I am not a news correspondent that is trying to belittle the atrocities done by Hitler by comparing his actions to something incomparable. I am just pointing out similarities in the German people’s acceptance of Hitler as a leader to a religious person’s acceptance of God, and including my Plato-inspired allegory and reasons why religion is lost. I’d also like to add the irony that Hitler “believed that he had been called by God to become dictator of Germany and rule the world”. Enjoy.
The start of a monotheistic religion is a lot like the story of Hitler’s rise to power. It all starts off with a people stuck in an extremely unfortunate situation, a hole. The German people at the time were stuck in one of the worst depressions; poverty and hardships affected the country to a degree where the people were desperate for a solution. People in general have a conscious and subconscious fear of the unknown in death as well as a constant want of guidance on how to live a proper life. The German people were stuck in a hole of poverty due to their loss in WWI and a treaty that kept them in that hole, and because of this, had lost faith in their political parties. People constantly thinking about death, afterlife, and how they ought to live their lives are stuck in a hole of uncertainty, fear, depression, and anxiety. Both situations can and usually do lead people to a state of desperation for an answer or solution, and that desperation can most likely hurry an acceptance of a proposed answer that must be analyzed, critiqued, and brought about with skepticism and if accepted, must be supervised under extreme scrutiny. In other words, both look for the first hand offered to pull them out of the hole, and if they grab that hand, they must know whom the hand belongs to before accepting its help.
Neither the acceptance of Hitler nor the acceptance of a religion are or were analyzed, critiqued, and supervised under scrutiny to the extent necessary for proper evaluation or in order to see their true intentions, for if they were, neither would occur or have had occurred. Now I’m not saying that the German people are to blame for Hitler’s rise to power. They were in a “deep anger about WWI and the Treaty of Versailles [which] created an underlying bitterness” that appealed to Hitler’s “viciousness and expansionism”. Their feelings of humiliation, anger, and discontent with their living situation make it easier to understand how they could be so blind as to accept the Nazi Party and Hitler. However, this is exactly my point. Blinded by emotions, the German people were unable to move beyond their anger for the current government and all their other negative emotions towards their current living situation that they ignored the skepticism they must maintain when allowing a new leader to be in control. This neglect of careful examination, along with promises by Hitler to dismiss the treaty and restore Germany to its former state of prosperity were a perfect combination to win over the people and attain power (link below for better description on Hitler’s rise to power). People stuck in the hole of uncertainty tend to allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the emotions, and who can blame them. When considered seriously, death and the question of the afterlife can both be the most petrifying and anxiety causing thoughts a person can have, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about because your entire life you’ve been spoon fed a comfortable religious tale of heaven and souls and eternal life, consider for a second that you might be wrong, that you truly know absolutely nothing of what happens in and after death, and that the only certainty you have of death is the ambiguity in the word itself. Feel better? Back to my point, those people with this fear, this desperation for an answer (for most, a comforting answer), were given an answer, by whatever religion offered it to them, and with the feeble ability to reason they possessed, they made their decision, much like the German people using an insufficient amount of analysis to decide who to place in power. This first clean religious hand presented itself to the people in the hole with an offer of solitude and well being with a promotion of comradery with thy fellow man. No one can deny the good moral teachings by Jesus Christ, Abraham, or Muhammad. Even Islam, today’s most “violent” religion, is a religion that originated with “attributing particular importance to social service, alleviating other people’s suffering and helping the needy”. Who wouldn’t take the religious hand when held out in the hole? Islam, Judaism, and Christianity all offer a promise to eternal bliss, a moral compass to live by, and answers to every question one might have. And at their time of creation, their strengths in answering these questions greatly outweighed their main opponents, logic, reason, and science, who were not as explored and implemented as they are today. This is strikingly similar to Hitler’s rise to power, where the strengths of the Nazi Party, with their promises of prosperity, along with the weaknesses of other parties created an extremely timely and advantageous situation for the Nazi Party. Who can blame the German people for allowing what seemed to be the Party that not only would restore Germany economically, but as a world power as well? And who can blame our less-educated ancestors for grasping the hand that provided all the answers? We, however, are not our ancestors.
Today, we are being offered a gloved religious hand to help us out of this hole. This glove covers the scarred hand, which after committing thousands of years, as well as current situations, of bigotry, discrimination, oppression, war, genocide, and the list of atrocities goes on and on so much to the point that I would have to dedicate a whole other discussion for that topic alone, has been disfigured to a state that needs concealment, and the owner of the hand knows this. The trick we see today is that the hand promises to pull you out, but will not do so until death has taken you, a trick our ancestors failed to realize. In a side not for similarity to Hitler, he made the promise to pull Germans out of their hole by saying he would nullify the financially detrimental treaty as well as reconstruct a powerful Germany if he were in power. His promise, unlike the religious’ hands promise however, was somewhat briefly fulfilled. In response to this realization of the trick however, the owner of the hand explains that its answers to the questions of death and the afterlife are sufficient enough to keep us in the hole until it is our time to come out, and conveniently enough for them, that time is death, a time where physical proof no longer matters. And this is where “faith” comes into play. Our ancestors were sold the idea that in order to obtain exodus from the hole, they must simply abide by the moral compass provided by whatever religion they followed. Well now we see that the religious moral compass is flawed, and we are not the first. Famous Greek philosophers understood the question of ethics and began delving into the proper answer of how one ought to live. Once Christianity obtained enough power in the region, schools of philosophy were shut down, writings done by the philosophers were to be destroyed, and an entire enlightenment movement by the Greeks was to be obliterated; and their reasoning was that any teaching that is not derived from the word of God is to be considered blasphemy, one of many oppressions by religion. Now to come back to the similarity aspect between the rise of Hitler and the rise of God, a very important aspect to consider is the fact that Hitler obtained money and support from the industrialists in Germany. The German people had witnessed their democracy fail, and in response, “many workers turned to communism”. This of course frightened wealthy businessmen, who feared losing their wealth to a communistic policy. They, in return, helped financed Hitler’s campaigns. The similarity here is best compared to the Catholic Church. During the Middle Ages Kings and Queens would have to seek the approval of the Church in order to rule. To think that Catholic/Christian bishops and popes did not use this to their advantage in order to maintain wealth, power, and control over the population is to ignore common sense and historical fact. The common people even regarded the Church as more powerful than the Monarch. Therefore, the wealthy and already powerful people who allotted their wealth gained from their rule to the Church would be granted Divine Command from the Church, and as a result, the submission and control of its people, all of which is in the end, under the control of the Church. This point of time in which total religious control maintained itself throughout Europe is known as the Dark Ages, or “age of faith”. The wealthy financed Hitler’s campaigns in order to keep their wealth and the royalty of the Middle Ages financed the Church in order to keep their power, power which of course contributed to their wealth.
There is one massive difference that can be found in this discussion, and that is in the post-Hitler dictatorship and post-religious dominance. After WWII, the German people realized the tragic mistake they had made; they grabbed the wrong hand to get pulled out of their hole, got one foot out, and fell right back in. However, they made an effort to learn from that mistake. For the years to follow Germany recovered and its people denounced any act or belief relating to Nazism. Germany itself became one of Europe’s most thriving and profitable economies. The German people ended up getting themselves out of their own hole through ideas put into practice by economic leaders like Ludwig Erhard, an anti-Nazi teacher who is said to have contributed to fixing Germany’s money supply. However, acknowledgment of outside help from the Allies must be recognized as well. And yet, where is the fix from post-religious dominance? Where is our chance to pull ourselves out of the hole? Religious dominance during the Dark Ages in Europe proved that religion does not provide us with the tools to live better lives as a society, and people began to realize this. The Age of Enlightenment is a period of time that entails that realization. It was “a cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe and America, whose purpose was to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted science and intellectual interchange and opposed superstition, intolerance and abuses in church and state”. Current religious dominance in the Middle East is proving the false notion of beneficial religious dominance as well, and current religious dominance in the “Bible-Belt” of the United States is attempting to stunt the constant, gradual evolution of a great country.
Imagine for a moment that you are in a literal hole, a very large, cave-like hole that you cannot get out of unless you are pulled out. It’s one hundred yards in diameter, about fifty feet high, and there is only a small circle opening at the top about ten feet in diameter that allows the only source of light in. You are of looking up towards light, and that large-enough-to-be-noticed gloved religious hand is being presented as an offering to get you out. All you see is the hand and the light, nothing else. The hand is just out of your reach, and like stated before, the owner of the hand will not pull you out until you have died, and once you do, it will reach down and pick you up out of the hole for your soul to enjoy the eternal bliss that you have been led to believe awaits it outside of the hole. But until your death, you must remember the moral compass you follow forbids you to look at anything but the hand, because you know looking away will just bring you back to uncertainty and fear. Now imagine your curiosity finally gets to you and you decide to look at something other than the hand. You decide to look around and you realize there are others reaching for the gloved hand as well. At first you feel happy, content that you’re not alone in this goal to reach for the hand, but you think, “All these people here and I have not once in my lifetime seen the hand come down to retrieve one after death, how is this so?” You now look beneath you and find you are standing on the bodies of the dead, and an unknown voice behind you explains, “These people looked away from the hand and therefore were not taken up by the hand. If you do not return to observing the hand, your fate shall be the same”. You pause and think, beginning to analyze your situation, and you decide to go one step further and turn around. Behind you there are even more people all around the cave, with torches lit that expose the vastness of this cave your are in. However, these people are elevated above you and are already halfway up the hole but not out. They are each holding onto some type of long fishing rod, but all fishing rods are connected to one piece of bait, which you notice is the same gloved hand you were reaching for before. After this realization, the uncertainty returns. Fear and anxiety overwhelm you, and you briefly consider going back to just looking at the hand, even though you know it to be a hoax. In spite of this, you decide to start looking around anyways, analyzing your environment, walking around, and you end up finding stairs that lead up to an equal second level to those holding the fishing rod. Once at the top, you find your stairs were left unfinished, and decide to build new ones. Building these stairs begins to relieve you of your fears, the work allows you to better understand and remember your true purpose of figuring out how to exit the hole, a purpose lost and forgotten when you accepted the offer and answers of the gloved hand. Others were able to look away as well and join you, but the majority is still reaching for the hand. Because it’s so few of you building the stairs, you understand it will take a very long time to exit the hole, maybe your entire life. Still, you and the others press on. Not phased by the idea of living a life of uncertainty, determined to finish the staircase, hoping more will join you, and with a thirst for true knowledge for what lies beyond this hole, you and the others press on.
In this allegory, the people holding the fishing rods were, hopefully obviously, religious organizations, in case I did not make that clear enough. Now like I stated before, one cannot deny the good moral teachings by Jesus Christ, Abraham, or Muhammad. These teachings are what allow the religious organizations to sit above the masses because they were on the right path. It can be said that religion started with great intentions, intentions to bring man and woman to live side by side with their fellow woman and man in peace and harmony, with an end goal similar to that of a social hedonist, greatest pleasure for the greatest number. In spite of that, two thousand years of corruption, greed, and misconduct by religious officials, followers, and practitioners, have completely dismantled religions that could have once been described as organizations that are beneficial towards the cause of humanity, and has made them the polar opposite. The three organized monotheistic religions, Christianity/Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism, are organizations hell-bent on obtaining and maintaining as much control over the general population and as much power within the worldwide political systems as possible. They have dismissed their teachings of peace and replaced them with teachings of hate. They have justified the killings of others by the words of their very own holy books and prophets. They have sexually suppressed their members of clergy to the point where they have committed one of the most heinous crimes against children, and they have not been penalized for it in the slightest. And they are doing so and have done so since their coming into existence. Religion has now caused the human chain of evolution to come to a halt and is attempting to keep us here. Its benefits no longer outweigh its own detrimental actions as well as its influence to outside actions it chooses to have any responsibility over (I’d like to briefly mention Hitler here for the last time). It allows no more progress for humanity and attempts to prevent it by any means necessary, means that they will find a verse in their holy books to justify. And the reason for all of this is not God; it is man. A deistic approach can exist within society through peace and in unison of our constant scientific findings, and until scientists provide an origin for the Big Bang, I see no harm in allowing it. Be that as it may, man will not know peace until this primitive belief of an interactive God is dismissed as the fairy tale it is. People raise their children with lies of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and God. To explain to your child there is a certainty of eternal bliss after death if they follow your religion, and I’d like to emphasize your religion because there is no such thing as Christian/Muslim/Jewish child, just a child with Christian/Muslim/Jewish parents (as said by Richard Dawkins), is just as much a comforting lie as the belief that if they behave well a fat man in a red suit will give them presents. These are nothing but controlling mechanisms, used to get a child to behave. You tell the story of eternal bliss after death to your child for the same reasons you tell them the stork story; you feel they are not mature enough to understand the immensity of the information that is available to them. You want to protect them from an idea that only you find terrifying so that they can be terrified with you, and it’s a damn shame.
This is my opinion of course, and I do not wish to force beliefs onto anyone, that of course being religions territory. I strongly believe in the first Amendment and would fight to the death to protect that right for every American citizen, theist or not. My point with that closing paragraph is simple: Man and Woman need logic to live peacefully, and logic is not found within religion.
Live your life believing whatever religion you like without judging others for their beliefs and without implementing your beliefs onto others and society, and maybe one day soon, we’ll all live to see a day of peace with or without religion.
- Ex See
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/germany/hitlerpowerrev1.shtml
http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/year9links/riseofhitler/Hitlertopower.pdf
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_did_Hitler_rise_to_power#ixzz1wUcy6vll
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GermanEconomicMiracle.html
