they are allowed to sing hallelujahs! …Christianity, of course, has reached the peak of absurdity in this respect. And that’s why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already impregnated humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline.
“Hitler’s Table Talk”, translated by N. Cameron and R.H. Stevens, Enigma Books (1953)
Yes, he seems to think very poorly of Christianity in general – which, of course, does not make him an atheist…provided he had replaced Christianity with another belief – rather than a lack of belief. And, the quotes above demonstrate that Adolf Hitler thought Islam to be superior to Christianity.
If that were not enough, let us consider not words, but actions.
Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by a 22-year old Muslim named Hassan al-Banna, who admired Adolf Hitler’s hatred of the Jews and persistently wrote to Hitler to express his admiration for Hitler, as well as his desire for collaboration with Hitler’s Nazi Party.
When Hitler rose to power, his Nazis supported al-Banna, a school teacher, to grow the Muslim Brotherhood into its ally in the Middle East; by 1938, the membership of Muslim Brotherhood topped 200,000.
During World War II, members of the Muslim Brotherhood spied for Hitler’s Nazis in the Middle East and fought for Hitler as Nazi troops in two specially formed Muslim Waffen-SS HandscharDivisions (‘Handschar‘ is German for scimitar, the curved saber used by the Muslim troops of the Ottoman empire).
Above is Hitler with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and a close ally of al-Banna, in Berlin, where he lived as Hitler’s VIP guest from 1941 to 1945, before joining al-Banna in Egypt in 1946. The Muslim Nazi troops of the Waffen-SS Handschar Divisions are being reviewed by Haj Amin al-Husseini (right) and by the SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler (below).
Due to the large number of Muslim volunteers, the HandscharDivisions were the largest of Hitler’s 38 Waffen-SS divisions.
The Muslim Brotherhood (ikhwan) is, of course, recognized as a terrorist (along with its daughter organizations, like The Muslim Students’ Association, CAIR, and many, many, many more) in most parts of the world…excepting the PC ‘West’ where calling a terrorist organization ‘a terrorist organization’ would be ‘racist’.
Even though ideology, beliefs and actions have nothing to do with race…
How do I get off this planet???
I have to say, yet again, that I am sick and tired of religionists demanding that their non-evidence based claims be ‘respected’ more than any other non-evidence based stories, just because they call them ‘religion’.
I am sick and tired of non-evidence based beliefs being afforded more privileges under the law than evidence-based claims.
But most of all, I am sick and tired of people demanding limits on my freedom of speech, just because my I will not treat as absolute truth everybody else’s non-evidence based claims!
Sorry that this has to come as a post: but, it would appear that due to WordPress’s most excellent latest updates, my response to POD’s comment is too long to post as a comment.
I guess I am just a little bit too verbose…but I hate being misunderstood, so I had to reply in some length.
The comment by Peter O’Donnel is here.
My reply is below:
Thank you, Peter, for the long and well thought out reply.
Let me take things in order:
It seems to me that Christianity stopped committing atrocities whenever it became separated from actual real, hands-on political power. I suspect that this will be true of all religions, secular (non-theistic) as well as theistic: it is the real-world power combined with a firm and unshakable belief that one is not just correct, but ‘absolutely right’ that produces tyranny.
Since this piece focuses on Christians forming what they hope will be a religious terrorist organization, I naturally focused on Christianity. That, plus Christianity martyred more of my family than any other doctrine – so it’s personal. Of course Communism and Islam are greater threats now than Christianity has been in the 20th century, but my point was that regardless of which religion it is, it can and will be used by some to usurp power over others. If we let them.
As for Jesus whispering similar things to people – I understand your belief in this, but there have been many wars between Christian sects all of whom truly and honestly believed to have Jesus’s true message while the other guys were idiots who were wrong. Just consider the difference between Catholics and Evangelicals on the topic of evolution: Catholics assert it is the means through which the various species were created by God while Evangelicals claim it is Devil’s teachings…
Solzhenitsyn: good book, the Gulag Archipelago. However, Solzhenitsyn himself longed for a totalitarian state himself – he just wanted the tyrant to be the Russian Orthodox Church instead of the Bolsheviks…which is really much the same thing.
As for Buddha: he was not so much enlightened as cowardly. He was in the perfect position to alleviate the suffering of the common folk, being a crown prince and all that. Instead he went and sulked in a cave….and had the nerve to accept food from the poorest of the poor, who thought it was their duty to feed him even if it meant their own children starved. Yeah, great spiritual enlightening there!
