I think he's a knob as I've said before, but logically is this any different from someone who chooses to name their son after a religious character I consider evil, genitally mutilates him as a young child, forces him to wear specially symbolic clothes and read books that preach ideologies which I find abhorrent? Because there's probably a billion people that do that...

Wonderful sense of moral absolutism you have.

Yes there's a difference. Hitler established an enterprise of indisputable evil on an industrial scale with no redeeming qualities. I hope your views about any of the world's major religions aren't that extreme, but I presume your views about Hitler are.

When people cast around for something nice to say about the Nazis they tend to highlight their stylish uniforms. We have on the first page of this thread photographic evidence that even this need not be true.

I'd consider the crusades, the inquisitions, the witch hunting and numerous acts of ethnic cleansing committed in the name of religion to be "enterprise of indisputable evil". Combined with the forced indoctrination of young people to be intolerant of others, I really don't see much difference.

Sure most religious people I meet are jolly nice and do not generally go around advocating violence, even the ones that wear silly uniforms. Do we know that this chap does? I think we all know at least one person who likes Nazi hats, but that doesn't automatically make them evil any more than wearing a bishop's hat automatically makes you a paedophile.

Don't confuse a 'religious' crusade with the predisposition for a lust for power.

All of which, over hundreds of years, did a fraction of the harm the regime Hitler ran did in half a decade.


Let me get this straight, you're arguing a man who names his child Adolf and turns up to a court appearance dressed in the military uniform of a regime that committed possibly the greatest atrocity in recorded history might not be all that bad really?

Is great success a necessary measure of evil intent? They tortured and killed as many people who didn't conform as they possibly could with the weapons at hand. Also remember that the population was a small fraction of wartime figures. And of course, Hitler is dead. Ethnic cleansing in the name of religion continues today.


Not exactly. I'm suggesting he might perhaps be no more a threat to his children's physical and mental health than would a religious nutter. The degree of fundamentalism involved isn't really known to either of us, but he'd be in prison if he'd done anything murderous.

Just a thought... A similar number of innocent people where deliberately burned to death in the Dresden bombings as died by the sword in the crusades.

None of those are universals within religion. The Crusades, along with the pointier aspects of Inquisition were fairly normal behaviour for their times, and now that they no longer are it is rare for religious practitioners to promote such causes. The Crusades killed a lot fewer people than Genghis Khan did, and he was not motivated by religion.


In contrast to the above, it is not possible to evolve Nazism into an acceptable modern theology. Fascism is predicated on the desirablity of violence and of harsh rule. Nazism goes further in demanding enslavement and death for inferior races. You can be a Christian, Muslim or a Jew without advocating death for anybody, nor any of the other obscenities you accuse them of.

You cannot possibly be a Nazi without those things unless you are only in it for the stylish trousers. It is a creed specifically devoted to murder.

I think you see such causes promoted on a daily basis, be it Palestine or closer to home as the cultural hatred of Islam forged as "the war on terror" and preached in the tabloids.


Just because you can, it doesn't follow that you will.

Many people have died in recent years because of religious hatred. Hitler hasn't killed anyone for quite a while now, and his iconic fashions have remained quite popular.

So now you're arguing that the holocaust wasn't all that bad, comparatively speaking?


Just a thought.. there are people alive today for whom the uniform he wore is an immediate and traumatic personal memory. There are people alive today who saw people wearing that uniform murder every member of their family and every friend they had ever known. Your attempt to divert this towards your own personal dogmatic hobbyhorse is bordering on the offensive.

[LIFTED] hell. I'm out.

All true stuff in so far as it goes. But consider the reasoning you originally presented which was that you saw no moral difference between naming your child Hitler and, let's say Jesus. Do you at least recognise that Hitler can only be regarded as evil, whereas it's perfectly ok for me not to share your view that Jesus must be seen as his moral equivalent? I'm not saying it's ok to name your offspring Torquemada and rear them to torture Jews. But I think it's not such an issue to name them Noah or Jesus (it's pronounced Hay-soos).

What I'm getting at here, is that sometimes when I have time on my hands I like to goad somebody into sticking to an obviously unravelling line of argument for my personal entertainment. But this one's a bit icky, and I'm in the middle of an essay, and you strike as smart enough to spot that your reasoning won't hold because it's an argument from a malnourished analogy.

Frankly I'm surprised anyone put effort into arguing against what I thought was pretty uncontroversial.

I was just suggesting that there are men who pose a much more serious and real threat, both to their children and to the world at large. I mean, how can anyone really take this idiot seriously at all?

I'll agree that Jesus as a name is probably going to offend far fewer English speaking people than would Hitler. I'm not sure how it would measure up in other countries, but world-wide it's possibly less controversial than certain other fairly popular names. I would not want to attend a Jewish school if my name was Mohammed. I would not want my father to wear a skullcap while taking me to a Muslim school. I would not want to be seen carrying certain religious volumes in certain communities. I wouldn't even want to be thought Catholic in a predominantly Protestant area, and they both preach from the same book.

There's also a certain irony that those who fought for freedom might seek to deny it. If we banned everything that anyone found offensive, we wouldn't be allowed outside our own homes.

An important part of fascist theory is to do with provoking violence. In his view he has named his children as an act of war in order to provoke violence against not only against himself, but also his children.

For him, naming his kid Hitler is the beginning of a race war. I think that's pretty bad parenting.