What If Hitler Was God?
The scene: It is November, 1943. We’re in Camp Shelby, just
outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi,
where 5,300 German prisoners of war are
interned. The Geneva Conventions are being strictly adhered to, with food
(prepared by German cooks), clothing, and medical care equal to their captors.
The German POWs have formed soccer and volleyball teams, with descriptions and
results of the tournaments between them reported in the camp newspaper, The
Mississippi Post.
A Nazi church has been erected in the camp, where Nazi worshippers attend services held by Nazi chaplains. In their sermons, the chaplains instruct that “Nazism is the true religion, the Aryan Soul the only true God, our understanding of Whom has been brought to us by His Holiness, Adolph Hitler. Our Führer, Adolph Hitler is the true Holy Ghost. He is the human form of the Aryan Soul instantiated here on earth. We believe on this earth solely in Adolph Hitler and his sacred teachings.”
The Nazi Bible, Mein Kampf, is treated with careful reverence by the American camp guards. “The Holy Mein Kampf must never be placed in offensive areas such as the floor, near the toilet or sink, near the feet, or dirty/wet areas,” state the detailed rules issued by the Pentagon. “Only Nazi chaplains may handle the Holy Nazi Book, or by guards only after putting on clean white gloves in full view of the POWs.”
“The Holy Mein Kampf,” states the Pentagon’s
directive, “should be treated like a ‘fragile piece of delicate art.’
The first paragraph in the above four is historically accurate. There really was
a Camp Shelby just as described. The remaining three form an imaginary “thought
experiment” to demonstrate how investing a criminally pathological ideology with
the respect of a “religion” castrates our capacity to fight it.
Modern
fanaticisms are often called “secular religions” – pro-“choice” abortionism,
environmentalism, belief in man-made global warming, etc. – because their
advocates are impervious to falsifying evidence. But they aren’t true religions,
for if they were, the qualifier “secular” wouldn’t be necessary. A true religion
requires worshipful belief in a non-natural realm inhabited by one or more
consciousnesses not subject to physical laws but rather capable of controlling
those laws and thus events in our world and lives.
So here’s the thought
experiment: What if Nazism wasn’t just a political ideology, wasn’t just a
secular fanaticism, but a true religion instead? What if its believers
worshipped Hitler as God, or as the Prophet of God – the Nazi Deity being the
reified Aryan Soul who created the universe for the benefit of his followers?
What if Nazis preached totalitarianism, the subjection of everyone to Nazi law,
as a religious doctrine giving them the holy right and sacred duty to wage war
upon all non-Nazis by any means?
In other words – is an ideology of hate
and violence any more acceptable and excusable if it is disguised as a
“religion”?
The answer is yes – because this is precisely the moral
slack we cut for Islam.
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