And before you go on about the accomplishments of monks who meditate: please consider their diet and that their ‘enlightened meditation’ perfectly fits the symptoms of brain damage due to malnutrition.
I would not go looking for spiritual advice there!
As for God being the foundation of morality. I did not intend to say that since God does not exist, it cannot be the foundation of morality.
I do not know whether god(s) exist or not or how we would define them. I suppose I am very much an ignostic. As such, I would need a clear definition, because different people mean different things when they say ‘God’ – and without knowing what they mean, I cannot possibly hold an opinion, much less knowledge, regarding their existence. (Having said this, I find little to no evidence that supports the existence of Bible-definined deity, and consider monotheism to be the least credible of all the theological positions – but that is not the point here.)
What I was referring to is the continued assertion by Christian apologists that morality is whatever their God defines it to be. So, if God commands genocide, then genocide is the moral thing to do. If selling your daughter to her rapist for 40 silver pieces is what God says is the moral thing to do, then that is indeed the ‘moral’ thing to do.
In other words, many Christians argue that without God, there can be no morality.
Because ‘morality’ is obeying anything and everything that God commands.
I hold the diametrically opposite view: ‘obedience’ to morality dictated from the outside (be it from a parent or God or teapot or whatever else) is exactly that. Obedience.
And obedience, in my never-humble-opinion, precludes morality.
Morality is making decisions about what is right and wrong, what is good, bad or evil. Weighing the consequences of one’s actions – then choosing what to do and living with it. Morality is reasoning from the first principle of self-ownership and deriving the least incorrect course of action therefrom.
Morality is choosing one’s actions and accepting the responsibilities thereof.
Without this decision making process, without internal locust of decision-making, there is no ‘morality’ – only obedience.
After all, how can you be held responsible for following someone else’s rules?
So, to my way of thinking, ‘obeying the word of God’ is abdicating ‘morality’ in favour of ‘obedience’.
Because doing the right thing for the wrong reason does not make you ‘moral’….it makes you, at best, ‘accidentally right’. Because you did not make the choice as to what the moral course of action would be – you simply obeyed the what somebody else decided is the moral course of action.
Sorry to go into this in so much detail, but as I did not make my position clear in the original post, I want to make sure to be more clear in my reply.
To recap: I am not saying that morality cannot come from God since God does not exist: I am saying that obeying somebody else’s rules about what is or is not moral is not morality itself, it is simply obedience because the locust of decision-making about what is or is not moral is external to one-self. And I am perfectly aware that many religious people consider ‘morality’ to be ‘obeying God’s commands’ because they believe they are owned by God (in one manner or another). I acknowledge their belief, but disagree with them. Obedience is not ‘morality’ – or every puppy would be the most ‘moral’ creature in the world!
Which brings me to Mother effing Theresa.
Just this past weekend, I had a huge fight with a self-defined Christian apologist about Mother effing Theresa!
He had driven her around Montreal for a week and thought the sun shone from her behind!
Of course, being a fact-focused person, I know better than to buy in to the hollow propaganda about this profoundly evil person, who fetishized the suffering of others and maximized it in order to bring about her own salvation. Her clinics did not differentiate between curable and incurable patients and used unsterilized needles for all…as well as denying even child-patients life-saving medical care and all painkillers….’cause, suffering would bring them closer to Jesus!
If the evil bitch Agnes (self-called Mother Theresa, which in itself should be a hint as she was NOT a mother and it is deeply immoral of her to usurp that noble title) is your example of the good things Jesus whispers to people, then you confirm my suspicion that all religions are, at their core, evil incarnate. And that to get good people to commit evil deeds, all you need is religion….
Jesus himself: perhaps we can leave discussion of the Nazarene and his teachings for another day…
As for giving God a chance: I rather like Thor…and Tyr…and Hospodin and Baba Maja. Have you given them a chance?
One thing that differentiates Atheists from religious people is the recognition that regardless of the underlying religious doctrine, believing that one is doing things to please their God can make even good people descend into acts of unspeakable barbarity.
It is the ‘knowledge’ that one is the instrument of ‘The Almighty’ that gives people the impetus to leave their humanity behind and commit acts of unspeakable cruelty.
In many debates between famous theists and Atheists on the topic of morality: every single Christian apologists (whom I have seen – and I follow this a lot) states that ‘morality’ is what God commands.
As in, defining right from wrong is God’s prerogative – and God’s prerogative alone!
If that does not frighten you, the following bi should: many Christians truly and honestly believe that they have a personal relationship with Jesus and that he whispers right and wrong into their ears. And Jesus hardly ever whispers the same things to two different people….
