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Stalin murdered 80 million idiot.
Read a book sometime konny. Your profound ignorance is showing.
USA is the only western nation where you are not considered nuts if you believe in Noah's Ark and Creationism.
Will this ever change ?
Why would you say that?
Frankly, a lot of people act like douchebags because they are religious.
Because usually, they are pretty ignorant of what is in their holy books, and the Imaginary Sky Pixie is a great enabler for douchebaggery.
But usually the biggest arrogant douchebags come from the aethist side of the equation.
Its not suprising that people who believe in nothing bigger than themselves can tend to be assholes.
Really, name them.
Jim Jones, David Koresh, Jimmy Swaggert, I could come up with a whole list of religous douchebags...
You, not so much. Okay, I guess you'll claim Stalin was an "atheist". You'd probably try to claim Hitler was an atheist, ignoring the whole "Gott Mit Uns" thing.
But usually the biggest arrogant douchebags come from the aethist side of the equation.
Its not suprising that people who believe in nothing bigger than themselves can tend to be assholes.
Really, name them.
Jim Jones, David Koresh, Jimmy Swaggert, I could come up with a whole list of religous douchebags...
You, not so much. Okay, I guess you'll claim Stalin was an "atheist". You'd probably try to claim Hitler was an atheist, ignoring the whole "Gott Mit Uns" thing.
You make it too easy... Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Mugabe, Ataturk, Hell plug in any mass murderer in history and odds are they were atheist.
[
Stalin murdered 80 million idiot.
Read a book sometime konny. Your profound ignorance is showing.
80 Million? really? This is what you are trying to claim?
Most historians put the death toll from Stalin's purges at only a few million, which for a country that just underwent a civil war, is kind of to be expected. You only get into 8 figures if you toss in the wars and the famines...
Yeah, Famines. that's the ticket. Dirty stinking commies created famines.
[
Stalin murdered 80 million idiot.
Read a book sometime konny. Your profound ignorance is showing.
80 Million? really? This is what you are trying to claim?
Most historians put the death toll from Stalin's purges at only a few million, which for a country that just underwent a civil war, is kind of to be expected. You only get into 8 figures if you toss in the wars and the famines...
Yeah, Famines. that's the ticket. Dirty stinking commies created famines.
But usually the biggest arrogant douchebags come from the aethist side of the equation.
Its not suprising that people who believe in nothing bigger than themselves can tend to be assholes.
Really, name them.
Jim Jones, David Koresh, Jimmy Swaggert, I could come up with a whole list of religous douchebags...
You, not so much. Okay, I guess you'll claim Stalin was an "atheist". You'd probably try to claim Hitler was an atheist, ignoring the whole "Gott Mit Uns" thing.
You make it too easy... Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Mugabe, Ataturk, Hell plug in any mass murderer in history and odds are they were atheist.
[
The minimum number for Stalin is 20 million. The high estimate is 80 million (most Russians are leaning towards this number as they further their research), and that was accomplished through many methods, starvation being one of them. Does it matter how they died?
That does NOT include the 25 million killed during the 2nd World War. Mao is responsible for a minimum of 80 million and demographers have estimated as high as 150 million. In other words atheistic socialist governments have managed to murder orders of magnitude more people in under 100 years than all the religious murders committed over 2000 years.
You guys are
[. . .]The Nazis defined Jewishness in part genetically, but did not always use formal genetic tests or physiognomic features to determine one's status (although the Nazis talked a lot about physiognomy as a racial characteristic). In practice records on the religious affiliation(s) of one's grandparents were often the deciding factor (mostly christening records and membership registers of Jewish congregations).[9]
However, while the grandparents had been able to choose their religion, their grandchildren in the Nazi era were compulsorily classified as Jews and thus non-Aryans if at least three grandparents had been enrolled as members of a Jewish congregation (regardless whether the persecuted themselves were Jews). According to Orthodox Jewish Halachah, one is Jewish by birth from a Jewish mother or by conversion. Thus Jews who had converted to Christianity could be regarded as especially deceitful and subversive, while Gentiles who had converted to Judaism were perceived as traitors to the "Aryan race" and were among the first to be persecuted and killed.[...][E.A.]
That's why atheists are more moral than religous people. We do the right thing because it's the right thing.
New to the board and this may be a discussion that's been had before. Apologies in advance if so.
