Re: CONTRARY EVIDENCE (WASRe: Evide)nce!

Ernest Major wrote:

On 27/03/2024 00:33, Burkhard quoted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Adolf_Hitler

How good or bad is that Wikipedia article? (It's not a subject I would trust Wikipedia on, as it's vulnerable to communities with axes to grind.)

Could be much worse I guess. The main problem is that while it covers the main views, and broadly does so fairly, it does not aim at a source-critical evaluation
of its own - which is of course appropriate for an encyclopedia. But as a result you get authors from the 1950s side by side those from the 2000+, as if these were all equally tenable NOW - which ignores the new archival materials and research that have become available. It also ignores how some
of these authors themselves changed their views over time (Bullock e.g.) and
also does not give you the context of the methodological commitments of some
of the authors. In some cases, they only "seem" to contradict each other, but
once you know where they are coming from and what their methodological
commitments are, some of this disappears. A functionalist like Mason, an intentionalist like Bullock and a "synthesist" structuralist social historian like Kershaw simply mean different things when they talk about Hilers, or anyone
else's, beliefs. They also mean subtly different things when they talk about
"religion" - individual sets of beliefs vs membership in a social group etc.
 Historians who read them know this and take it into account, and then would give you a more nuanced account of the quotes that seem more
at odds with each other than they really are.
Wikipedia is clear about one thing, and rightly so: Hitler was not an atheist.
The question then becomes: was what he believed recognisable as "Christian".
Given the diversity of broadly speaking Christian beliefs over the centuries, this obviously has no easy answer. I mean, some of our creationists here more or less explicitly said they don't consider Catholics Christians (Ray e.g.),
or for that matter people who self-identify as Christian but have no problem
with the theory of evolution.
I gave you my own take in the long post: On the institutional side, there is
a clear line from Luther and Henry VIII to Hitler, i.e. his view on the
relation between religion, church and state has a very clear basis in
mainstream Christian theology and the history of that religion. Things are
less clear when it comes to the substance of his beliefs. I would say on balance, there too his beliefs "match" an identifiable historical trajectory and an intellectual tradition within Christianity - messianic, apocalyptic, end-of-old-world after a struggle of light against dark
and its INEVITABLE outcome. That's de Fiore, Denys van Leeuwen,
Adso of Montier-en-Der and other dispensationalists. Then
in 19th century Germany, the pre-Nazi voelkische writers such as
Johannes Schlaf and later Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. This tradition
does not end with Hitler either - modern neonazis and the US
protestant fringe often embraces the same "accelerationist" view of the end-times that sees wholesale slaughter as a necessary and preordained
step towards the "paradise on earth" which is "racially purified". So
there is a clear family resemblance, and while it always ever
was a fringe belief within Christianity, it clearly belongs historically and systematically to this religion.