Why am I going into this?
Well, non-Muslims are eager to prove – with actual quotations from their scriptures – that their faith could never be used to justify brutality in the name of their God.
Raise the Crusades with Christians and they’re apt to go off the handle about Muslim aggression and the Crusades being defensive wars. OK – that is true – for some crusades.
What about the Albigensian Crusade?
That one was fought by Catholics against Gnostic Christians who were non-violent and wanted nothing other than just to practice their own faith, without interference from the Catholics.
Or the immolation of Jan Hus and the subsequent Crusade to murder anyone who dared disagree with the immolation of the peace-loving priest? The suppression of the disciples of Hus got so brutal that simple folk would have no choice but to take up farm implements to protect themselves and their children from the aggression of the fully armoured, mounted, armed and militarily trained knights!!! Much of my own family – peaceful farmers who just happened to be in the path of the Crusaders and suspected of, may be, perhaps, because of their geopgraphic location, harbouring Hussite sympathies – were butchered in the most horrible ways possible.
These were not Muslim aggressors: these were peaceful Christians who just wanted to practice their faith unmolested by the Pope and his Church tyrants!
And, apart from wars: Christianity was used to impose a tyrannical system of peasantry on the majority of European populace: ‘as above, so below’ was the name of the doctrine which permitted the nobles to own their serfs, rape and kill them at will. It wasn’t until another one of my ancestors, Jan Sladky ‘Kozina’ invited his lord to God’s judgment – and won – that peasants realized that their suffering was not ‘God’s will’ and began the uprisings which eventually ended serfdom in Europe.
So, it comes as little surprise to me that Christianity has spawned its own ‘Christian Taliban’ group.
That is not my assessment: that is what they describe themselves as.
It’s here and it demonstrates that all belief in ‘divine-dictated-morality’ is necessarily going to lead even good people to do evil things.
But, don’t take my word for it: read all about it!
‘That’s the theory. In practice, Korchynsky wants the war in eastern Ukraine to be a religious war. In his view, you have to take advantage of the situation: Many people in Ukraine are dissatisfied with the new government, its broken institutions and endemic corruption. This can only be solved, he believes, by creating a national elite composed of people determined to wage a sort of Ukrainian jihad against the Russians.
“We need to create something like a Christian Taliban,” he told me. “The Ukrainian state has no chance in a war with Russia, but the Christian Taliban can succeed, just as the Taliban are driving the Americans out of Afghanistan.”
For Korchynsky and the St. Mary’s Battalion, the Great Satan is Russia.’
Ah, yes.
Nothing like a bit of a holy ‘war’…
From National Secular Society:
‘The Muslim Action Forum (MAF), which staged a protest outside Downing Street against Charlie Hebdo in February, has launched a “legal strategy” to stop insults against Mohammed.
The organisation is also asking supporters to “lobby your MP” to make “Islamophobia” a criminal offence.
They state that they intend “to launch a series of legal challenges in the English Court system” because “depictions of our Holy Prophet peace be upon Him is the worst kind of ‘Hate Crime’ that can be perpetrated on the 3 million Muslims in the UK and 1.7 billion Muslims worldwide.”
The group says that they have “devised a legal strategy to prevent the continuous insulting and derogatory publications depicting and abusing the personality of our Holy Prophet Muhammad peace be upon Him.”
In a press release published shortly after the demonstration in February 2015, the MAF set out details of their plan to outlaw depicting Mohammed in the UK, through “amendment of some existing legislation and the presentation of a Private Members Bill that promotes the idea of Global Civility.”
They describe “Global Civility” as a “new direction” and argue that the “desecration” of “collective human dignity”, through “insult, denigration or humiliation is morally and ethically wrong”. Their website rails against “reckless and malicious expressions”.
They urge the 100,000 Muslims who they claim signed their petition to lobby their MPs and all candidates standing in the General Election. The MAF makes a number of suggestions including three specific questions which they ask supporters to direct to their MPs.’
Well, that’s not good.
Getting 100 000 signatures?!?!?
I guess us blasphemers ought to prepare for being burned at the proverbial stake for now – and a literal one soon!
What an interesting article!
It tells the story of a satirical magazine published in Tbilisi a century ago, using satirical cartoons to promote women’s equality, individual rights and secularism…
In this cartoon, the magazine depicts a prison with windows and a house of Muslim women with none
This 1909 cartoon, Pilgrimage to Hajj, had a pretty clear message
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 