Shambhala Sun Requests Interview With Brit Hume. Srsly!

If you want to see how Buddhists are responding to Brit Hume's advice to Tiger Woods (that he abandon Buddhism and embrace Christianity), check out the comments section at this post over at the Shambhala SunSpace blog.

Shambhala SunSpace is an online entity that is part of Shambhala Sun's online presence (and Shambhala Sun is one of the oldest and most widely known US Buddhist magazines out there).

The really interesting news, though, is that Shambhala has a "pending" request in for an interview with Brit Hume! What are the chances?????

Well, until that interview comes along, here are some tidbits from Tom Shales withering column on the subject from today's Washington Post:

"It sounded a little like one of those Verizon vs. AT&T commercials -- our brand is better than your brand."

"Whom did he sound more like -- Mary Poppins on the joys of a tidy room, or Ron Popeil on the glories of some amazing potato peeler?"

"You could almost hear the gears of YouTube turning as he spoke, and imagine the writers on 'Saturday Night Live' trying to find ways other than the painfully obvious to satirize the moment and what it represents."

"At the same Republican convention where Hume bemoaned his advancing years, he spoke of knowing when to leave the party and go home. 'I'd like to walk away while I'm still doing okay,' he said, "and not have people say, He was fading." It's easy to understand the sentiment, but Hume ought to know that what people are saying right now is a whole lot worse than that he's fading."

Beauty, Nature, Divinity, Secrets

In his Peri Kosmin Kai Theon (On the Cosmos and the Gods), Sallustius wrote of the Gods that

Those who make the world are Zeus, Poseidon, and Hephaistos; those who animate it are Demeter, Hera, and Artemis; those who harmonize it are Apollo, Aphrodite, and Hermes; those who watch over it are Hestia, Athena, and Ares.

One can see secret suggestions of this in their images. Apollo tunes a lyre; Athena is armed; Aphrodite is naked (because harmony creates beauty, and beauty in things seen is not covered).

And of myths he wrote that

They also represent the activities of the Gods. For one may call the world a myth, in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden. Besides, to wish to teach the whole truth about the Gods to all produces contempt in the foolish, because they cannot understand, and lack of zeal in the good, whereas to conceal the truth by myths prevents the contempt of the foolish, and compels the good to practice philosophy.

But why have they put in the myths stories of adultery, robbery, father-binding, and all the other absurdity? Is not that perhaps a thing worthy of admiration, done so that by means of the visible absurdity the soul may immediately feel that the words are veils and believe the truth to be a mystery?

Aphrodite, in her nakedness, represents the visible beauty and harmony of the Kosmos, whereas Athena, with her armor, shield and spear, represents the invisible beauty and harmony of Nature that lies beneath the surface. In fact, Aphrodite is not merely naked, but alluring: hers is the beauty that does not merely invite, it positively seduces.

Athena's beauty, on the other hand, is not merely covered, but defended at the point of a spear: it must be fought for, and at great risk. But to win the fight requires more than simple courage. It also requires strength, skill, endurance and judgement.

Nigeria and the Pew Forum's Blatant Double Standard on "Religious Restrictions"

On Christmans Day 2009 a Nigerian Jihadist came unthinkably close to blowing up Northwest Flight 253 in mid-air. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be-suicide-bomber, was motivated by religious hatred. He had grown up in a nation where religious freedom is in theory guaranteed by law, but where religious violence has become a normal and pervasive feature of society.

In 1999 predominantly Muslim states in northern Nigeria began officially instituting Islamic Courts to impose Sharia Law. Protests by non-Muslims were met with violence, and in one city alone, Kaduna, at least 2,000 people, mostly Christians, died.

In the fall of 2002 religious riots erupted in Nigeria in protest against the Miss World contest, which was scheduled to be held in Abuja. The contest was moved to London because of the violence, which claimed as many as 200 lives. According to one BBC story, "hundreds of Muslim youths have gone on a rampage in Nigeria's capital, Abuja ... people armed with sticks, daggers and knives set fires to vehicles and attacked anyone suspected of being Christian."

In 2004, 900 people were massacred in clashes between Muslims and Christians in northern and central Nigeria. Human Rights Watch released a 75 page report critical of the Nigerian government for it's failure to prosecute "those responsible for this cycle of violence". The title of that 2005 report was simply "Revenge in the Name of Religion".

