Blog atheists are notable for their habit of all saying a small number of limited things over and over again. Usually they've gotten them from other atheists instead of directly from people who know what they're talking about. One of those is the frequently repeated tape loop about Hitler and the Nazis being Christians.
In an argument on this point last week, something occurred to me that I'd never considered before. In the grim list of groups who were murdered by the Nazis there are Jews, Roma, disabled people, leftists, gay German men, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic priests, especially Polish and Czechoslovakian priests and any others who opposed the Nazis, The protestant Confessing Church, etc. But there is one group relevant to that frequently made atheist canard, that the Nazis were a Christian phenomenon, missing from that horrible list.
Atheists were not targeted by the Nazis for extermination or even suppression.
The Nazis violated the teachings of Jesus in the most obvious and fundamental ways.
They did not love God with all of their heart, soul, strength and mind and their neighbor as themselves
They didn't do unto others as they would have done unto them.
They did not turn the other cheek when attacked.
They did not love their enemies and pray for them.
They did not act as good Samaritans.
They did not give to the poor and the destitute, the downtrodden of the world, they did their best to crush them into dust. That is what the Nazis did to the least among them.
They lived by the sword and died by it, their dying by the sword was about the only part of Jesus's words they fulfilled. The Nazis tried to gain the world and they lost their souls, as so many who merely profess Christianity without fulfilling its requirements do, even outside of that indisputably anti-Christian group.
Nazism was entirely compatible with atheism and the most profoundly religion hating atheists, as Martin Bormann's position in the Nazi hierarchy proves. And he was far from the only atheist who was an enthusiastic Nazi. There is nothing in materialism, the faith of most modern atheists, that was violated by the Nazis, there is everything about the gospels that they violated. Their actions and words were entirely incompatible with the teachings of Jesus, his closest disciples, the Jewish prophetic tradition they were a part of and most of the history of Christian theology. Clearly, being a serious Christian was far less compatible with being a Nazi than being a serious materialist, being an atheist doesn't seem to have conflicted with it at all.
Materialism has no ban against murdering people, singly or as a total genocide, it is absolutely against the gospel of Jesus to commit one murder or to refuse to give aid to people living in misery. A materialist, acting with complete integrity with his beliefs, can kill people and refuse to help the helpless, a good Christian cannot. Trying to live by those teachings of Jesus listed above could get you imprisoned and killed by the Nazis, especially those teachings against killing other people and doing justice. The pacifism of the Jehovah's Witnesses was one of the things that brought them some of the severest treatment of any group under the Nazis. Following the teachings of Jesus is what also got other religious people murdered.
A Nazi could possibly be convinced that killing and oppressing people is wrong from the teachings of Jesus found in the Gospels, there is nothing in atheism or materialism that could convince them to give up Nazism. That is real life proof that Christianity is better than materialism and atheism. That difference isn't unimportant. That difference is real, it is conclusive, it means everything.
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