Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Nazi Germany used as trump card in argument for 823rd time this month. Sadly, it still works.

Today's link takes us to an article about the need for America to keep the Bible at it's heart if it wants to continue to thrive.

Now, I, as the person who is very much for the separation of church and state instinctively did not like the article as it chastised Libya's revolution for trying to seek freedom through "the barrel of a gun" but praised America's existence for being founded with a spiritual dimension and a Biblical ethic at it's core. The contradiction here being that America would not exist without the that same barrel of a gun that defended our cessation from England in the Revolutionary War.

But yet with the many historical inconsistencies and narrow arguments alluded to by the author, I couldn't just shrug this article off as just another piece of conservative propaganda (just as much as "liberal" propaganda will hit us over the head with the need to "go green"). In fact as I sat in front of my computer after reading the article, I realized I was feeling some remorse with a slight tinge of bitterness and a whole ton of frustration. The problem was that I couldn't figure out why this article in particular struck me so raw.

And then I realized what it was.... my frustration wasn't with the article as a whole (because it's just silly), but rather with one line.... and I quote

Forget the Bible and America will go the way of the first Protestant nation – Nazi Germany.
That's it.... That one line used by the author irked me to no end. Why? Because it had nothing to do with the article. Nazi Germany is not brought up before this sentence nor at any point after. If you read the whole article, there is nothing the author offers as to explain the logic of this sentence, nor is the logic apparent in the sentences preceding the sentence.

The dude just used Nazi Germany because he knows it will shock us. He knows that the Nazi's are one of the hardest things for us to swallow....He is using the tragedy of at least 6 million Jews to validate his argument even though the Bible has nothing to do with Nazi Germany. I theoretically have more of a claim to use the Nazi trump card because I had actual relatives who died in it, but I'm not that kind of an idiot. Simply because I know I can't relate to what happened to my relatives. It's a world beyond me. Everytime I find myself at a Holocaust Memorial either here in Michigan, in D.C. or in Jerusalem, I find myself speechless because nothing I can say or even think could calculate in a justifiable manner what happened in the Holocaust. Yet Vishal Mangalwadi whoever he is, feels the need to display the worst kind of irreverence to the tragedy of the Holocaust as to compare a Bibleless society as that of Nazi German because he knows that if we make the bad guy out to be Nazi Germany, the other side of the argument is going to look like a saint.


However, many Christians and ministers who even went to church and avidly read the Bible were Nazi's. Nor did Nazi Germany ban Bibles in any manner from being read within the country. But I have yet to read an atheist say "if we don't get rid of the Bible now, we will end up like Nazi Germany." Because to make such an allusion is asinine.

And it's not just the author of the article that has written such nonsense. I the Nazi/Holocaust allusion as a trump card all the time from Christians, Jews, Liberals, Atheists, Conservatives, etc.... and all the Holocaust and Nazi Germany is invoked for is simply as a tool to win an argument. But the problem becomes especially difficult when someone invokes Nazi Germany without giving any logical reason why.....

(Here is where I openly and hypocritically attempted a psychoanalytical logical argument ascribing that his treatment of non-Biblical nations is much closer to reflecting the ideology of Nazi Germany than a non-Biblical nation reflects Nazi Germany, but I will refrain because I realize anything that comes out from this point on is pure, 84 year old man crankiness)...

1 comment:

John said...

Godwin's law