In December of 2008, Time Magazine ran an article under the title "Religious Violence Rages in Nigeria". The article was written just one week after "violent clashes left at least 300 people dead" in the Nigerian city of Jos.

When the Pew Forum released its report on "Global Restrictions on Religion" in December of 2009, Nigeria was given a score of just below 6 on a scale (going up to 10) measuring religious "social hostilities". Incredibly, the same "study" ranked the nation of India as being fully 50% worse than Nigeria on the same scale. In fact, India was ranked as among the absolute worst places on earth in terms of religious "social hostilities".

The Pew Forum and others (especially American based right-wing evangelical Christians, many of whom have close ties with Pew) have decided to wage a propaganda campaign against the nation of India and the Hindu religion. The signature feature of this campaign is the cynical misuse of the issue of religious tolerance as a club with which to beat Hindus and Indians over the head. But as the near tragedy on Flight 253 makes clear, properly understanding and assessing religious tolerance and religious violence isn't just a matter of fairness, it is a matter of life and death.

The combined death toll due to religious violence in Nigeria since the year 2000, according to a "timeline" of religious violence in Nigeria published by Reuters is well over 5,000. The number of people who have died in religious violence in India during the same period is much smaller, despite the fact that India's population is almost 10 times that of Nigeria. In fact, while Nigeria is the the most populous nation in Africa, India's population is larger than that of the entire African continent.

This is not to say that there has been no religious violence in India. There has. There is also religious violence in the United States and in every other nation. There have been two significant outbreaks of religious violence in India since 2000: in Gujarat in 2002, and in Orissa in 2008. Even the most wildly inflated estimates for these (and all other, much smaller-scale incidents during the same period) do not add up to even half the death toll in Nigeria during the same period. And in both Gujarat and Orissa the outbreaks began with unprovoked murders of Hindus. In Gujarat a train car full of Hindu religious pilgrims were burned alive, and in Orissa an 80 year old Hindu holy man and four of his devotees were gunned down in cold blood.

Religious tolerance is too important to be treated as merely yet another political football in the culture wars being waged by right-wing Christians. These religious bigots, whose aggressive and massive missionary activities in Asia, Africa and Latin America are in large part funded by a significant portion of the US foreign aid budget*, have so far been extremely (and alarmingly) successful in their smear campaign against India and Hinduism. But perhaps the near tragedy on Christmas Day, which came just a few weeks after Pew's India-bashing "report", will finally inspire more people to look below the surface and to question the crude anti-Hindu propaganda being peddled by the Pew Forum and it's right-wing fundamentalist allies.

*[For more on how US tax dollars go to fund right-wing Christian "missionary" activities abroad, see this post and links and references contained therein. See, especially, the 2006 Boston Globe four part series on "Exporting Faith".]

Primitive Accumulation

One of the great questions of history is how did a handful of western European nation states come to so completely dominate the entire planet earth and all of its inhabitants?

While the era of overt European colonialism is officially over, its legacy is alive and well. The European Union and the United States combined account for 54% of the world's Gross Domestic Product, while accounting for only 12% of the world's population. Other measures ranging from military spending to the virulent spread of such western cultural icons as McDonald's and Coke, demonstrate that Euro-American world domination is not only not a thing of the past but is arguably still expanding.

In fact, the continued penetration of Western culture is especially marked in the two most populous (and most powerful) non-western states: India and China (both of which are nuclear powers, one of which sits on the UN Security Council, and which together account for 1/3 the entire human race).

Karl Marx proposed a famous explanation for the Western domination of the world in one of the more celebrated sections of Das Kapital, dealing with the phenomenon of The Primitive Accumulation of Capital:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England's Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c.

The different moments of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.
[Marx, Das Kapital, Volume I, Chapter 31]

The connection between colonialism and Christianity was hardly lost on Karl Marx. Immediately after the above passage he quotes from William Howitt's Colonisation and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in all their Colonies (London, 1838):

The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however reckless of mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth.

European Christians have demonstrated over and over the truth of the adage that the mere possession of power is not by itself sufficient to dominate: one must also possess the will to use that power to do violence to others. And even that
comes in degrees, and the greater the degree of that will to violence, the greater the domination.

