One of the big points Richard Dawkins made in his book, The God Delusion, is that we apply a totally different standard to religious discourse than we do to any other kinds. Imagine, for a moment, a prominent European politician going on tour to promote the message that women are lesser creatures than men, the only kind of sexuality that should be allowed is heterosexuality, and that science and progress are evil. Instead of science, we should listen to a 2,000-year-old version of L. Ron Hubbard's money-grubbing cult literature. Also, he is the head of a worldwide organization that has been responsible for covering up serial pedophilia committed by its employees. Of course, they blame gay people.
The idea of a secular politician behaving like this just boggles the mind. It's almost inconceivable. However, if he wears a funny hat, suddenly it's perfectly all right.
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He also took the time to, once again, float the idiotic canard that Hitler and his fellow Nazis were "extreme atheists" (BBC). There was, of course, an uproar, but quite frankly, nearly everyone keeps missing the point. Nazism was not atheism. It's just as simple as that. Nazi ideology effectively contained a whole pseudo-religion in its "occult side", complete with a mythical cosmogony and all the trappings of religion.
The Nazis didn't persecute the Christian churches in Germany because they were atheists who hated Christianity. Hitler himself was personally opposed to atheism. Some of them sought to replace Christianity with Nazi occultism, while most weren't opposed to Christianity as such at all.
So, in short: stop calling Hitler an atheist. He wasn't one, nor was he in favor of atheism. And neither was the Nazi party in general. This whole argument rests on deliberately confusing anticlericalism with atheism, which is hogwash.
Also, the idea that all Christians in Nazi Germany, or even all churches, were opposed to the regime simply isn't true. The vast majority of Christian churches in Nazi Germany collaborated with the regime. The notion that they resisted Nazism en masse is a post-war invention.
An unexpected note of hilarity in all this was the Catholic Church's official comment:
However, the Catholic Church has moved to play down the controversy, saying the Pope knew "rather well what the Nazi ideology is about".
He does indeed. He is, after all, a former member of the Hitler Youth.
That's another thing. I don't know if many people remember the outrage that erupted when Günter Grass revealed that he'd been drafted into the Waffen-SS during the war. In case it isn't obvious to everyone, that's exactly the same level of involvment in the Nazi war machine as that of the pope. However, when a German writer admits he was in the Waffen-SS, international outrage erupts; when the Catholic Church elects a former Hitler Youth member as pope, this is nothing special.
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To sum up, the British government spent approximately £20 million of taxpayer money to have this guy come over and talk about his opinions.
Great.
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