Next time someone tells you about those Nazi Christians

Sing 'em a verse from this Nazi Youth ditty I came across in my reading:

"We are the happy Hitler Youth;
We have no need for Christian virtue;
For Adolf Hitler is our intercessor
And our redeemer.
No priest, no evil one
Can keep us
From feeling like Hitler’s children.
No Christ do we follow, but Horst Wessel!
Away with incense and holy water pots."

Well, Dick, it's got a good beat and you can dance to it...

And how about the Nazi-revised lyrics to “Silent Night”:

"Silent night! Holy night! All is calm, all is bright,
Only the Chancellor steadfast in fight,
Watches o’er Germany."

Yipes!

Then there's this little problem: "In 1935 mandatory prayer in school was abolished, and in 1938 carols and Nativity plays were banned entirely. By 1941 religious instruction for children fourteen years and up had been abolished altogether."

I feel like I'll spend my whole adult life unlearning the lies I learned as a youth.

I've been reading Darwinian Fairytales, and I remembered a moment in grad school when I started to get a little glimmer that maybe the overpopulation stuff was a bit, um, exaggerated. I remember thinking--why do we keep talking about the third wolrd? And why did someone just ask if, given that we could do away with high populations elsewhere, it would be ok for him to own a whole lot of land? And it was like trying to think inside a wet paper towel, I was so convinced by all of the population arguments I knewto be true.

The same with Nazis and Chritianity. I had never heard of Bonhoeffer until I was in my twenties. When my grandmother used to point out how many Catholics died in concentration camps, I thought it was some weird anti-semitism that made her exaggerate so.

Now I just wonder how many malformed truths I'm living with without realising it.

You'll feel like the person in Plato who stepped outside the cave and came back to report to the cave dwellers chained to the rock that the shadows aren't real. They'll think you're insane.

I've tried to tone it down lately, because I think I'm about to drive Mr. Cradle out of his mind.