The European conquest of the Americas (in particular) initiated an explosive feedback loop in which savage violence led to a massive influx of wealth, which led to greater power, which led to even greater savagery and violence, which led to even greater wealth, and so forth.

It is no coincidence that "Great Power" colonialism, the African Slave trade and full-on genocide in the Americas were all taking place simultaneously. Just as it was also no coincidence that the perpetrators regularly inflicted the same level of violence on each other. In fact, spiraling European militarism eventually resulted in catastrophic "world wars" which almost seemed to threaten Christendom with self-immolation.

But it must be emphasized that there was nothing unpredictable about the inter-European wars that scarred the 20th century. in the sense that these horrors were completely consistent with past behavior. These were the same people who had conducted the Inquisition and the witch-hunts. These were the descendants (indeed, they proved themselves the rightful heirs) of the people who had given the world such "idyllic proceedings " as the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the Court of Blood, the Thirty Years war, and so forth and so on. In this grisly context even the Nazi Holocaust no longer appears as an aberration.

(Is it unhealthy to dwell on this aspect of western history and recite this nightmarish litany? But shouldn't Russians study the deeds of Stalin, Germans those of Hitler, the Chinese those of Mao, the Spanish those of Cortes? Or should each be excused from such unpleasantness and only be required to be familiar with the evils done by others, but not the evils done by their forebears to others?)

Throughout all of this bloodletting, the United States ended up in the enviable position of being able to participate in the Primitive Accumulation of Capital, but without having its cities and factories bombed as part of the bargain. The United States has been almost completely spared the mess and bother of fighting wars on our own soil, unless you want to count the mind-bogglingly lopsided military engagements known as the Indian Wars, which consistently blurred all distinctions between battles and massacres.

There is no question that free (that is, stolen) land, and free (that is, slave) labor were the engines the propelled the U.S. forward in its formative years, that is, these were the primary sources of the Primitive Accumulation in what was to become the greatest Capitalist state of all time. And there is also no question that the Christianization of the Indians and Africans were central not only to the ideological justification of conquest and slavery, but were central to actually carrying out those very profitable enterprises.

Brit Hume Calls On Tiger Woods To Leave Buddhism For Christianity

O.M.F.G.

Brit Hume has publicly called on Tiger Woods to renounce Buddhism and to embrace Christianity. Hume's position is that Christianity is the religion-of-choice for philanderers because Buddhism just doesn't offer "the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith."

Here's an interesting question: to what extent is Hume speaking from personal experience? Although there is no known evidence that he has ever dabbled in Buddhism or any other non-Christian faith-tradition, there have been repeated rumors about Hume's own marital fidelity or possible lack thereof. In particular there were reports starting in 2007 linking him with Fox News anchor Megyn Kendall, who is nearly three decades younger than the almost septuagenarian Hume. One of the first reports along these lines was a Wonkette piece under the title of "Fox's Most, Least Attractive Anchors Hook Up".

The story about Kendall came on the heels of speculation that on-the-job marital squabbling had led to the departure of Kim Hume (wife of Brit) from Fox News in 2006 (she had been Washington Bureau Chief and a Fox News Vice President). And it turns out that Ms. Hume actually has a sense a humor: when she announced that she was leaving the Bureau that she and her hubby had co-founded in 1996, she stated that she wanted "to spend less time with my family"!!!

Brit Hume has also recently used his Sunday morning bully pulpit to claim that global warming may be a "fraud". Most people seem to have forgotten the storm of controversy that was stirred up in 2005 when Hume himself was accused of consciously perpetuating a fraud when he claimed that FDR had personally supported the idea of privatizing Social Security.

Paganism is not a European religion, Part Deux

I would like to return briefly to the issue of the non-European-ness of Paganism (look here to see my previous post on this subject, written back in June of '09).

More than anything else I would simply like to encourage Pagans (and anyone else interested in an intellectual understanding of what Paganism is) to get their hands on the book Ancient Religions, edited by Sarah Iles Johnston, and to read it. Johnston, Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Professor of Greek and Latin at the Ohio State University, is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking Hekate Soteira. She has also written or edited volumes on Medea, Ancient Greek Divination, Orphic Dionysianism, and other subjects of acute interest to modern Pagans (or at least to this one).

