Blue Collar Scientist

A few weeks ago I had a student confront me with the “Hitler was an atheist therefore atheism causes evil” meme. It happens periodically - these kids pay real close attention in Sunday school, and don’t dare ever think that what they are taught there might be wrong….

Anyway, I’m feeling a need to put some of the standard quotations on the topic here so that I can access them more quickly and easily when they are needed.

My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. (Hitler, Munich, April 12, 1922.)

The creationists sometimes charge that Hitler claimed to be Christian, but was soft on atheism and maybe even a closet atheist. Hitler didn’t agree:

We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out. (Hitler, Berlin, October 24, 1933.)

I occasionally get the “Hitler said he was Christian, but really he was a paganist” meme. So:

National Socialism is not a cult-movement– a movement for worship; it is exclusively a ‘volkic’ political doctrine based upon racial principles. In its purpose there is no mystic cult, only the care and leadership of a people defined by a common blood-relationship…. We will not allow mystically-minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else– in any case something which has nothing to do with us. At the head of our programme there stand no secret surmisings but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will– not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord…. Our worship is exclusively the cultivation of the natural, and for that reason, because natural, therefore God-willed. Our humility is the unconditional submission before the divine laws of existence so far as they are known to us men. (Hitler, Nuremberg, September 6, 1938.)