{"id":655,"date":"2010-11-01T18:12:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-01T18:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/authority-un-challenged.html"},"modified":"2010-11-01T18:12:00","modified_gmt":"2010-11-01T18:12:00","slug":"authority-un-challenged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/authority-un-challenged.html","title":{"rendered":"Authority Un-Challenged"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

On his recent trip to England, Pope Ratzi gave a speech in which he tried to pin Nazism on atheism.\u00a0 Many of us responded by pointing out that atheists were persecuted by Hitler, that the Church cooperated with him, or that Germany and Hitler were heavily Catholic and so forth.<\/p>\n

It should be unnecessary to state any of this because it\u2019s really impossible to look at German history and not see how he came to power.\u00a0 The people put him there.\u00a0 Not the leftists, socialists or atheists, but the average Kurt and Hilda.\u00a0 A new German exhibit explores the relationship of Hitler to his nation<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cHitler and the Germans. Nation and Crime\u201d at the Deutsches Historisches Museum is only the second exhibition in Germany ever dedicated to Adolf Hitler. It seeks to answer what is perhaps the country\u2019s most pressing question: why did the nation follow him?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve seen the films of throngs of people adoring him. \u00a0It\u2019s because they absolutely loved him:<\/p>\n

\u2026Hitler\u2019s rise to power cannot be explained without considering his support among the German people. Sir Ian Kershaw, a British biographer of Hitler and member of the exhibition\u2019s board of historians, has classified this relationship as one that was near religious, like people with a messiah. Hitler offered a way for Germans to regain their pride after the degrading fallout from the Treaty of Versailles and the struggles of the Great Depression. One exhibit features hand-written letters to \u201cMy dear F\u00fchrer\u201d with warmest wishes for his 43rd birthday. Many Germans felt personally invested in the man who promised to grant them the lives and the future they deserved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t know if Hitler really believed in God.\u00a0 His writing and speeches seem to indicate that he did, but it\u2019s really beside the point.\u00a0 Hitler did believe he was the German savior and convinced millions of Germans that he was.\u00a0 He exploited every single authority symbol of Germany, from the churches to the media to the judiciary.<\/p>\n

By constantly invoking the love of fatherland, German superiority, Christianity and other traditional imagery, Hitler tied himself to the \u201cglories\u201d of an imagined German past.\u00a0 On top of this he offered a utopian future.\u00a0 In some ways he was nothing more than a false messiah, a phenomenon that we\u2019ve seen many, many times.\u00a0 The fact that his self-deluded followers took his path to world destruction underscores just how irrational people can be when they are promised an unrealistic future of perfect happiness.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t need to make the obvious comparisons to traditional religion here.\u00a0 Anyway, I am more interested in just how unquestioning people can be when they are convinced to grant someone or something authority over them.\u00a0 The German experience demonstrates that an unchecked level of human gullibility can rise to fatal levels.<\/p>\n

Why do people turn off their personal incredulity when confronted with tradition-based authority?\u00a0 How can they be skeptical in their private affairs and so in thrall to authority just because it invokes a god, a flag or some other revered or ancient source of power?<\/p>\n

One of the reasons that I am a skeptic and atheist is that I don\u2019t accept anything on face value.\u00a0 The day I started studying the bible and the rabbinical literature I began to ask where it came from.\u00a0 I\u2019m lucky that I live in an age when answers to those questions are widely available.<\/p>\n

Just as importantly, I learned to challenge facile answers to my questions.\u00a0 When an Orthodox rabbi told me that there were three million witnesses to the revelation at Sinai, I asked for the sources.\u00a0 When presented with only one source\u2026the same Torah that was supposedly revealed at that very event\u2026I said, \u201cNo thank you.\u00a0 That\u2019s not evidence and that\u2019s not legitimate authority.\u201d<\/p>\n

I firmly believe that teaching our children the ability to confront any and all such claims of authority will immunize us against any future Hitlers. \u00a0While I\u2019m not saying that we should never trust anyone or anything, I am saying that we should constantly evaluate and re-evaluate. \u00a0No source of authority should ever be eternal or absolute.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On his recent trip to England, Pope Ratzi gave a speech in which he tried to pin Nazism on atheism.\u00a0 Many of us responded by pointing out that atheists were persecuted by Hitler, that the Church cooperated with him, or that Germany and Hitler were heavily Catholic and so forth. It should be unnecessary to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[8,14,27],"class_list":["post-655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogentries","tag-catholicism","tag-history","tag-morality"],"yoast_head":"\nAuthority Un-Challenged<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On his recent trip to England, Pope Ratzi gave a speech in which he tried to pin Nazism on atheism.\u00a0 Many of us responded by pointing out that atheists\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/authority-un-challenged.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Authority Un-Challenged\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On his recent trip to England, Pope Ratzi gave a speech in which he tried to pin Nazism on atheism.\u00a0 Many of us responded by pointing out that atheists\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theatheistrabbi\/2010\/11\/authority-un-challenged.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Atheist Rabbi\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-11-01T18:12:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jeffrey L. 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