The publishers blurb for Ancient Religions reads as follows:

Religious beliefs and practices, which permeated all aspects of life in antiquity, traveled well-worn routes throughout the Mediterranean: itinerant charismatic practitioners journeying from place to place peddled their skills as healers, purifiers, cursers, and initiators; and vessels decorated with illustrations of myths traveled with them. New gods encountered in foreign lands by merchants and conquerors were sometimes taken home to be adapted and adopted. This collection of essays by a distinguished international group of scholars, drawn from the groundbreaking reference work Religion in the Ancient World, offers an expansive, comparative perspective on this complex spiritual world.

An "expansive comparative perspective" is, unfortunately, exactly the opposite of the perspective with which many Pagans today, especially those who consider themselves "reconstructionists" and/or fans of Ronald Hutton, look at our Pagan past. Although the majority of these Pagans don't even realize that they have enlisted themselves (on the wrong side, no less) in the ongoing intellectual conflict between comparativism and anti-comparativism.

As Johnston notes in her Introduction, whereas modern westerners take it for granted that, at least in theory, we have a wide variety of religious alternatives to choose from if we are so inclined,

Only relatively recently, however, have scholars recognized the extent to which ancient peoples, as well, were exposed to a diversity of religions, both indigenous and imported -- or even, indeed, acknowledged that ancient peoples were exposed to a diversity of cultural influences of any kind. The historical reasons for this failure [until recently -- on the part of modern scholarship] are political and ideological, as well as intellectual, among which three are especially interesting, as Walter Burkert and other scholars have shown (see esp. Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution). First, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, following a long period during which scholars of the Bible and of classical antiquity had taken cultural interaction in the ancient Mediterranean for granted, the boundaries between academic fields were redrawn in universities, and what we now call classics and theology strove to assert themselves as independent entities. As they did so, each one naturally stressed the grandeur and achievements of the cultures it represented -- respectively, ancient Greece and Rome, and the ancient Near East. Second, at about the same time, Romantic nationalism developed. In their desire to show that particular myths, literatures, and forms of religion could be tied to particular ancient cultures that served as models for contemporary nation-states, Romantic nationalists not only discouraged any assumption of cross-cutural influences within the ancient Mediterranean, but also brought new energy to the old quest of tracking the specific, discrete origins of each cultures practices and ideas. Finally, and also at about the same time, notions about a lost "pre-language," shared by the Greeks, Romans, Germans, and other "Aryan" peoples -- but not by the Semites -- crystallized into the proposal for the language we now cal "Indo-European."
[p. viii]

The source that Johnston cites, Burkert's The Orientalizing Revolution, was originally published in 1984 in German as Die orientalisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literatur. Between the first German edition and the revised expanded English edition in 1992 there appeared Martin Bernal's 1987 Black Athena: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985. The furor and outrage that greeted Bernal's Black Athena significantly effected the reception of Burkert's Orientalizing Revolution. Compared to Bernal, who was widely viewed as a bomb-throwing leftist cultural warrior, Burkert was seen as a refined and cautious scholar. This was largely due to style and timing, since the main theses of the two books broadly overlap. In fact, by 1992 Burkert felt emboldened to go futher than he had in 1984, and this is reflected in the title itself: the Orientalizing "Epoch" had become the Orientalizing "Revolution"!

In fact it's quite interesting to look at the Introduction to Burkert's book to see the original inspiration for what Johsnton says above:

The Greeks had become of their own identity as separate from that of the "Orient" when they succeeded in repelling the attacks of the Persian empire. But not until much later, during the crusades, did the concept and the term Orient actually enter the languages of the West. This fact hardly explains why even today it should be difficult to undertake unprejudiced discussion of connections between classical Greece and the East. But whoever tries will encounter entrenched positions, uneasiness, apology if not resentment. What is foreign and unknown is held at a distance by an attitude of wary defensiveness.

To a large extent this is the result of an intellectual development which began more than two centuries ago and took root especially in Germany. Increasing specialization of scholarship converged with ideological protectionism, and both constructed an image of a pure, classical Greece in splendid isolation. Until well into the eighteenth century, as long as philology was closely connected with theology, the Hebrew Bible naturally stood next to the Greek classics, and the existence of cross-connections did not present any problems. Jephtha's daughter and Iphigenia were interchangeable models in the realm of oprea; Iapetos was traced to Japheth, the Kabeiroi to a Semitic designation for "great gods", and the "East" was found in the name of Kadmos the Phoenician
[pp. 1-2 ]

Johnston delicately points out that despite significant advances in knowledge during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ideology continued to dominate the study of ancient cultures with the result being the emphasis of "the unique character of each Mediterranean culture" to the detriment of recognizing commonalities. Although Johnston feels compelled to, inaccurately, insist that this was the case "particularly in Germany", the fact is that "racial theories" were, at the very least, an acceptable part of mainstream intellectual discourse throughout the West. It only needs to be pointed out that segregation was widespread throughout the United States prior to, throughout, and even after WWII -- and this was not just in the South.

