Didn't Epicurus and Plato DESTROY the idea of God with these two questions ?!

Well, I tend to think of Christian as someone who makes an attempt to follow some or all of the teachings of Christ.

 

It’s up to you if and in how far you want to follow Plato’s idealism. And of course he was just one of the first in a long line of idealists. If you have not already done so, you may want to read Kant one day.

It’s a close step from one to the other: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

What makes you think showing empathy is more moral than bashing another living being’s head in, a behaviour that also comes natural to us and that has certainly brought us considerable evolutionary advantages?

So depending on how you view evolution you think that ‘progress’ goes into random directions. A cockroach is perfectly well adapted to its environment. Cockroaches are among the few creatures that would probably be able to survive a fully blown nuclear war. Does that make them morally better?

I suppose you are talking about basically every social animal. Sorry, but monkeys – amazing social animals as they are – are a long way away from coming up with anything like the categorical imperative. And not all of our morals 'make sense'. A neighbor of mine has Down Syndrome. The Nazis would have regarded her as an unproductive waste of space. In their eyes killing people like her made perfect sense for the well-being of society. Incidentally back in the day the only ones who openly spoke out against that were guys like Bishop van Galen.

I’ve amply explained to you what I mean by paper Christians. I never implied that to be viewed as a Christian by me one has to share my personal theological and moral opinions to the last dot. If you go back to the beginning of our conversation, you'll find that I already stated several times that I don't claim to know objective truth, I just believe there is one. And while I subjectively think he's confused, I’d never doubt NeverLeft for example, with whom I’m having a hefty dispute in another thread on how to view homosexuality, is a Christian. I’m very prone to doubt the sincerity of politicians though. You may call me a cynic for that.

 

That definition would probably not only rule out a good many Nazis but also a helluvalot of Christians that weren’t/aren't Nazis. But feel free to read both the New Testament and then “Mein Kampf” and tell me whether you can find any attempts to follow the teachings of Christ in the latter.

 

Yes, Hitler prayed. There are pictures of him praying. http://www.nobeliefs.com/nazis.htm

Maybe he was praying for the power to kill his enemies like the guy in Psalms prayed for their destruction.

"Let death take my enemies by surprise; let them go down alive to the grave." Psalm 55:15

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"O God, break the teeth in their mouths." Psalm 58:6

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"May they be blotted out of the book of life and not be listed with the righteous." Psalm 69:28

And guess what? Hitler also had a mother. She probably loved him.

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Not really. Social darwinism is bad science and bad philosophy. It is a manipulation of evolutionary principles for racist reasons.

Because of how we define morality, again.

No, not really. My point was that "progress" doesn't necessarily denote striding towards a specific final or objective goal.

Okay?

Why are you prone to doubt the sincerity of politicians or the Nazis when you are accepting that Christians hold different moral views?

 

According to the book of Revelation when Jesus returns he's going to be an autocratic dictator just like Hitler. So when Hitler was on his romp around Europe he was acting just like Jesus will do when he returns (according to the Bible). Therefore Hitler was showing us what life will be like under Jesus' dictatorship. And remember, in Luke 12:47-48(NKJV) everyone gets a beating. [SUP]

"47 [/SUP]And that servant who knew his master’s will, and did not prepare himself or do according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. [SUP]48 [/SUP]But he who did not know, yet committed things deserving of stripes, shall be beaten with few. For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more."

Embrace the pain.
Proverbs 20:30 (CEV) = "

A severe beating can knock all of the evil out of you!​

"

 

How many? I'm happy to grant that Hitler probably didn't really believe in the Christian god, but I'd be very surprised if the majority of nazi party members and supporters didn't consider themselves to be followers of Christ.

 

Probably not.
Fascists; totalitarians; leftists; communists; etc., all tend to put themselves first. Their emotion based religion is that They know what is best for everyone else and Their view should become the Law that everyone else must obey.
Whether they believe in G-d or Jesus or whomever, they still overwhelmingly believe that Their view is Primary and everyone else's view, including the supposed divine is, at the most, secondary.

 

As with your second quote, Epicurus' viewpoint is totally out of context.
He was actually being used as a foil for a Christian theologian's work called "Treatise on the Anger of God." to disprove this theoretical quote by Epicurus. There is no evidence that Epicurus actually ever wrote such a question.
However, pretending that you are actually quoting something in context - this is merely one of the first viewpoints that is based on the notion that This World is all that exists.
Therefore, he is not questioning G-d's ability to "prevent evil," he is merely restating the premise that neither G-d nor "Heaven' (The World to Come; The World of Truth; The Invisible World that is not of This World) exists at all.
If he actually presumed that G-d and "Heaven" do exist, then he would have to acknowledge that the question of good and evil is unknowable based on this material world.
Based on the idea of G-d and The World To Come, we are taught that This World is a forge; a testing place; the place where our immortal souls have the ability to make choices that enlarge our souls and enable us to grow closer to G-d. Or, to make the wrong choices and to diminish us and to further our distance from G-d...
If This material World is all that is, then Epicurus' questions are irrelevant. Who cares?
If G-d and The World to Come, exist, then his questions are childish and uninformed.

