Sells,

Liberalism has its origins in a time earlier than you mention. Liberalism as a youngster breaks from Feudal society, which allowed the State and the Church to dominate the individual. In the discipline of Economics, the Church had a major stake alongside the landed aristocracy. The Church presided over the right of private conscious. So presumptuous was the early Church, it supposed, the common person must not themselves interpret scripture. Later, humanist scholars, such as Erasmus, set the foundations wherein the rights of the individual flourish. The Enlightenment and the Great Divergence were its worthy children.

Moreover, Liberalism is seen in the Protestant Reformation. Luther's own persona was powerful in overcoming the authoritarian Christian church. Many OLO posts show we have evolved far beyond Luther. We can independently, study ancient documents, without a religion, and,we now make own interpretations. This progress: The very nature of Liberalism.

O.

Trav wrote: “Hitler was a devout Christian, was he? Until when? Was he still a "devout Christian" in the 1940's? More importantly, what were the goals of his party in relation to religion? They were completely atheistic. He banned all seminaries in about 1937 IIRC. Sounds like a religious agenda, doesn't it?”

Dear Trav,

The German army had Christian chaplains, and Christian seminaries were not banned. Nobody claimed Hitler was devout. You added that.

Hitler ordained school prayer and despised secular schooling. A quote from Hitler after the Nazis took over:
"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people." - Adolf Hitler, Speech, April 26, 1933

Christians still try to deny that Hitler was a Christian. In doing so they tell lies about him being an atheist. You have misinformation. Hitler did not ban all seminaries in 1937. The Gestapo shut the last Jewish seminary in 1942 according to the following.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1528866/Germany-to-ordain-first-rabbis-since-Hitler-shut-seminaries.html

"The three men, who began their training at the Academy of Judaism in Potsdam five years ago, will become the first rabbis to be ordained in Germany since 1942 when the Gestapo closed the last Jewish seminary."

Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. "... I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews. I am doing the Lord's work." Years later, when in power, he quoted those same words in a Reichstag speech in 1938.
Three years later he informed General Gerhart Engel: "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so." He never left the church, and the church never left him. Great literature was banned, but Mein Kampf never appeared on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.

The Holocaust followed the tradition of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms and the many other instances of Christian murder of Jews. Hitler was, if not devout, a true Christian.

david f,

Hilter believed in Jesus, with a passion, as is evidenced by his writings and speeches. On the other hand, Hitler seems to have held the Christian church to be highly devious, as is clear from History.

For me, the latter is hypocrical, because instead of hunting and killing witches and heretics, Hilter did the same thing against Jews and Communists. Moreover, the teutonic discipline and "hardness" of the SS, is modelled on the Jesuits.

Like the Christian church, Hitler's National Socialism was authoritarian. The rights of the individual are subordinated, as in a theocracy. Manic fourth century Christian theocracy, immediately post-Nicaean, was much like today's Taliban: Christians rampaged and destroyed things.

Hitler though being a Catholic was mostly influenced by the occult as well as Darwinism. Over one of the gas ovens Hitlers words were inscribed 'I want to raise a generation of young people devoid of conscience, imperious, relentless and cruel.' Hitler believed the destruction of the weak is a good thing for the survival of the strong which he took from Darwinism. The deceit of the secularist on this matter defies belief. Hitler like today's secular humanist have introduced their own perverted base of morality that does not value all human life. That is why they can murder the unborn without conscience by the truckload. NO doubt like Hitler the Secularist argue that nature intended it that way.

The idea that somehow Hitler was a Christian is totally deceitful. Next we will be seeing the blinded secularist declaring Pol Pot and Stalin as Christians. Hitler himself personally presented the writings of Nietzche to Stalin and Mussolini.

Keep rewriting history guys with your warped interpretation but one day you will need to face the truth.

It seems to me that there has been a great reversal. It used to be that Christianity was the dominant force in society and which defended its position against the atheists and agnostics. Now the dominant position has become liberalism which, in its turn defends itself against those who would impugn it, the Christians! Christians are now the counterculture that seek to tear down the current orthodoxy. The heat that my articles generate comes from the perception that I am attacking the commonly held religious position, which I am. My purpose is to expose liberalism for what it is, a façade of good intentions dressed up in the clothes of values: freedom, fairness, tolerance, choice, human rights. The problem is that values are window dressing unless they are founded in virtue, which liberalism deems an unnecessary imposition on the freedom of the individual.

Dear runner,

I don't think you want the truth. Religious belief, no matter how strong, is not truth.

Possibly, you may be open to history:

Christianity, like all other religions, is a human invention as is God. The Christians copied the pagan religions and invented a humanoid God in Jesus. The invisible God of the Jews did not have great appeal to the pagans. However, Christians incorporated the Jewish tribal legends along with the fairy tales of the New Testament to compose their Bible.

Due to an unfortunate event in history a Roman Emperor adopted Christianity. Although the Roman Empire disappeared as a political entity it has been preserved as a religious entity with the dioceses and bureaucracy of the Catholic Church that copies the administrative structure of the Roman Empire. Had Constantine not adopted Christianity the religion would either have disappeared or remained a minor sect.

The adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire was the beginning of the Dark Ages and the end of the spirit of free inquiry in the western world. Charles Freeman in "The Closing of the Western Mind" tells the story.

Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001, tells how the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire changed Christianity to a religion of war. James Carroll was a Catholic chaplain in the US army and started to question during the Vietnamese War. He is a friend of Jim Noonan, a Catholic peace activist, who introduced me to his writings.

The Conversion of Europe from Paganism to Christianity: 371-1386 by Richard Fletcher, London: Fontana (HarperCollins), 1998, is a tale of great violence. Ireland is the only country during that period which became Christian peacefully. Christians could freely murder to correct the sin of not being Christian.