But I don't understand how atheism can presume a "right" action even exists. I don't understand the basis for morality for an atheist. True morality, I mean; as in, this act is absolutely morally wrong as opposed to, I would prefer a different act, or this act makes me feel bad personally.
As with Nietzsche's atheism, I don't see how atheists escape inevitable nihilism. I don't think they do, in fact. I think the "new breed" of atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins simply choose to ignore it.
If someone can explain to me how one can be an atheist yet still enjoy a foundation of objective and absolute morality and meaning I'd be much obliged, because I can't figure it out.
Really, name them.
Jim Jones, David Koresh, Jimmy Swaggert, I could come up with a whole list of religous douchebags...
You, not so much. Okay, I guess you'll claim Stalin was an "atheist". You'd probably try to claim Hitler was an atheist, ignoring the whole "Gott Mit Uns" thing.
You make it too easy... Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Mugabe, Ataturk, Hell plug in any mass murderer in history and odds are they were atheist.
Hitler wasn't an "Atheist". We just spent three pages debunking that, I'm kind of amazed that you repeated it.
Mao and Pol Pot were brought up in societies that lacked a Western notion of "God".
Kemel Ataturk was actually kind of an okay guy, not sure why you are putting him on the list, exactly.
Mugabe is grossly incompetant, but he's hardly a mass murderer.
So that kind of just leaves you with Stalin. A guy who was educated in a seminary and studied to be a priest, BTW.
Really, name them.
Jim Jones, David Koresh, Jimmy Swaggert, I could come up with a whole list of religous douchebags...
You, not so much. Okay, I guess you'll claim Stalin was an "atheist". You'd probably try to claim Hitler was an atheist, ignoring the whole "Gott Mit Uns" thing.
You make it too easy... Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, Mugabe, Ataturk, Hell plug in any mass murderer in history and odds are they were atheist.
You forgot to put JoeB on the list.
New to the board and this may be a discussion that's been had before. Apologies in advance if so.
But I don't understand how atheism can presume a "right" action even exists. I don't understand the basis for morality for an atheist. True morality, I mean; as in, this act is absolutely morally wrong as opposed to, I would prefer a different act, or this act makes me feel bad personally.
As with Nietzsche's atheism, I don't see how atheists escape inevitable nihilism. I don't think they do, in fact. I think the "new breed" of atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins simply choose to ignore it.
If someone can explain to me how one can be an atheist yet still enjoy a foundation of objective and absolute morality and meaning I'd be much obliged, because I can't figure it out.
The book Hitler's Secret Conversations 1941-1944 published by Farrar, Straus and Young, Inc. first edition, 1953, contains definitive proof of Hitler's real views. The book was published in Britain under the title, _Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944, which title was used for the Oxford University Press paperback edition in the United States.[...]
Beware, this is a discredited source (at the very best, widely disputed), and no serious historian relies on this information. After WW2, there was much embarrassment over Hitler being a Christian and supported by the Christians and the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Lo and behold, we have this book of "secret" conversations, which is where we get all the these anti-Christian quotes. Its usually published as "Hitler's Table Talk", and is an exclusively hearsay compilation of "private" conversations in which Hitler was supposedly warned beforehand that everything he said would be recorded for posterity, yet he lowered his guard and supposedly revealed his true feelings anyway. Naturally, these feelings contrast violently with other public and private speeches or conversations, and mysteriously enough, no original documents or recordings can be found.
Another over-used source is Hermann Rauschning's "The Voice of Destruction: Hitler Speaks", which was already so heavily quoted by 1945 that it was explicitly mentioned and dismissed in OSS documents because of its unreliable nature. In fact, May 1983, Swiss historian Wolfgang Haenel formally gathered together all of the criticisms of Rauschning's book and resoundingly debunked it at a presentation at the annual conference of the Ingolstadt Contemporary History Research Center, showing
(among other things) that Hitler was not physically present at the times and places indicated, and that the financially desperate Rauschning was paid a staggering sum of money to produce the book by French and American sources who wished to use it as propaganda.
