Secular Schools Can Never Be Tolerated
June 6, 2011 5 Comments
Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith … we need believing people.
~ Adolf Hitler
Oh, and by the way, this is also the agenda of todays religious right and the Republican Party. The attacks continue all across America…get religion into the curriculum, by hook or by crook.
.
.
see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!
About the word of me
The Word of Me... 
Hitler was also a vegetarian and a painter. What conclusions can we draw?
(For the record, I would personally argue that schools must be secular so that religious choices are based on “informed consent” by the adult—not the indoctrinated believes of the child.)
Hello michaelericksson,
He was also a amphetamine addict, from that we can conclude he was batspit crazy. Oh, and the vegetarianism would also contribute to the craziness.
Of course they must be secular. Have to stop spreading that crazy religious stuff to our youngsters. 🙂
Actually, Hitler was a master of affecting character training. He turned it to dark purposes, true, but that does not invalidate what he says in the quote you’ve selected here. So, ironically, Hitler may have proven that the most effective way to shape character–for good or for ill–is through religious instruction. It is lamentable, of course, that Hitler used it in the manner that he did.
Regardless, your assumption in this post seems to be that if Hitler endorsed religious education–or opposed secular schools–and the “Right” does also, then “the Right = Hitler.” Besides this being untenable in the terms of formal logic, it is an odious comparison. I care less that you are willing to slander the legitimacy of certain perspectives on the Right, than that you are willing to pretend (or seriously believe?) that the worst members of the Right could even begin to approximate the reprehensible politics of Hitler. This is absurd. Worse, it trivializes the true magnitude of Hitler’s atrocities by turning them to your own snide political ends to make an unpersuasive point–or really, just a juvenile jab–about your political opposition.
I’m no fan of the Right, but this kind of “argument” is what makes liberals look bad. I thought everyone over age 13 now understood that drawing comparisons to Hitler simply undermines your credibility. You’re not helping expose the fallacies of the Right. You’re helping to justify their indignation at liberals by making the rest of us look stupid.
Hello Conscience, thanks for writing.
You may be misunderstanding my purpose here… I run an atheist blog. The Christian right has been saying for 60 +- years now that Hitler was a atheist and that atheism is why he killed 6 million Jews and all the other crap he was responsible for. Basically blaming atheism for all the death in WWII.
Well he was not an atheist…He was born into the Catholic faith and for a while practiced it and he always wrote and spoke of Christianity in a favorable light. He was responsible for book burning of atheistic and skeptical works and banned them in Germany. He used and worked religion for all it was worth.
Speaking of the Right…especially the Christian Right which controls the Republican Party. Listen to them sometime. A large number of them advocate Biblical rule in America, criminalization of homosexuality, adultery, masturbation, ridiculing old bald men 🙂 blasphemy, being a heretic…crap like that. They also want to bring in religious indoctrination of our children in ALL schools…kind of like Hitler wanted in Germany.
Peace my friend
Well, Hitler may have purported to be Catholic, but he did not act in a Catholic manner. He simply wielded the rhetoric of religion. I don’t know that it is fair, then, to conflate his actions with Catholicism in particular or Christianity in general. Even atheists would concede that Hitler’s actions were about as anti-Christian as they could be, even if he still used religious and moral language (as all politicians do) to negotiate support for his interests.
The other issue is that, in all fairness, it was actually science that enabled Hitler’s atrocities. He may have used religious language to put a moral facade on his actions, but he justified them even more vigorously with appeals to genetics, lineage, and racial traits. He also used science to devise his means of exterminating Jews on a mass scale. I’m not criticizing science. I’m trying to point out that what makes it good or ill is how it is used, not some built-in essence. I trust you understand that argument when it comes to science and technology, but it seems you think that the rules of religion are different. Not so. With religion, too, the good or ill comes from the human failings. And ironically, religion is the discourse we have to thank for being the most eloquent and insightful explanation of man’s failings. Yet it usually gets blamed, instead, for being the cause. That is a sophomoric and historically ignorant critique.
I don’t disagree with your sense that the Christian Right has its radicals, but it sounds to me as though you’re in the grip of the media sensationalism. I am hard pressed to find many Republicans who are radicalized in the Christian Right terms you’re invoking. Instead, I find that most of them resent how much the media has reduced their positions to supposedly uber-Christian terms that they themselves believe is a serious distortion of any Christian ethic. It is like the liberals being conflated with the odious Michael Moore and the radicals from the 70s who thought bombing was an intelligent way to wage dissent. None of us benefits from this sort of reductionism.
The fact is that politics is now a spectator sport. There are no debates of fact or truth. We just root for “our” team and bash the other. I wanted to think that liberals had risen above this, but I am disillusioned when I see them conflating others with Hitler–which, again, is an odious comparison. You seem to have little or no appreciation for just how exceptionally brutal and systematic Hitler’s “achievements” were. The radicalism of the Christian Right–which I believe is actually fairly marginal and not very widespread, despite media pretenses–pales in comparison. Is it alarming? Sure. But responding to it in the intellectually indefensible terms you’re invoking can only increase its power, since your rhetoric is so overblown it can only hurt the credibility of we dissenters. That is all I meant.