Here is another article about Nazi regime and atheism... Oh, and throw the Commies in there too.
German Bishop Links Nazi Crimes to Atheism
By Markus Becker
"In an Easter sermon that has
drawn widespread criticism, the Catholic bishop of Augsburg has linked
the crimes committed under Nazi and Communist regimes to atheism.
Atheist groups have reacted with fury and accuse the cleric of
rewriting history.
A Catholic German bishop has come under fire for his remarks
condemning atheists. In a sermon given on Easter Sunday, the bishop of
Augsburg, Walter Mixa, warned of rising atheism in Germany. "Wherever
God is denied or fought against, there people and their dignity will
soon be denied and held in disregard," he said in the sermon. He also
said that "a society without God is hell on earth" and quoted the
Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky: "If God does not exist, everything
is permitted."
Most controversially, he linked the Nazi and Communist crimes to
atheism. "In the last century, the godless regimes of Nazism and
Communism, with their penal camps, their secret police and their mass
murder, proved in a terrible way the inhumanity of atheism in
practice." Christians and the Church were always the subject of
"special persecution" under these systems, he said.
However, critics accuse Mixa of rewriting history. The bishop's
claim that humanity automatically arises from religious faith is
"totally untenable," Rudolf Ladwig, president of the Germany-based
International League of Non-Religious and Atheists (IBKA), told SPIEGEL
ONLINE. Mixa's words are part of a "long-term strategy by the Church to
exculpate, in a historically inaccurate way, the history of its own
institution as relates to fascism."
The Nazi dictatorship targeted Communists, Social Democrats,
liberals, trade unionists, Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, the
disabled and others, Ladwig said. "It was by no means the dictatorship
of a dedicated atheist movement. Resistance from within the churches
came only from individuals."
The philosopher Michael Schmidt-Salomon, head of the humanist
non-profit group the Giordano Bruno Foundation, also sharply criticized
Mixa. "If you bear in mind that during the Nazi era it was precisely
the Jews who were accused of being godless, then one sees how
perfidious Mixa's reasoning is," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE. He points out
that freethinker associations were disbanded by the Nazis and avowed
atheists were persecuted.
Mixa's claim that the Nazi regime was "godless" is "a massive
distortion of history," Schmidt-Salomon said. Nazi ideology --
including its anti-Semitism -- was based largely on Christian
traditions, he said, explaining that evidence for that can be found in
Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and elsewhere. "The majority of the Nazi elite
saw themselves as Christians," says Schmidt-Salomon.
Although the Nazi movement included a wide variety of currents of
religious thought, ranging from nihilism to neo-paganism to Teutonic
mythology to Hinduism, atheism played no significant political role for
the Nazis. Avowed atheists were not welcome in the Nazi party or the SS.
The relationship of the Catholic Church to the Nazis was also an
ambivalent one. Individual members of the clergy openly confronted the
regime, which in some cases resulted in their persecution and murder.
Others voluntarily collaborated with the dictatorship, while most
simply did nothing. A systematic persecution of Christians did not take
place in the Third Reich -- let alone the "special persecution of
Christians and the Church" which Mixa spoke of.
Both the diocese of Augsburg and the German Bishops' Conference
declined to comment on the sermon and the criticism when contacted by
SPIEGEL ONLINE.
The Easter sermon was not the first time that Mixa has made
comparisons to Nazism for rhetorical purposes. In February, the bishop
compared the number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust with the
number of abortions performed over the past decades, according to a
newspaper report. The bishop's spokesman also responded to criticism of
Mixa from Germany's leading Green Party politician, Claudia Roth, who
called the bishop a "crazy über-fundamentalist," by comparing her words
to Nazi propaganda.
Mixa has also courted controversy on other issues. In 2007, he
criticized a proposal to expand daycare in Germany by saying it would turn women into "breeding machines." Later that same year, he was criticized by the Jewish community in Germany when he compared the situation of the Palestinians
to the Warsaw Ghetto.
According to the Federal Statistical Office, approximately one-third
of all Germans do not belong to an organized religion. A 2005 survey
conducted by AP-Ipsos showed that only 22 percent of Germans have no
doubt about the existence of God, while some 23 percent of Germans
identify themselves either as atheists or agnostics."
Source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,618746,00.html
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