Plato's question is merely one of a lifetime of questioning in a multitude of contexts.. It means nothing out of context. Your either/or out of context question was not a question regarding G-d but a Socratic dialectic between Socrates and Euthyphro regarding the nature of "piety."

 

The thing is, the great majority of Germans for a very, very long period of time have been either Lutheran or Catholic. Sure, you could say the nazis had bigger priorities than their religion - but that doesn't mean they weren't religious.

 

Bad luck for you - but the so called "Deutsche Christen" ("German Christians") - have not really anything to do with the word "deutsch" and the word "Christ". In my eyes the "German Christians" were nothing else than a antisemitic and antichristian Nazi organisation. You grandfather was either a usefull idiot, an opportunistic criminal or a breakfast for Satanas.

I never tried to whitewash anyone or anything. I only said that the Nazis were not Christians. I thought in this context about the leading Nazis and the SS-Officers - not about all Germans or all Christians. Example: Someone here called Hitler a Catholic who prayed - that's more than only a lousy argument - and the nazilike argument that will follow in such a figur of argumentation will be to send all Christians into concentraions camps - as prisoners to kill their bodies or as guards to kill their souls. In the reality nothing in the motivation of Hitler had to do with the christian religion - and for sure not bishops entered continously his heaquarters. Hitler and his criminals misused what they were able to misuse - and it's a shame also for all Christians in Germany what had happened under his tyranny. Nevertheless: Everyone who studies the men causing the deeds of the Nazi regime can see very easy that the Nazis had absolutelly nothing to do with the Christians religion. But not to forget: Never a German asked any member of my families for forgiveness for the very heavy crimes they did - and on the other side: if someone had asked me personally in my life I never had forgiven anyone - specially not someone who was member of the "German Christians". I'm not able to see anything else than only Criminals with a very bad influence in this organisation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKU2Cb63wTM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXnnpRrtvL4

 

Of course they were religious. It's just that they were not believing Christians.
And, I am talking about believers - Nazis, not the rest of the Germans.
Religious Christians or Muslims or whatever, have always believed any damn stupid thing they want such as "killing for Christ." The great mass of peoples are sheep and embody the idea "if it feels good, do it."
But the devoted Nazi party members were most certainly not "followers of Christ." They were followers of their own demented passions which demanded that Jesus must approve of what they were doing.
The same insanity is self evident among devoted Leftists and Islamists today.
They believe in whatever the Hell it is that they insist that everybody else should live in so, therefore, it Must be for the "Greater Good" of Society or, Allah must approve.
One follows the other....

 

Non sequitur, as evil is necessary for the development of virtue.

poses a false dichotomy. You're welcome.

Anything ordered by God can be called arbitrary, including the internal structure of atoms, but the characterization is meaningless absent a standard higher than God.

 

According to Isaiah 45:7 God created evil.

 

I still don't have any idea why you think so nor what you like to see in the pictures you showed to me.

I hope so. Why should his mother had not to love him? Or what do you think has his mother to do with the crimes of Hitler?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S0LNGA2hp8

 

If you don't have any idea what I am speaking about - why do yo try to say nonsense to me instead to try understand the realities in the world we are living in? Without any doubt you yourselve are for example not a red indian from one of my bavarian tribes. Am I right, chief?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUKF1RrfG0A

 

I agree. But again: what follows from to your philosophical tenets is that there is no telling that racism and weeding out the weak is objectively bad and the opposite is objectively good. One position would be as arbitrary as the other and there would be no objective good or bad worth striving for.

Human definitions of morality change. In the Nazis definition bashing in a ‘subhuman’ head would have been a moral act. Who’s to say that our morals are objectively better than theirs if morals just depend on human definitions and nothing else?

Which is basically the same as saying that ‘progress’ goes into random directions.

What’s the question mark for?

As I said: I’m a cynic. With good reason I’m afraid, because:

A) "In his memoirs, Hitler's chief architect, Albert Speer, wrote "Amid his political associates in Berlin, Hitler made harsh pronouncements against the church...", yet "he conceived of the church as an instrument that could be useful to him":[69]

Around 1937, when Hitler heard that at the instigation of the party and the SS vast numbers of his followers had left the church because it was obstinately opposing his plans, he nevertheless ordered his chief associates, above all Goering and Goebbels, to remain members of the church. He too would remain a member of the Catholic Church he said, although he had no real attachment to it. And in fact he remained in the church until his suicide.
— Extract from Inside the Third Reich, the memoir of Albert Speer

Hitler, wrote Speer, viewed Christianity as the wrong religion for the "Germanic temperament":[69] Speer wrote that Hitler would say: "You see it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?"[70]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler's_religious_views

B) I doubt that politicians for the most part are much driven by religious moral considerations (that they may or may not hold in private) rather than by very practical earthly political interests. I’d be very surprised if Obama asked his pastor rather than his political advisors before making the decision to send off another drone.