[I also discuss Johnston's book Ancient Religions in this previous post: Monotheistic Robots of Doom, Part Deux. In addition I dashed off a flurry of posts when this issue became something of a hot topic due to some stupid things said during the recent World Parliament of Religions: Everyone Already Knows What Paganism Is, Paganism Is Indigenous and Very Old , But It Is Not European, and Are Pagans At The Parliament Sleeping With The Enemy?]

"we must always be learning it"

I was just lately telling you that I was within sight of old age. I am now afraid that I have left old age behind me. For some other word would now apply to my years, or at any rate to my body; since old age means a time of life that is weary rather than crushed. You may rate me in the worn-out class, - of those who are nearing the end.

Nevertheless, I offer thanks to myself, with you as witness; for I feel that age has done no damage to my mind, though I feel its effects on my constitution. Only my vices, and the outward aids to these vices, have reached senility; my mind is strong and rejoices that it has but slight connexion with the body. It has laid aside the greater part of its load. It is alert; it takes issue with me on the subject of old age; it declares that old age is its time of bloom. Let me take it at its word, and let it make the most of the advantages it possesses. The mind bids me do some thinking and consider how much of this peace of spirit and moderation of character I owe to wisdom and how much to my time of life; it bids me distinguish carefully what I cannot do and what I do not want to do. . . . For why should one complain or regard it as a disadvantage, if powers which ought to come to an end have failed? "But," you say, "it is the greatest possible disadvantage to be worn out and to die off, or rather, if I may speak literally, to melt away! For we are not suddenly smitten and laid low; we are worn away, and every day reduces our powers to a certain extent."

But is there any better end to it all than to glide off to one's proper haven, when nature slips the cable? Not that there is anything painful in a shock and a sudden departure from existence; it is merely because this other way of departure is easy, - a gradual withdrawal. I, at any rate, as if the test were at hand and the day were come which is to pronounce its decision concerning all the years of my life, watch over myself and commune thus with myself: "The showing which we have made up to the present time, in word or deed, counts for nothing. All this is but a trifling and deceitful pledge of our spirit, and is wrapped in much charlatanism. I shall leave it to Death to determine what progress I have made. Therefore with no faint heart I am making ready for the day when, putting aside all stage artifice and actor's rouge, I am to pass judgment upon myself, - whether I am merely declaiming brave sentiments, or whether I really feel them; whether all the bold threats I have uttered against fortune are a pretense and a farce. Put aside the opinion of the world; it is always wavering and always takes both sides. Put aside the studies which you have pursued throughout your life; Death will deliver the final judgment in your case. This is what I mean: your debates and learned talks, your maxims gathered from the teachings of the wise, your cultured conversation, - all these afford no proof of the real strength of your soul. Even the most timid man can deliver a bold speech. What you have done in the past will be manifest only at the time when you draw your last breath. I accept the terms; I do not shrink from the decision." This is what I say to myself, but I would have you think that I have said it to you also. You are younger; but what does that matter? There is no fixed count of our years. You do not know where death awaits you; so be ready for it everywhere.

I was just intending to stop, and my hand was making ready for the closing sentence; but the rites are still to be performed and the traveling money for the letter disbursed. And just assume that I am not telling where I intend to borrow the necessary sum; you know upon whose coffers I depend. Wait for me but a moment, and I will pay you from my own account; meanwhile, Epicurus will oblige me with these words: "Think on death," or rather, if you prefer the phrase, on "migration to heaven." The meaning is clear, - that it is a wonderful thing to learn thoroughly how to die. You may deem it superfluous to learn a text that can be used only once; but that is just the reason why we ought to think on a thing. When we can never prove whether we really know a thing, we must always be learning it. "Think on death." In saying this, he bids us think on freedom. He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery; he is above any external power, or, at any rate, he is beyond it. What terrors have prisons and bonds and bars for him? His way out is clear. There is only one chain which binds us to life, and that is the love of life. The chain may not be cast off, but it may be rubbed away, so that, when necessity shall demand, nothing may retard or hinder us from being ready to do at once that which at some time we are bound to do. Farewell.
[Seneca, Epistles 26]

Death and dying is a subject that evokes such deep and disturbing emotions that we usually try to live in denial of death. Yet we could die tomorrow, completely unprepared and helpless. The time of death is uncertain but the truth of death is not. All who are born will certainly die.

People often make the mistake of being frivolous about death and think, “Oh, well, death happens to everybody. It’s not a big deal, it’s natural. I’ll be fine.”

This is a nice theory until one is dying. Then experience and theory differ. Then one is powerless and everything familiar is lost. One is overwhelmed by a great turbulence of fear, disorientation, and confusion. For this reason it is essential to prepare well in advance for the moment when the mind and body separate.

There are many methods, extraordinary and ordinary, to prepare for the transformation of death. The greatest of these results in enlightenment in one’s lifetime. In enlightenment, death has no relevance to one’s state of being. Enlightened realization is deathless, but it requires flawless meditative practice.

If deathless enlightenment is not accomplished during one’s lifetime, the transition of death itself offers another supreme opportunity to attain enlightenment. But again, realizing the potential of this opportunity depends on having mastered certain meditative skills.

Enlightenment is the highest attainment of the death transition, but it is not the only one. If meditative realization is incomplete yet one has developed the power of prayer, there can be liberation into an environment of perfect bliss, free of suffering, by invoking the blessings of enlightened wisdom beings.

To accomplish the meditative skills and power needed to direct our mind at death, we must learn about the relationship of life and death, about the process of dying, and about the transitions from the moment of death until rebirth. In this way we become familiar with death and are not caught by surprise as the process begins to unfold.
[Life In Relationship To Death, Chagdud Khadro]

Christian Nazi Quote-fest (Nazis and Christians and Pagans, Part Two)

I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that I shall at all times be prepared, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath.
[Wehrmacht Oath]

The following quotes are all found in Richard Steigmann-Gall's Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945. For each quote I will provide both the original source and also the page number in Steigmann-Gall's book {in curly brackets}. And if you want more along these lines check out this page of Quotes from Hilter's Henchmen and Nazi Sympathizers, compiled by Jim Walker over at nobeliefs.com. That huge page of quotes, in turn, is part of Walker's collection of online resources related to Hitler's Christianity.

"The struggle we are now waging today until victory or the bitter end is, in its deepest sense, a struggle between Marx and Christ."
Joseph Goebbels, Michael: A Novel
{p. 13}

"We demand freedom for all religious confessions in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence or conflict with the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The party as such represents the standpoint of a positive Christianity, without tying itself to a particular confession. It fights the spirit of Jewish materialism within us and without us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our Volk can only take place from within, on the basis of the principle: public need comes before private greed."
Point 24, Party Program, National Socialist Workers Party of Germany
{p. 14}

"And among [our heroes] I want to count that man, one of the best, who devoted his life to the awakening of his -- our -- people, in his writings and his thoughts and finally his deeds: Dietrich Eckart."
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
{p. 17}

"Christ stands never otherwise than erect, never otherwise than upright ... eyes flashing in the midst of the creeping Jewish rabble .. and the words fall like lashes of the whip: 'Your father is the devil' (John 8:44)."
Dietrich Eckart, Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin
{p. 18}

"In Christ, the embodiment of all manliness, we find all that we need."
Dietrich Eckart, Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin
{p. 18}

"We seek God nowhere but in ourselves. For us the soul is divine, of which the Jew, on the other hand, knows nothing. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you (Luke 17:21), thus God also, who belongs to the Kingdom of Heaven. We feel our soul is immortal, eternal from the beginning, and therefore we refuse to be told that we are created from nothingness."
Dietrich Eckart Auf gut deutsch (1919)
{p. 30}

"I converse with Christ."
Joseph Goebbels, Michael: A Novel
{p. 21}

"I take the Bible, and all evening long I read the simplest and grandest sermon that has ever been given to mankind: The Sermon on the Mount!"
Joseph Goebbels, Michael: A Novel
{p. 21}

