Debate: CONSCIENCE: IS THERE A UNIVERSAL MORAL LAW?
Side: yes

"Hitler was a moral objectivist. It is clearly expressed in his work that he believed he was:"acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." (Mein Kampf)."1. Is there a reason why you selectively quoted just that statement and ignored other sayings of Hitler? On the other hand Hitler made this statements regarding Christianity:Night of 11th-12th July, 1941: National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity.... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things.14th October, 1941, midday: The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death.... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.... Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity.... And that's why someday its structure will collapse.... ...the only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.... Christianity the liar.... We'll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State.9th April, 1942, dinner: There is something very unhealthy about ChristianityWhen one looks at the atrocities committed under the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler and compares them to the teachings of, Jesus of Nazareth, one might come to the immediate conclusion that the notion that Hitler was a Christian is absurd. Before I'll provide evidences on the difference between Hitler and Jesus' teachings, I would like to point out:Point 1: Conclusion of Biographers and Historians:1. Hans Küng-The most prominent Catholic theologian living today, respected by thinkers of all denominations. He is well known around the world and has been Professor of Dogmatic and Ecumenical Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany, as well as Visiting Professor at Chicago University and at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He holds honorary degrees from several American universities and has lectured at various universities in Europe, America and Asia." (Hans Küng, On Being a Christian, Image Books Doubleday, New York, 1976)"the great figures of terror in our century—Hitler, Stalin and their deputies—were programmatic anti-Christians" [Küng, p. 30]"...we cannot make Jesus a guerrilla fighter, a rebel, a political agitator and revolutionary or turn his message of God's kingdom into a program of politico-social action, unless we distort and reinterpret all the Gospel accounts, make a completely one-sided choice of sources, irresponsibly and arbitrarily work with isolated texts...and largely ignore Jesus' message as a whole...Even though it is as much the fashion today to speak of Jesus, the rebel, the revolutionary, as it was in Hitler's time to speak of Jesus the fighter, the leader the military commander, or in sermons of the First World War of Jesus the hero and patriot, it must be made unmistakably clear—for Jesus' own sake, regardless of the spirit of the age—that he was neither a supporter of the system nor a politico-social revolutionary. [Küng, p. 187]2. Alan BullockA journalist and biographer of Adolf Hitler."Hitler had been brought up as a Catholic and was impressed by the organization and power of the Church. Its hierarchical structure, its skill in dealing with human nature and the unalterable character of its Creed, were all features from which he claimed to have learned. For the Protestant clergy he had nothing but contempt: 'They are insignificant little people, submissive as dogs, and they sweat with embarrassment when you talk to them. They have neither a religion they can take seriously nor a great position to defend like Rome.' [Conversation with Rauschning on 7 April 1933; Hitler Speaks, p. 62] It was 'the great position' of the Church that he respected, the fact that it lasted for so many centuries; towards its teaching he showed the sharpest hostility. In Hitler's eyes Christianity was a religion fit only for slaves; he detested its ethics in particular. Its teaching, he declared, was a rebellion against the natural law of selection by struggle, and the survival of the fittest. 'Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure.' [Hitler's Table Talk, London 1953, p. 57] From political considerations he restrained his anti-clericalism, seeing clearly the dangers of strengthening the Church by persecution. For this reason he was more circumspect than some of his followers, like Rosenberg and Bormann, in attacking the Church publicly. But, once the war was over, he promised himself, he would root out and destroy the influence of the Christian Churches. 'The evil that is gnawing at our vitals,' he remarked in February 1942, 'is our priests, of both creeds. I can't at present give them the answer they've been asking for but...it's all written down in my big book. The time will come when I'll settle my account with them... They'll hear from me all right. I shan't let myself be hampered with judicial scruples.' [Hitler's Table Talk, p. 304]...The truth is that, in matters of religion at least, Hitler was a rationalist and a materialist. 