Reply #55: There's a picture of Hitler exiting a church. That proves he was devout.

[Inland]

I know it sounds stupid, and it is, and yet it's been posted before and will probably be posted in this thread. It's not even a good picture of the most biographed man on the planet.

You can find a reasonable discussion on the matter here, from Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope, who summarizes as follows:

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mhitlerchristian.html


As for your chat-room experiences, well, my friend and source David Gehrig noted that Hitler still sets the gold standard for "easiest rhetorical cheap shot." He related a comment from Usenet that there is an empirical law: As a Usenet discussion gets longer, the probability that someone in it will compare someone else in it to Hitler asymptotically approaches 1. In other words, atheists looking for a quick cheap-shot may claim Hitler was a Christian; similarly, Christians looking for a quick shot may claim he was an atheist. Know what? Hitler was a vegetarian! Oooh, those evil vegetarians! He also recommended that parents give their children milk to drink instead of beer and started the first anti-smoking campaign. (So by the "reasoning" used in these types of arguments, if you are truly anti-Hitler, you should smoke heavily and only give your baby beer!) Better watch out, though he was an oxygen-breather, too! In other words, does it really matter whether Hitler was an atheist or a Christian or whatever? Just because somebody may hold a particular worldview (along with other views) doesn't make him a spokesman for that view, or even remotely representative of others who hold that view. No matter how his madness is painted, he was still evil incarnate.