"Today's youth is not against God, we are only against his cowardly religious menials, who try to commercialize Him as they do everything else. We have to square off against them if we want to square ourselves with God."
Joseph Goebbels, Michael: A Novel
{p. 22}

"When we call for the unification of the Protestant Church, we do so because we do not see how, in a time when the whole Reich is unifying itself, twenty-eight Landeskirchen can persist.... In the interpretation of the Gospel one may hold the command of God higher than human commands. In the interpretation of political realities, we consider ourselves to be God's instrument."
Joseph Goebbels, Hannover Kurier, 29 March 1935
{p. 178}

"Our religion is Christ, our politics Fatherland."
Hans Schemm, leader of National Socialist Teachers' League and Gauleiter of Beyreuth
(Schemm often ended his speeches by leading the audience in A Mighty Fortress is our God)
{p. 25}

"We struggle for a union of the small Protestant state churches into a strong Protestant Reich Church.... We are acting not as a party, but as Protestant Christians who only follow a call to faith from God, which we here in our Volk movement. As true members of our church we have a legitimate claim to have appropriate consideration given to the greatness and inner strength of National Socialism in church life and the church administration."
Helmut Brucker, Gauletier of Silesia, "Richtlinien fur Kirchenfragen," Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf (10 Nov. 1932: Breslau)
{p. 73}

"The party stands for positive Christianity. The National Socialist state is absolutely ready to work with the Christian churches."
Wilhelm Frick, one of only three Nazis in the original Hitler Cabinet, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 2 June 1935
{p. 121}

"We have told the churches that we stand for positive Christianity. Through the zeal of our faith, the strength of our faith, we have once again shown what faith means, we have once again taken the Volk, which believed in nothing, back to faith."
Hermann Göring in a 1935 speech, Positives Christentum, 3 Nov. 1935
{p. 120}

"When Point 24 of our program says the party stands for a positive Christianity, here above all is the cornerstone of our thinking."
Walter Buch, President of Nazi Party Supreme Court, "Geist und Kampf" (speech): Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf (probably given between 1930 and 1932)
{p. 23}

"Public need before private greed.... So important and meaningful is this phrase that Jesus Christ placed it in the center of his religious teaching. However, since Christ was not a politician, since his Reich was not of this world, he put the calling into other words. He taught: love your neighbors as yourself! National Socialism is therefore nothing new, nothing that a person after much consideration would not come upon as the solution to the economic plight of the Germans."
Walter Buch Der Aufmarsch, Blatter der deutschen Jugend 2 (January 1931)
{p. 44}

"Many people confess their amazement that Hitler preaches ideas which they have always held.... From the Middle Ages we can look to the same example in Martin Luther. What stirred in the soul and spirit of the German people of that time, finally found expression in his person, in his words and deeds."
Walter Buch "Geist und Kampf" (speech), Bundesarchiv Berlin-Zehlendorf
{p. 55}

This post is part of the series on "Nazis & Christians & Pagans":
[1] Nazis and Christians and Pagans, Oh My! (Part One)
[2] Christian Nazi Quote-fest (Part Two)
[3] Fascism, Islam, and Freedom of Expression (Part Three)
[4] "Hitler was not an occultist": Mitch Horowitz is right but his sourcing is all wrong (Part Four)
[5] Karla Poewe's "New Religions and the Nazis" reviewed by Richard Steigmann-Gall (Part Five)
[6] Rosenberg, Chamberlain, Harnack (Part Six)

Pagan Literacy Reading Guide!! New Year Fun for the whole family!

Level 1:
Linda Johnsen's Lost Masters
Antonia Tripolitis: Religions of the Roman Hellenistic Age
Karl Kerenyi: Gods of the Greeks
Julia Annas' Ancient Philosophy: A Very Brief Introduction
Joscelyn Godwin: The Golden Thread
Hesiod: Theogony
Apollonius: Argonautica
Homer: Odyssey

Level 2:
Karl Kerenyi: The Heroes of the Greeks
Julia Annas: Plato: Very Brief Introduction
Christoph Riedweg: Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching and Influence
James B. Rives' Religion in the Roman Empire
Frances Yates: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound
Euripides: Bakkhai
Vergil: Aeneid
Apollodorus: Libray of Mythology
Ovid: Metamorphoses