'The dogma of Christianity,' he declared in one of his wartime conversations,gets worn away before the advances of science....Gradually the myths crumble. All that is left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know the stars are not sources of light, but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity....The man who lives in communion with nature necessarily finds himself in opposition to the Churches, and that why they're heading for ruin—for science is bound to win. [Hitler's Table Talk, pp. 59-61][Bullock, p. 387-88]"3. Konrad Heiden (historian)Heiden is an interesting source, writing as a contemporary of the Third Reich. However, he writes without the benefit of the documentary evidence captured by the Allies and without the testimony of the Nuremberg war crimes trials."These [National Socialists] were concerned with more than power; many were out for more than advantages. They wanted their life to have a new meaning, their existence in society a purpose; their value for their own people was the one thing that gave their careers on earth any value. To many, and not always the worst among them, only faith in their fatherland had retained any meaning, their own nation had become God; if they hesitated openly to declare themselves religious unbelievers, Hitler had provided them with a suitable formula: 'We know two Gods: one in heaven and another on earth; the second is Germany.' But 'we' are Germany, Hitler had said on another occasion, and 'we' meant 'I.' And so there were people who prayed to Hitler, perhaps without realizing that this was prayer. [Der Fuehrer by Konrad Heiden, pp 631]It was at this time [1922] that [Hitler] began to believe in his own God-given mission. It was no accident that—in his own words—he 'learned from the Bible with boundless love how our Lord and Savior seized his whip,' and marched on Jerusalem. Was not he himself armed with a heavy crocodile whip, marching through the streets of his beloved Munich, which he sometimes called the 'Mecca' of National Socialism? A short time previous, it is true, he had admitted in a chastened mood to his friend Georg Schott: 'All of us are nothing but little Saint Johns. I am waiting for a Christ.' But the period of modesty was drawing to a close. Were not all the signs by which Heaven customarily announces its prophets being fulfilled in him? The fanatical faith of the disciples, the rejoicing of the masses, the hostility or contempt of those in high places—and now wasn't he going through a sort of Golgotha? His Golgotha, to be sure, was nothing more impressive than the month in prison which he wished so fervently to avoid; but before going in, he took leave of his people with the words: 'Two thousand years ago the mob of Jerusalem dragged a man to execution in just this way.'Hitler, introduced as a speaker, explains how Judah tried to conquer the world; first with the help of the Ten Commandments; then (this was only hinted rather shamefacedly) by Christianity; finally through Marxism and Bolshevism; for Hitler and Eckart had no doubt that Lenin was a Jew. [Der Fuehrer, p. 280]A metaphysical line runs through [Mein Kampf], not always easy to find amid all the vulgar vilification and barren, long-winded meditations; here a man seeks for God and discovers himself. This is exactly what happened to Soloviev's Antichrist; he too, like Hitler, had written in his thirty-third year, a book in which he claimed to be the Savior. [Der Fuehrer, p. 281]."4. Ian Hershaw - HistorianKershaw's fine book The 'Hitler Myth' presents an in-depth study of German public opinion and how it was manipulated by Nazi propaganda. This book also has an excellent list of sources. An excerpt follows:"Apart from the organized sectors of the working class, the Nazis had greatest difficulty, as is well known, in penetrating the Catholic sub-culture, where the dominant image of Hitler provided by Catholic 'opinion leaders' was equally negative. The main attack was levelled at the anti-Christian essence of the Nazi Movement and of its leader's philosophy. Publications sought to demonstrate that Hitler's ideas stood in direct contradiction to the teaching of the Christian catechism. Especially in Bavaria, where Catholicism was dominant and extreme anti-Marxism widespread, he and his Movement were seen as a variant of 'godless Bolshevism'-an association which was frequently to recur after 1933 during the 'Church struggle'. Though Catholic anti-Nazi polemics generally concentrated on attacking the anti-religious, and especially anti-Catholic, thrust of Nazism, some publications did offer a devastating assault on the entire Nazi doctrine. Hitler's brutality, contempt for human rights, warmongering, and elevation of force to a principle of political behaviour, were all castigated in Catholic publications of the early 1930s. One Catholic weekly above all, Der Gerade Weg, published in Munich under the editorship of Dr Fritz Gerlich-murdered in Dachau in 1934-and Fr. Ingbert Naab, kept up a relentless assault on Hitler, describing him in September 1932, at a time when, despite his open show of solidarity with five of his SA men who had been condemned to death for the brutal murder of a communist in Potempa, the Centre Party was involved in negotiations with the Nazis, as 'the incarnation of evil'.A few months earlier, the alleged hostility of Hitler to the Church had played a key role in persuading the Catholic parties to support the Protestant, and 'pious', Hindenburg in the election for the Reich Presidency. ... They were equally concerned to attack and debunk the neo-pagan deification and mythologizing of Hitler. One speaker told of a woman who had erected an altar in her house with a picture of Hitler in place of the monstrance, and declared that he could simply not understand the German people for letting itself be led astray by such a charlatan: 'Hitler has succeeded