Many ideologues want the world’s most reviled man to belong to “the other side”. There are some Christians who claim Hitler was a pagan who led an “atheistic regime” or even that he was an atheist himself. On the other hand, many atheists claim he was a devout Catholic or at least some kind of Christian who was cosy with the churches. So what is true? Was Adolf Hitler an atheist, a neo-pagan occultist or a devout Christian? Or was…
In God is Not Great the New Atheist writer Christopher Hitchens describes how March 2 1939 saw “the death of an anti-Nazi pope and the accession of a pro-Nazi one”. The claim that Pius XII was friendly with, or at least passively acquiescent to, the Nazi regime is an unquestioned dictum in New Atheist circles. This is despite the fact the claim Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope” is a total distortion of history. Hitchens and “Hitler’s Pope” Christopher Hitchens was…
Yesterday I had a great conversation with Steve McRae and Kyle Curtis of the Non Sequitur Show about History for Atheists, atheist bad history and why non-believers need to get history right if they want to be taken seriously. This was the first of what we plan to be several conversations and this time around we discussed the myth of the Medieval flat earth, touched on Jesus Mythicism and talked a little about the myth of Pius XII as “Hitler’s…
Thomas Smith was good enough to have me back on his “Serious Inquiries Only” podcast (formerly “Atheistically Speaking”), this time to tackle the question “Did the Catholic Church Support HItler?“. Unfortunately we didn’t quite get time to go into the related question of Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, but I did a further 30 minutes on that topic which Thomas will be making available to his patrons as bonus content. Since the myth of “Hitler’s Pope” is common in…