Reply #59: I'm a lapsed Lutheran and well aware that Brother Martin

[PurpleChez]

was quite the anti-Semite. (He also advocated the use of farts to repel the devil!) Stalin may not have killed in the name of atheism, but he did kill in the name of ideology; he did kill because others opposed or did not hold his (political) ideology, as religious zealots have killed/oppressed/exploited others who opposed their (religious) ideology. There are distinctions but also many similarities between the two, and my thinking is that it's not so much about Christianity or communism or zoroastrianism as it is about powerful people maintaining power by all means available, often including the exploitation of religion.

But did Nazis (as opposed to Germans) believe in Christianity, or did they simply exploit it to manipulate a largely christian population? Hitler spoke with great contempt about christianity and considered it to be a religion of weaklings, and many of the Nazis held (or claimed to hold) beliefs that grew out of pagan Germanic mythology, and which marginalized Jews (and others) as üntermenschen (sub-human) without recourse to a christian deicide charge.