PAGAN CREED

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 254, 24 September 1935, Page 2

PAGAN CREED

“GERMAN HEATHENS.”

SHOCK FOR CHRISTIAN CHURCHES. *

Observers abroad look upon the new German army witli apprehension and some dismay. Exactly the same nervousness is felt by millions of Germans at home, but towards a different Third Reich institution—the “German .Heathens,’’ states the Munich correspondent of the Morning Post. | The original Nazi programme called for the capture riof only of the State and of the Press, but of the Church as well. Many Nazis took Hitler seriously, adopted his hook “My Struggle” as their Bible, and proceedded to organise a literally “100 per cent. German religion.” They are the “German Heathens.” | their first National Diet was held at Eisenach last July, and chose Dr Wilhelm Hauer, Radical Professor of Divinity at Tuebingen University, as “Chief of the Movement.” Since then i they have gained approximately 1,000,iOOO followers, most of them earnest j members of the Nazi party or Storm | Troops. They have already become so I powerful, and their doctrines are so close to Hitler’s own, that for a year I the Catholic and Protestant Churches i have buried century-old jealousies to ! concentrate on a joint defence against 1 the “Heathens.”

| This month, the Creed of the “German Faith Movement” has been cogently formulated—in 25 Points, in imitation of the original 25-point programme of the Nazi party. The Pagan Creed goes far beyond what either the Protestant or Catholic Church had feared, and copies of it are being distributed at mass meetings throughout Germany each day. The 25 Points are entitled “The A B C of the German Heathen,” and come from the able pen of Dr Busso Loeive, second lender of the movement. TITLE OF HONOUR.

The most striking verses from the Pagan Creed are as follows: — “The word ‘heathen’ is for us no insult, but a title of honour. We are proud of our German faith, of our Nordic paganism ” “Our Holy Land is no longer Rome and Palestine; for us the oue and only | Holy Land is—Germany.” . j “If we turn from dews in politics and business, in art mid in law, then we can no longer allow our religious j faith to be dominated by Jews. We be-1 lieve no more in the Holy Spirit; we believe in the Holy Blood.” “The Aryan paragraph has been introduced into our Evangelical Churches ; it must be enforced. Jews 'and halfJews must hold no church office whatever. To-day neither St. Paul nor Jesus himself could be a pastor in the Church —nor even a sexton.” ... “The essence of Jewish Christianity is sin and absolution; the essence of Nordic Paganism is blood and honour. Everlasting consciousness of sin is a symptom of racial crossbreeding and consequent degeneration. Worried consciousness of sin is the opposite pole from proud consciousness of race, and the two can never meet.” I “Lite brings three great things: battle labour, and love. All are by nature Jiolv. We love battle. Jf battle should at length die out of'the world, then all joy would die out of life.”

' PAGAN EASTER. “For the Christian theologians, woman is the ‘vessel of sin’ ; for them the natural urge to love is a siuful desire. In Germany the Catholic and likewise the Protestant Church tortured and burned hundreds of thousands of innocent, women and girls until, in the cigthoenth century, German science rose and throttled this madness. German youth to-day finds the moral basis of life not in the Bible, but in their new knowledge of racial inheritance and in their faith in Germany.” . . “We shall do away with ‘Christian holidays, but turn them back into the Pagan festivals which were their origin. Easter, for instance, is a thoroughly heathen-Germanic iestival that lias nothing whatever to do with Christianity. The ‘Descent of the Holy Spirit’ brings us only embarrassment; for who thinks on Simon Peter and their brethren when the meadowlark sings, the cuckoo calls, and the apple trees are bright with blossoms.” “To celebrate these festivals we need no priestly caste. The father of the family or a friend, the Storm Troop leader or the Black Guard officer can hold these celebrations more beautifully and naturally than any paid agent of an alien religion.” NO BIBLE NEEDED.

“Christian confirmation is only a recent institution. In the close-knit political, social, and religious brotherhood of the German future, Christian confirmation will be replaced by the great Third Reich annual festival celebrating the entrance of the Hitler Youths into the ranks of the Storm Troops. “The German people need no Bible. The Edda and the Sagas, Master Eckeliart and Frederick the Great Goethe and Schiller, Hoelderlin and Nietzsche, and many other great Germans were no Christians; they believed in life, m Nature, and in the power of the German 50u1. ,, “The first successful missionary among the Germans in the time of the Great Migrations was Bishop Ulfilas, a haltbreed ; his father was a Goth, but his mother was a non-Aryan Asiatic. Through butchery, murder, and conversion by cruelty this Jewish foreign religion made its entrance into German “We believe in God —a God revealed to us through blood and conscience. We believe in a united, free and sacred Germany under the swastika, whose svmbol guides us onward in the eternal struggle of Light against Darness toward both living and dying for honour.