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The Dark Elf wrote: Ambient Hurricanes wrote: The Dark Elf wrote: The T wrote: I'm not sure christianity has anything to do with it anymore.   Hmmm...Christian zealotry is there, it just doesn't operate along the same lines as the victiorious Crusaders slaughtering all the inhabitants of Jerusalem (Deus vult!). Christians have diversified.   it's only been a few short years since Irish Catholics and Protestants stopped blowing each other up, along with any number of innocent men, women and children - because that's what they've done since the time of Cromwell. And one only has to look back 70 years to when Christian bigotry and two thousand years of slander  and pogroms created the proper atmosphere for the genocide of several million Jews. In the U.S., we look at Islamic countries as alien and barbaric (which they may well be, but that is not the point) and think nothing of killing thousands of innocents to eradicate some Al-Qaeda or Taliban. Hey, Iran is next! Just wait till after the election. Wait...now you're blaming Christians for the Holocaust? If you're going to make an assertion like that, it might be a good idea to provide some evidence.  While I don't deny that there was anti-semitism in the church long before the Holocaust, I think blaming the anti-semitism in Christendom for the eradication of Jews under an atheistic, social darwinist regime is more than a bit of a stretch.   I will have to disagree with you. Read up on the history of prejudice, pogroms and genocide by Christians against Jews in Europe prior to WWII. For a shorter historical review, you can start with the Black Death in the 14th century and the Christian massacres of Jews in Germany/Holy Roman Empire (Jews being blamed for poisoning the wells and causing plague), often fomented or abetted by local archbishops. The only reason there weren't Jewish massacres in French territory at the time is because the King Philip IV had already expelled the Jews from France in 1306. The Spanish expulsion of Jews would occur in 1492 (Jews were expelled from England very early on in the Middle Ages).   Fast forward a few centuries, I could describe the incredible prejudice faced by Jews in 19th century France, leading up to the Dreyfuss Affair, or the pogroms in Russia and Poland in the 19th and early 20th century, but let us stick to Germany just prior to WWII. According to a 1939 census in Nazi Germany, 54% of Germans considered themselves Protestand and 40% Catholic, six years into Hitler's regime. Both Hitler and Goebbels were registered Catholics and continued to pay church taxes, even though they ceased attending mass sometime before 1933.   Lutherans voted for Hitler in greater numbers than even the Catholics, with Hitler in speeches vociferously blaming the Jews for the defeat of Germany in WWI. Throughout Hitler's reign of terror there were, of course, many priests and pastors who spoke out against Hitler , they were abruptly sent to concentration camps (approximately 6000 clergy of different denominations dying in camps). But it is on record that many Catholic archbishops encouraged support of the Fuhrer during masses. As for the Nazis themselves, the vast majority of them identified with one Christian church or another. Many Nazis promulgated the idea of a "a militant, non-denominational form of Christianity which emphasized Christ as an active fighter and anti-semite who opposed the institutionalized Judiasm of his day".   In any case, Hitler used the age-old hatered of Christians against the "Eternal Strangers" which includes the belief of an international Jewish conspiracy propogated in the fraudulent "Protocols of Zion".  Tens of millions of German Christians supported Hitler and as active Nazis participated in the Holocaust. Hitler appealed to Christian beliefs formulated in the Middle Ages against Jews as "Christ-killer", "infaniticidists killing babies for rituals" and "poisoners of the wells" - all concepts actively believed in Germany for centuries.   To believe the Holocaust was merely perpatrated by Atheists or Neo-pagans is completely inaccurate.               "I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator."              - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 2 "In short, the results of miscegenation are always the following: (a) The level of the superior race becomes lowered; (b) physical and mental degeneration sets in, thus leading slowly but steadily towards a progressive drying up of the vital sap. The act which brings about such a development is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator. And as a sin this act will be avenged." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 11 "Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 2 Chapter 1

• Adolf Hitler is the completion of the Reformation,
• Baptized Jews are to be dismissed from the Church
• The Old Testament is to be excluded from Sacred Scriptures

The dismissal of baptized members of the church?  The rejection of the vast majority of Scripture?  Doesn't sound like Christianity to me, and it didn't sound like Christianity to the members of the Confessing Church either, who split from the mainline denominations in protest of their heretical views.  Indeed, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the leaders in the church, was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and was hanged for his subversive activity in the church and in the assassination plot.

As for Hitler himself, here you find a portrait of a man with conflicting public and private opinions on religion, claiming to be a Christian but not attending mass, and believing in some sort of militant, vengeful Jesus that's about as far away from the Jesus described in Scripture as Hitler himself was from, say, Mother Teresa.  Scroll down to the section where it lists scholars opinions on all of this, and none of the opinions identify Hitler as an actual Christian.  Though he himself was not an atheist (and though many of his supporters maintained a religious identity; the German religious heritage was strong enough to keep its vestiges even when its essence was destroyed), his philosophy was based on worship of the state.  That's what fascism is; it says that the individual, essentially, does not exist, and that the state, the collective, is the ultimate authority.  Hitler and his followers may have referred to the idea of a god, but he was a god stripped of his godliness and made in the image of the fascist state, which is essentially to make the state into a god.

For the evidence you provided as to the persecution of Jews in Christendom - I never denied that Christians persecuted Jews; I asked you to prove that Christians were responsible for the Holocaust.  If you look at what the mainstream "Christianity" actually was in Germany at the time, it's quite clear that it was not Christians responsible for the Holocaust any more than it was a Christian who perpetrated the massacre in Norway; Hitler and his followers were no more Christians than Breivik is, even though both parties claimed to be Christian.