HITLER’S GOD

In his new book, “Hitler’s Religion,” historian Richard Weikart attempts to pinpoint the beliefs had been central to Hitler’s worldview and his genocidal rampage. He identifies Pantheism:

·       In Mein Kampf, for instance, he often deifies nature.  This is so obvious that most translators often capitalize the word “Nature” therein.  Indeed Hitler on several occasions referred to nature as eternal, which means that it was not created, but in the same passages he refers to God as a Creator.  This seems rather contradictory at first, but it makes sense if you understand nature itself to be his God.  For this reason Pantheism seems the closest position to Hitler’s views.

But doesn’t Pantheism show respect for nature and living things? Isn’t it antithetical to genocide? If god is the entirety of nature, and nature contains many horrific elements like bubonic plague and the survival-of-the-fittest, then it would seem that this god sanctions genocide, among everything else that nature contains. What then would be the morality of this nature god? Anything that nature contains becomes a moral model. Therefore, anything goes. https://www.mercatornet.com/features/view/hitlers-religion-the-twisted-beliefs-that-drove-the-third-reich/19078

It is therefore easy to understand how the god of Darwinism fits comfortably alongside of Pantheism:

·       Since Hitler thought that nature was God, he believed that morality was defined by conforming to nature’s laws.  One of the natural laws he thought most important was the Darwinian struggle for existence, which produced evolutionary progress.  Since the struggle in nature was vicious and resulted in the strong destroying the weak, Hitler considered it good and right to viciously destroy the weak.  He thought this would bring about a better world with superior humans.  He thought he had divine approval for annihilating the allegedly inferior races and people with disabilities.

Consequently, Hitler became a faithful servant of his beliefs.

WE DEMEAN OURSELVES IF WE DEFINE OURSELVES MATERIALISTICALLY

The way we think about ourselves becomes the way we feel about ourselves. If we think that we are no more than purposeless wet machine, it is not surprising that we feel this way.

·       According to [Gil] Dodgen, from his youth “[ I] believed that I was just a complex piece of biochemistry that came about by chance.” He still remembers the place he was standing at age seven when he came to the stark realization that his own life had no meaning or purpose. For the next thirty-six years he often contemplated suicide. After all, what difference would it make if he were dead rather than alive? Even though he never tried to kill himself, by his own account he was “cynical about life.” All this changed for him in 1994 when at age forty-three he converted to Christ. From that time forward he was filled with joy, recognizing that he was created for a purpose and his life had meaning. Never since that time has he contemplated suicide. Now he knows that his life—and the lives of others—is valuable. (Richard Weikart, "The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life")

Christ dignifies life. Knowing His love and purpose for our lives, we are no longer a chance collection of molecules but a beloved person with eternal significance and a divine calling. What can be more edifying!

THE REJECTION OF GOD AND THE EMBRACE OF DARWIN IS A LOADED GUN

Historian Richard Weikart insists that the way we think is the way we live, sometimes with disastrous results:

·       Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who nicknamed himself “Natural Selector,” murdered eight students at a high school in Finland in 2007. In a YouTube video made shortly before the atrocity he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “HUMANITY IS OVERRATED” and pointed a pistol at the camera. In his manifesto he listed what he hated: human rights, equality, “religious fanatics,” and the “moral majority.” He also listed what he loved: existentialism, freedom, truth, evolutionary biology, and eugenics. He explained why he thought humans had no special value ("The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life"):

o   “Humans are just a species among other animals and world does not exist only for humans. Death and killing is not a tragedy, it happens in nature all the time between all species. Not all human lives are important or worth saving. Only superior (intelligent, self-aware, strong-minded) individuals should survive while inferior (stupid, retarded, weak-minded masses) should perish.”

It is likely that Auvinen also had psychological problems that could account for his murders, but many have these problems and yet treat others compassionately. Even though Auvinen might have always owned a handgun, his socially-derived beliefs put the bullets in its chambers and cocked the trigger:

o   “Life is just a meaningless coincidence . . . result of long process of evolution and many several factors, causes and effects. However, life is also something that an individual wants and determines it to be. And I’m the dictator and god of my own life. And me, I have chosen my way. I am prepared to fight and die for my cause. I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.”

Obviously, Darwinism had helped to load Auvinen's gun and cock its trigger. It provided a convenient rationale. Once he had rejected God, there was nothing left to stop him from pulling the trigger. 