While I agree with his views on euthanasia, my personal theological and moral views differ in many ways from those of the aforementioned Bishop von Galen, but I would not doubt his sincerity. All of us idealists are but searchers for goodness and truth, what unites us is the belief that what we search for exists.

 

Considering yourself a follower of Christ is not the same as attempting to follow the teachings of Christ. There are lots of Christians around who regularly fall asleep during the sermon or who stop thinking about it as soon as they leave Church because they consider their job done with having been there. That said, you could of course attempt to follow the teachings of Christ and still be a Nazi. All it takes is putting on big blinkers concerning Christ’s Jewish ancestry and narrowing the group of the neighbours that you’re supposed to love to your own ‘race’ while regarding all others as ‘subhuman’. I’d say that’s abysmally bad theology, but of course what’s good and what’s bad theology is rather subjective. (See my post above)

 

What’s frightening is that my grandfather was neither especially stupid nor especially evil. He was just an average bloke who had grown up in the Kaiserreich and whose instilled patriotism had been deeply hurt in WW I. In fact, at the time I knew him, he was the most loving grandfather a little girl could have wished for.
That normal people like him ended up becoming Nazis shows me that the potential for such slumbers in all of us.

Whether Nazis were Christians or not would depend very much on one’s definition of “Christian”. Does your attitude towards forgiving tell us you are one? Luke 17:3-4, or in your favourite medium:

[video=youtube;I39k4liafqQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I39k4liafqQ[/video]

 

That does seem to contradict all the passages in the bible about how God loves us and we are his children. Perhaps that's judging god by human standards but were not humans made in god's image? Doesn't that mean there are at least some similarities between us? God is said to express human emotions yet he doesn't act on them and humans are wrong to expect him to?

 

It was a reference to the No True Scotsman fallacy.

 

Well, I guess the point I was trying to make was that Epicurus was really only addressing one possible description of God (i.e. the biblical one). A more deist view of God, such as what I described (and most of the Founding Fathers believed in), not only sidesteps Epicurus' argument, but the assumptions made in your post as well. Take the bible out of the equation completely. Assume that it was written entirely by humans, with no divine influence. Also assume that God DOES exist, and DID create the universe, but our species is just not important enough to have ever directly communicated with the Creator. Then you will see where I am coming from.

 

I never said anything heat had only a llittle to do with this "Argument" - wjnazis by the way ine of the most childish arguments. Again: You are without any doubt not a Bavarian. A Bavarian whi speaks with you knows this immediatelly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6EzPkqt2Rk

 

The people who catched the children of Izieu on the Holy Thursday before Good Friday were evil by doing what they thought what their duty was in the eyes of the Nazis but what was without any doubt a heavy crime in the eyes of Lord and in the eyes of real humanity. What said he to you about the fact that he was on the side of this murderers in the name of Siegfried - ah sorry: Jesus? Was he on the side of this murderers because he was not evil or because he was not stupid or because he was not a breakfast of Satanas?

So what? Do you think any Jew in Germany or Austria was in another situation? Who allowed him to be an Antisemite? The Jew Jesus? For sure not. The prussian empire was destroyed from the emperor William in the moment he said "Pardon wird nicht gegeben".

When I survived the traumata in the first seven years of my life there came a time when my chances were not anymore so bad to survive as they were before.

Good grieve - he was a Nazi and it was not normal to be a Nazi.

Everyone could become a member of the Mafia - if he's for example a child of a member of the Mafia for example - but not everyone is a member of the Mafia.

Nonsense. To be a Christian and to be a Nazi excludes each other.

You are driftring in the near of sin against the Holy Spirit with your last sentences and the misuse of the bible in the conrete context. Your love for your grandfather should not make you blind for the sneaky and cruel mass-murder of the Nazis. Without any scruple and morality the Nazis produced with their death industry mountains of dead bodies. But I'm a member of the religion of life - and not a friend of Nazis.

[video=youtube;HIUz7U8hH2E]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIUz7U8hH2E[/video]

 

Bavaria is a country. You are Bavarian if you were born in Bavaria. The only way to tell if someone isn't Bavarian is not dependent on their attitude, actions, philosophy, beliefs, etc., but rather on their birth place. Christianity is a completely different animal. You can be a Christian with a WIDE swath of beliefs that other Christians may be opposed to. The Nazis were, in large, Christians and believed they were fighting on God's side, just as the Allied did.

Do you think that the people who forced Native Americans to walk the Trail of Tears were not Christian? What about those who owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy?