Is Religion Something to Pursue?

One of the arguments that is used to discredit religion is whether or not it makes sense in a modern world. The question is whether or not a religion based on the philosophies that are over two thousand years old have any applicability to our lives today. With all that is said and done, it does seem weird that we place a large amount of faith in a book written by forty different authors over the better part of a millennia that mentions how to beat your slave and rape your women. Nonetheless, there are a lot of good reasons.

I’m not going to argue the scientific validity or cherry-picking verses here; those are lectures for another day. What I am going to point out is that The Bible does have a lot of great advice if you bother paying attention; there’s a reason it has lasted so long. There is a lot to be gained by looking at it every so often, and bothering to even read it. We need to remember that it’s a metaphorical construct and that some of its tenets may not have gone by the wayside; this is not cherry-picking so much as it recognizing that The Bible is the Living Word. It is meant to change, just like a living being, to adapt to new challenges in order to overcome them.

Beyond The Bible, there are other advantages to being part of a church. Church-goers tend to live longer (a full five years longer), and there is always the added advantage of resources. One person focused on a problem can sometimes do miracles; imagine what can happen when you get an entire group of people focused on that problem. People tend to pull together in a crisis; nothing makes a group forget its internal bickering like an outside attack. People get organized when there is a call, be it someone needing help, a natural crisis, or just to see if they can make life easier for each other.

This is not to say that some groups do wrong in groups; the WBC is probably the best example of that. This is the problem of groups; the same group that forms a bucket brigade without effort to save a building from fire can form a lynch mob just as easily. That is something that we need to be beware of when we organize; we need to form groups intelligently and with wisdom rather than merely passion. This is not to say that we should remove passion from the equation, but that it should serve our will, not our will serving our passion. We are at our best when we are challenged and we attack that challenge intelligently rather than merely passionately.

We also need a common framework for communication. Any good text does that; it gives the group a means to quickly understand each other. By using The Bible, we have a way to quickly communicate information using metaphors when our other words fail us, giving us another way to communicate. We can also show that some problems, such as rebellious youth or husbands and wives seeming to be in different world, are universal and age-old, which is an odd comfort; in an ever-changing world, it is nice to know that some things never really change. That it allows communication between believers of the past and modern as well as between groups of modern believers makes it a powerful book.

So does religion in a modern world make sense? As long as it is a force for good, yes; nothing is more powerful than a group sharing the same motivation with a common ground. Yes, this also means that it can be a formidable power for evil, and that needs to be avoided at all costs. But the benefits ultimately outweigh the bad, and that is something that needs to be considered. We as believers must constantly ask ourselves if which we are serving, not as doubt but to ensure that our faith isn’t misguided. As long as we are not afraid to ask if we are doing the right thing, we should be okay. We just need to less fearful of asking the wrong question than doing the right thing.

HItler and the Destruction of the German Church

The problem with history is that it does not exist in a vacuum. It is a parade of events, some of which may have happened in the distant past, that affect the present. In order to properly understand the past sometimes we need to look at a number of different issues.

Nazi Germany happened because of a number of different events that coalesced into some serious nastiness. The major event is the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. After World War I, Europe and the United States wanted revenge; they wanted payback for all that they had suffered and were willing to do almost anything to get that payback. That desire severely screwed the country’s economics, to the point that there simply was not enough money to buy anything with. It was a country ripe for someone to take over and solve its problems

When Hitler started taking over, he needed to do a number of different things in order to properly do so. So he did a number of different things to do so. First, he needed a scapegoat, and decided to go after the most effective target: The Jews. Europeans traditionally avoided banking for the most part; there was the issue that money was considered evil (it was considered the root of all evils, after all), and so dealing with money was something no one wanted to do for most of Europe’s history. As Jews were considered outside normal society they were able to deal with money, and so they eventually took over the dealing with money, as well as trading in general. Although different groups took over the banking industry over time, it nonetheless established a link between Jews and money. This made them an obvious scapegoat in a financially depressed country, and Hitler took advantage of that.

Once he had his scapegoat in place, his ascent began. In order to stay in charge, he needed to control how people thought. Unlike Russia and China, Hitler decided to subvert religion. In his book, Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that religion must serve the needs of the country, and so he started endorsing the Deutsche Christen (German Christians) over the Catholic Church; not only did the German Christians support the Nazi Party, but they also had all of the right tenets; they were hostile to Jews (including excluding the Old Testament from their sacred scriptures), and the Nazi Party was able to combine pagan and Roman symbology with their message, assuring that Hitler would serve as a messiah. The Catholic Church also endorsed the Central Party, the main competition of the Nazi Party. Eventually the Catholic Church would seek a concordat with the Nazi Party in order to protect their followers that would effectively keep it out of Germany’s affairs.

So, not only did Hitler find the perfect scapegoat, and was then able to subvert a religious organization to aid his ascent and get another to back off. The German Christians were subverted on a number of levels; not only were leaders promised power, but those that were against the take-over were eliminated and replaced by Nazi Party members, and was soon able to influence the laity into doing pretty much anything. Ironically, Hitler had plans to eliminate all churches after the war, seeing Christianity as something that should be eliminated as it was incompatible with Nazism due to its Jewish origins.

Summing up: In order to solve Germany’s issues, Hitler was going to take Germany to war. In order to gain support, he subverted the local church. Once the war was over, he was planning on eliminating same church. Just something to consider when the whole “Hitler as Christian” thing comes up…