Nazi Pagans and Deists

Well, if there is one thing that I have a weakness for, it's following up leads when I get started on a topic.   It's a lot more interesting than reading who-done-its or watching them on TV.   Thus this unintended series which I'll put aside after this, barring someone in the opposition coming up with something other than their common received BS which is entirely unevidenced.

One of the things which I found puzzling in the online atheist blather of the past  dozen years is the rare but oddly regular invocation of "deism" as a more rational alternative to "theism", putting both in quotes because, as used by the blatherers, neither word had a fixed meaning and was often used contrary to any dictionary denotation of the term.

My immediate response was to ask where these "deists" were, if they had any kind of organization, etc.  I was assured they did and was given some URLs which looked about as substantial as the phony secular, Potemkin Village alternatives to Alcoholics Anonymous.   A few atheists declared themselves, eventually, to be "deists", when I doubted that there were any actual "deists" if that meant they believed in a creator god who, on the midnight of their "sixth day" said,  OK, I'm done, and left it to run itself down like a top set into motion.

The reason I bring that up is because, once in a while, in arguing about Christianity's culpability in Nazism some would bring up some Nazi or other declaring they were "God believing".   Though that, also, was rare, most of the atheists in the arguments having never even done that level of superficial reading on the topic, merely nodding and spouting unevidenced bigotry on the issue.

I was interested to read this passage from The Third Reich in Power by Richard J. Evans

The [Nazi] Interior Ministry ruled that people leaving their Church could declare themselves to be “Deists” (gottgläubig), and the Party decreed that office-holders could not simultaneously hold any office in the Catholic or Protestant Church.  In 1936, storm troopers were forbidden to wear uniforms at Church services, and early in 1939 the ban was extended to all Party members.  By 1939, over 10 per cent of the population of Berlin, 7.5 per cent in Hamburg, and between 5 and 6 per cent in some other major cities were registered as Deists,  a term which could encompass a variety of religious beliefs including paganism.   The great majority of these were likely to hae been Party members;  the proportion of Deists in the SS had reached over 25 per cent by 1938, for instance.  This process was accelerated by an escalating series of measures pushed by the energetic and strongly anti-Christian head of Rudolph Hess's office,  Martin Bormann, banning priests and pastors from playing a part in Party affairs or even,  after May 1939, from belonging to it altogether.   Still, there was a long way to go before the population as a whole took part in this movement.  “We won't let ourselves be turned into heathens,”  one woman in Hesse was heard to say by a Gestapo agent.  The German Faith Movement, which propagated a new, racial religion based on a mishamash of Nordic and Indian rites, symbols and texts, never won more than 40,000 adherents, and other neopagan groups, like Ludendorff's esoteric Tannenberg League, were even smaller.  Nevertheless, for all the general unpopularity of the movement it remained the case that the Nazi Party was on the way to severing all its ties with organized Christianity by the end of the 1930s.

While it is, indeed, terrible to think that any Christian pastor or priest would be involved with the Nazis, it is telling that the Nazis obviously didn't want them involved with their plans.  They didn't feel they could trust them to be sufficiently evil or fanatical, even if they'd managed to dupe them into participating in the earlier stages of their regime.  Remember, though there were lots of people who knew they were bad news in the early years of their LEGAL rule and their despotism which they instituted by due, if entirely insane, processes, who would certainly never have agreed to what they did from the late 1930s till the fall of Berlin.   That there were people with even more reason to distrust the Nazis who were, as well, taken in by them, is proved by the fact that there were even some Zionists stupid or desperate enough to think they could do business with the Nazis in the early years of their regime, for example in the The Haavara Agreement.  What people believed about the Nazis in their early years was seldom what came about in the last seven years of their regime, the Nazis, themselves, modified their policies as time went on, growing ever and unprecedentedly worse, as their ideological roots guaranteed.  What we know in hindsight isn't what could have been known with foresight.

Reading more about the "Deism" of the Nazis as well as the paganism of some of their worst members makes me wonder why the present day Pagans and deists aren't held responsible for them when the Nazis were certainly more pagan friendly than they were Christian friendly.   Hitler famously loved Wagner's insane operatic ring, one of the most absurdly scripted pieces of drama not denoted to be an example of surrealist, absurdist theater.

Reading on this also makes me understand why the past two popes and others who lived through the Nazi regime and invasion were skittish about the revival of "Paganism" which they'd seen revived under Nazism already.   To someone in the United States, born after the war and in ignorance of Nazi paganism that might look like some kind of harmless nature-loving buyers of newly created history and yearning for a 19th century, story-book style pseudo-historical view of those religions.  To someone who saw Nazi paganism, it would likely look a lot less harmless.

As I've noted several times, all of those pagan religions yearned after so romantically, sacrificed people to their gods.  That is something they have in common with the Nazis.  And I'm not going to not say it because they don't like it being said.   Not to mention bringing it up to those online "deists" who declare their "faith" opportunistically.

Update:  Ah, no.  You've been watching too many Buggs Bunny cartoons.  I am a classical musican and opera watcher who has always, always had a deep and abiding hatred of Wagner's music and a deep and intense disdain for his drama.    I believe it was the great stage director, not the actor, Peter Sellers who attributed the decadence of opera to Wagner and Puccini who sent opera out of the realm of relevance to reality and into insane and gooey fantasy.   I will say that Puccini's music is easier to take than Wagner's.

I have always held that Mahler wrote better Wagner than Wagner ever did and that Schoenberg wrote better Mahler than Mahler ever did.

Now, I've got to eat lunch before the bell rings.

Update:  The fact is four dull cents still doesn't add up to a nickle.  And that's about as much as they put into the discussion.   Funny kind of brain trust that never reads what they believe they discuss.   CD should stop making stuff up.

Update 3:  Let's see, I've presented Richard Evans, William Shirer, Christopher Krebs, Laurence Rees. who cite primary documentary evidence to support the argument that the Nazis intended to destroy Christianity, replacing it with a Nazi religion because they figured the Volk needed something like that to replace Christianity.  I also directly cited primary source material in making my case.  The Brain trust, in answering what I presented presented nothing but their own assertions.   And they figure they have the better argument.  Just to show how this new-intellectualism works.  

Sometimes I think that the problem with neo-atheists is that they don't have the first clue about how you make an argument in the world of adults.