WHAT WE BELIEVE IS HOW WE ACT

Historian Richard Weikart argues that will follow our thoughts:

• Eric Harris, the co-conspirator behind the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, confided to his journal just a few months before his rampage, “I just love Hobbes and Nietzche [sic].” On the day of the shooting he wore a T-shirt that proclaimed “Natural Selection,” and in his journal he stated that he loved natural selection and thought we should return to a state of nature where everyone had to fend for themselves. He wanted the weak and sick to die; his solution was to “kill him, put him out of his misery.” He also expressed utter contempt for humanity and dreamed of exterminating the entire human population. Although Harris had personal reasons for his hatred of humanity—he felt belittled and left out socially—he had also absorbed ideas prominent in our society today. It seems clear from his musings that Harris thought life was meaningless and death was natural, so why worry about it? On the same day that he wrote in his journal, “I say, ‘KILL MANKIND’ no one should survive,” he also remarked, “theres no such thing as True Good or True Evil, its all relative to the observer. its just all nature, chemistry, and math. deal with it.” Earlier he had written, “just because your mommy and daddy told you blood and violence is bad, you think its a law of nature? wrong, only science and math are true, everything, and I mean everything else is man made.” ("The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life")

Others had been social outcasts, but they did not kill. However, our secular society had virtually handed Harris a collection of deadly weapons:

1. The denial of a “true good or true evil”
2. “Natural Selection”
3. Survival of the Fittest
4. Denial of Human Exceptionalism
5. “Only science and math are true, everything, and I mean everything else [including God] is man made.”

When we kill God, only death remains. We are both dignified and destroyed by our beliefs. If we think of humans as mere animals, we will inevitably treat them accordingly. If we believe that there is no “true good and no true evil,” our behavior will eventually catch up with our beliefs, and the results will be costly.

THE DEATH OF GOD AND HOW IT HAS CHANGED THE WORLD

 The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, had argued that once we reject the Christian God, we have also rejected Christian values – equality, human exceptionalism, and an entire array of values that go along with them. However, the West naively thought that they could retain Christian values after “killing” the Christian God. Os Guinness wrote of Nietzsche’s disdain for such blindness:

• Nietzsche was a self-proclaimed “anti-Christ,” yet he had no time complacent middle-class thinking that could say, “God is dead” and go on living as before. If God was “dead” for Western culture, then nothing was the same. It was time to face the consequences. (The Journey, 136)

What were the consequences? Anything would now be permissible! With God in the grave, our only moral rudder would be our desires and fears.

However, as in Nietzsche’s day, so too in ours! Few can perceive the consequences of their rejection of God. Atheists confidently explain:

• We need not sink into a morally relativistic quagmire once we reject God. We still have absolute moral principles to guide us. For example, drinking water is absolutely good because it promotes survival and survival is absolutely good.

However, what makes survival absolutely good? There no longer exists an absolute principle that makes human survival more important than the malaria-bearing mosquito. Besides, is there anything that establishes that survival-is-good apart from our own subjective judgment? If the mosquito could talk, he might say that his survival is just as important to him as ours is to us, and who can mediate between those two opinions with any authority if God is dead! But should we have laws that equally protect the survival of the mosquito? A growing number would now argue, “Yes!”

This brings us back to moral relativism where morality is entirely relative to how I think and feel on any given morning. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche wrote:

• They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to the Christian morality… When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.

Truly, Christian morality rests upon an absolutely immutable and universal standard – God - but does it really matter? Yes! Our beliefs have consequences. The German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine noted these consequences back in 1832:

• It is to the great merit of Christianity that it has somewhat attenuated the brutal German lust for battle. But it could not destroy it entirely. And should that taming talisman break – the Cross - then will come roaring back the wild madness of the ancient warriors.

What would happen once the Cross was broken? Heine continued:

• And laugh not at my forebodings, the advice of a dreamer who warns you away from the Kants and Fichtes of the world, and from our philosophers of nature. No, laugh not at the visionary who knows that in the realm of phenomena comes soon the revolution that has already taken place in the realm of spirit. For thought goes before deed as lightening before thunder. There will be played in Germany a play compared to which the French revolution was but an innocent idyll.

It is inevitable that, without God, there will be little to restrain the madness. The late psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl, reasoned:

• I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek, were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. (The Doctor of the Soul)

Thoughts and philosophies precede plans and actions. Historian Richard Weikart, California State University, wrote in From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany about how the anti-God worldview of Darwinism impacted thought and action:

• By reducing humans to mere animals, by stressing human inequality, and by viewing the death of many "unfit" organisms as a necessary—and even progressive—natural phenomenon, Darwinism made the death of the "inferior" seem inevitable and even beneficent. Some Darwinists concluded that helping the "unfit" die—which had for millennia been called murder—was not morally reprehensible, but was rather morally good. 

Darwinist thinking brought about policy and behavioral change:

• Those skeptical about the role Darwinism played in the rise of advocacy for involuntary euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion should consider several points. First, before the rise of Darwinism, there was no debate on these issues, as there was almost universal agreement in Europe that human life is sacred and that all innocent human lives should be protected. Second, the earliest advocates of involuntary euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion in Germany were devoted to a Darwinian worldview. Third, Haeckel, the most famous Darwinist in Germany, promoted these ideas in some of his best-selling books, so these ideas reached a wide audience, especially among those receptive to Darwinism. Finally, Haeckel and other Darwinists and eugenicists grounded their views on death and killing on their naturalistic interpretation of Darwinism.

Heine was clearly right. In the same way that lightening precedes thunder, thought precedes deed. In Markings, the later Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, wrote:

• God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our loves cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

Perhaps not beyond all reason! In his Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle Paul had written that humanity is without rational excuse for rejecting God:

• For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:18-20)

Consequently, rejecting God is not a morally neutral choice.