in organizing the idiots, and only idiots, hysterics, and fools to go the NSDAP.' His election, he prophesied, would bring irreparable harm and destruction to Germany.Hitler was himself well aware of the need to counter his anti-Christian image if his Party were to break through in Catholic areas. He was keen even in the early 1920s not to antagonize unnecessarily the Catholic Church. And during the rise to power the NSDAP made particular efforts-largely in vain-in Catholic areas such as the Rhineland and Bavaria to emphasize its 'positive Christianity', to deny the slur that it was an anti-religious party, and to claim that National Socialism alone could provide the Church with a barrier against Marxism." In 1930 Hitler felt compelled to distance himself from Alfred Rosenberg, one of the leading Party ideologues, whose book The Myth of the 20th Century had cemented his reputation as the dominant representative of the 'new heathenism' and prominent 'hate figure' of the Catholic Church. And speaking before a mass gathering in the Catholic stronghold of Bavaria in April 1932, Hitler told his audience that while north German Protestants had labeled him a hireling of Rome and south German Catholics a pagan worshipper of Woden, he was merely of the opinion-here playing to some widespread anti-clerical sentiments-that priests in Germany, just as was the case in Italy, should end their political activities and confine themselves to denominational matters and pastoral duties: what the Pope had admitted in Italy, he concluded, could not be sinful in Germany. In fact, he was at pains to stress, he himself was deeply religious, the 'spiritual distress' of the German people even greater than its economic misery, and the toleration of over fourteen million anti-religious atheistic Marxists in Germany highly regrettable.Despite these disdainers, the negative image of 'neo-heathenism', which the NSDAP could not shake off; undoubtedly played a considerable role in bolstering the high level of relative immunity to Nazism which prevailed before 1933 in Catholic circles. Even after the disappearance of the Catholic press in the early years of the Third Reich, Catholic clergy were able to sustain the image through their own subtle 'propaganda' methods-greatly assisted by the often crude assaults of the Nazis themselves in the 'Church struggle'-and it remained throughout the Third Reich an important basis of the alienation of the Catholic population from the regime and of forms of partial opposition to Nazism in the Catholic subculture. Even so, the notion that there might be some authoritarian, patriotic, anti-Marxist, residual 'good' in Nazism, that 'National Socialism, notwithstanding everything, might succeed some day in eliminating from its programme and its activities all that which conflicted in principle and practice with Catholicism', offered the opening for the volte-face which Catholic bishops were prepared to make following Hitler's avowals of tolerance and support for the Church in March 1933 and the potential, too, for driving a wedge between 'the god-fearing statesman' Hitler and the anti-Christian Party radicals, especially Rosenberg. [pp 24-37]The sagging morale and worsening of mood in the second half of 1941 was not solely determined by the changing fortunes on the eastern Front. Events at home were also playing their part. The gathering force of worrying rumor about the killing in asylums of mentally sick and incurably ill patients was one factor which, especially but not solely among practising Christians, was giving rise to grave concern and threatening to alienate support for the regime. In August 1941, news of the courageous open denunciation of the 'euthanasia action' by Bishop Galen of Münster spread rapidly and seems to have persuaded Hitler to halt the killing, at least inside the Reich itself. Some reports by the Nazi authorities on the unrest which had arisen claimed that it was having an impact on confidence in Hitler himself. It may even have been the case--a suggestion emanating, admittedly, from a piece of post-war testimony--that the Reich Propaganda Ministry deliberately started off a rumour that the Führer, on discovering what was taking place (in an 'action' which, in reality, he himself had authorized in writing), had given the order to halt it immediately. According to this interpretation, the protection of the 'Führer myth'--of the legend that Hitler was kept in the dark about the misdeeds of the regime, and acted promptly on learning of them--was a crucial component in bringing the 'euthanasia action' to an end.Opinion in Catholic parts of the Reich in particular was greatly influenced by the new wave of attacks on the position of the Church which had been in spring 1941 and gathered momentum during the summer and autumn. They appear to have been initiated by the head of the Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann, probably under pressure at Gau level, for whom the apparent strengthening of the Church's hold over the population during the war was a notable provocation. New measures against the Church--including the confiscation of monastic property, further restrictions on provision of religious instruction and on publications, the removal of the last nuns from any form of social or education work, and interference with holy days and with the form of school prayers--where guaranteed to stir up antagonism and unrest in Catholic regions. [pp. 176-177]