Authenticity of Hitler Speaks
The authenticity of the discussions Rauschning claims to have had with Hitler between 1932 and 1934, which form the basis of his book Hitler Speaks,[18] was challenged shortly after Rauschning's death by Swiss researcher Wolfgang Hänel. Hänel investigated the memoir and announced his findings at a conference of the revisionist association Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt[19] in 1983.[citation needed]
Hänel declared that Gespräche mit Hitler (the German title of Hitler Speaks) was a fraud and that the book has no value "except as a document of Allied war propaganda"[page needed] and concluded that:
Rauschning's claim to have met with Hitler "more than a hundred times" was a lie[page needed]
that the two actually met only four times, and never alone[page needed]
words attributed to Hitler were simply invented or plagiarized from many different sources, including the writings of Ernst Jünger and Friedrich Nietzsche; and an
account of Hitler hearing voices, waking at night with convulsive shrieks and pointing in terror at an empty corner while shouting "There, there, in the corner!" was taken from a short story by French writer Guy de Maupassant (Le Horla).[page needed]
Hänel based his book upon a tape-recorded interview that he had led in 1981 with Emery Reves, Jewish publisher of the original French edition of Hitler speaks (which had been entitled Hitler m'a dit) who had commissioned the book from Rauschning in 1939. In this interview, Reves contended that penniless Rauschning's main reason for agreeing to write Hitler speaks was the 125,000 francs advance, and, referring to preliminary talks with Rauschning in 1939 where he had agreed with the author on what themes and personality traits to apply to Hitler, considered it as largely fabrication.
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich also considers that "The research of the Swiss educator Wolfgang Hänel has made it clear that the 'conversations' were mostly free inventions."[20]
The non-revisionist historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's initial view that the conversations recorded in Hitler Speaks were authentic[21] also wavered as a result of the Hänel research. For example, in the introductory essay[22] he wrote for Hitler's Table Talk in 1953[23] he had said:
"Hitler's own table talk in the crucial years of the Machtergreifung (193234), as briefly recorded by Hermann Rauschning, so startled the world (which could not even in 1939 credit him with either such ruthlessness or such ambitions) that it was for long regarded as spurious. It is now, I think, accepted. If any still doubt its genuineness, they will hardly do so after reading the volume now published. For here is the official, authentic record of Hitler's Table-Talk almost exactly ten years after the conversations recorded by Rauschning".[24]
in the third edition, published in 2000,[25] he wrote a new preface in which he did revise, though not reverse, his opinion of the authenticity of Hitler Speaks:
"I would not now endorse so cheerfully the authority of Hermann Rauschning which has been dented by Wolfgang Hanel, but I would not reject it altogether. Rauschning may have yielded at times to journalistic temptations, but he had opportunities to record Hitler's conversations and the general tenor of his record too exactly foretells Hitler's later utterances to be dismissed as fabrication."[26]
In writing his biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw has written "I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning's Hitler Speaks, a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether."[27][28]
Richard Steigmann-Gall, in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, is another historian contending Hitler speaks an overall fake.[29]
The Hänel research was reviewed in the West German newspapers Der Spiegel[30] and Die Zeit in 1985.[31][...]
[
New to the board and this may be a discussion that's been had before. Apologies in advance if so.
But I don't understand how atheism can presume a "right" action even exists. I don't understand the basis for morality for an atheist. True morality, I mean; as in, this act is absolutely morally wrong as opposed to, I would prefer a different act, or this act makes me feel bad personally.
As with Nietzsche's atheism, I don't see how atheists escape inevitable nihilism. I don't think they do, in fact. I think the "new breed" of atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins simply choose to ignore it.
If someone can explain to me how one can be an atheist yet still enjoy a foundation of objective and absolute morality and meaning I'd be much obliged, because I can't figure it out.
The book Hitler's Secret Conversations 1941-1944 published by Farrar, Straus and Young, Inc. first edition, 1953, contains definitive proof of Hitler's real views. The book was published in Britain under the title, _Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944, which title was used for the Oxford University Press paperback edition in the United States.[...]
Great book! An Amazon reviewer summarized its credibility rather succinctly:
Beware, this is a discredited source (at the very best, widely disputed), and no serious historian relies on this information. After WW2, there was much embarrassment over Hitler being a Christian and supported by the Christians and the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Lo and behold, we have this book of "secret" conversations, which is where we get all the these anti-Christian quotes. Its usually published as "Hitler's Table Talk", and is an exclusively hearsay compilation of "private" conversations in which Hitler was supposedly warned beforehand that everything he said would be recorded for posterity, yet he lowered his guard and supposedly revealed his true feelings anyway. Naturally, these feelings contrast violently with other public and private speeches or conversations, and mysteriously enough, no original documents or recordings can be found.
Another over-used source is Hermann Rauschning's "The Voice of Destruction: Hitler Speaks", which was already so heavily quoted by 1945 that it was explicitly mentioned and dismissed in OSS documents because of its unreliable nature. In fact, May 1983, Swiss historian Wolfgang Haenel formally gathered together all of the criticisms of Rauschning's book and resoundingly debunked it at a presentation at the annual conference of the Ingolstadt Contemporary History Research Center, showing
(among other things) that Hitler was not physically present at the times and places indicated, and that the financially desperate Rauschning was paid a staggering sum of money to produce the book by French and American sources who wished to use it as propaganda.
More reading on Table Talk.
And here's some relevant information about Hitler Speaks.
Authenticity of Hitler Speaks
The authenticity of the discussions Rauschning claims to have had with Hitler between 1932 and 1934, which form the basis of his book Hitler Speaks,[18] was challenged shortly after Rauschning's death by Swiss researcher Wolfgang Hänel. Hänel investigated the memoir and announced his findings at a conference of the revisionist association Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt[19] in 1983.[citation needed]
Hänel declared that Gespräche mit Hitler (the German title of Hitler Speaks) was a fraud and that the book has no value "except as a document of Allied war propaganda"[page needed] and concluded that:
Rauschning's claim to have met with Hitler "more than a hundred times" was a lie[page needed]
that the two actually met only four times, and never alone[page needed]
words attributed to Hitler were simply invented or plagiarized from many different sources, including the writings of Ernst Jünger and Friedrich Nietzsche; and an
account of Hitler hearing voices, waking at night with convulsive shrieks and pointing in terror at an empty corner while shouting "There, there, in the corner!" was taken from a short story by French writer Guy de Maupassant (Le Horla).[page needed]
Hänel based his book upon a tape-recorded interview that he had led in 1981 with Emery Reves, Jewish publisher of the original French edition of Hitler speaks (which had been entitled Hitler m'a dit) who had commissioned the book from Rauschning in 1939. In this interview, Reves contended that penniless Rauschning's main reason for agreeing to write Hitler speaks was the 125,000 francs advance, and, referring to preliminary talks with Rauschning in 1939 where he had agreed with the author on what themes and personality traits to apply to Hitler, considered it as largely fabrication.
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich also considers that "The research of the Swiss educator Wolfgang Hänel has made it clear that the 'conversations' were mostly free inventions."[20]
The non-revisionist historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's initial view that the conversations recorded in Hitler Speaks were authentic[21] also wavered as a result of the Hänel research. For example, in the introductory essay[22] he wrote for Hitler's Table Talk in 1953[23] he had said:
"Hitler's own table talk in the crucial years of the Machtergreifung (193234), as briefly recorded by Hermann Rauschning, so startled the world (which could not even in 1939 credit him with either such ruthlessness or such ambitions) that it was for long regarded as spurious. It is now, I think, accepted. If any still doubt its genuineness, they will hardly do so after reading the volume now published. For here is the official, authentic record of Hitler's Table-Talk almost exactly ten years after the conversations recorded by Rauschning".[24]
in the third edition, published in 2000,[25] he wrote a new preface in which he did revise, though not reverse, his opinion of the authenticity of Hitler Speaks:
"I would not now endorse so cheerfully the authority of Hermann Rauschning which has been dented by Wolfgang Hanel, but I would not reject it altogether. Rauschning may have yielded at times to journalistic temptations, but he had opportunities to record Hitler's conversations and the general tenor of his record too exactly foretells Hitler's later utterances to be dismissed as fabrication."[26]
In writing his biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw has written "I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning's Hitler Speaks, a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether."[27][28]
Richard Steigmann-Gall, in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, is another historian contending Hitler speaks an overall fake.[29]
The Hänel research was reviewed in the West German newspapers Der Spiegel[30] and Die Zeit in 1985.[31][...]
While I don't blame Westwall entirely for the cut-and-paste job from answers.com, he or she has demonstrated a common failing of the willfully ignorant: namely the complete lack of effort in verifying the credibility of a source.
