Satire on a Sad Second Millennium: A Religious Perspective

Moreover, pain, evil, and suffering all play an important role to bring the state of humanity to our attention. If everything were perfect which they would be if God directly intervened in every act of evil this world endures , then we would perceive no need of a savior for humanity and the world itself.

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Pain is necessary for survival in this broken world, and is the consequence of evil for which we ourselves are responsible. Can you see all ends? Can you perceive the past, present, and future and understand the eternal ramifications of this or that? How do you know that helping one will not result in the harm of another?

Or that to help one may hurt the whole? The Father turned His back on His only begotten Son, Jesus, who was blameless and perfect, and permitted Him to endure the worst imaginable suffering—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—for the sake of the eternal salvation of humanity at large. Why then is this of any significance in light of that reality?

Because Christians list omnipotent and omnibenevolent as attributes of their god. If those attributes are correct, then he has both the power and the will. The fact that societies have established moral standards is not evidence of a deity by a long stretch. Go read the epistle of Romans if you genuinely want to try to understand this issue. At the end of the day, all humans are absolutely evil and God-hating by default from birth, and with no way to personally rectify this state.

Thankfully, evil people can still do good things. If everyone is indeed evil, then God is—no matter how benevolent—obligated to do anything for them. God owes us nothing. We deserve much more than the evil that is permitted to happen to us. The Gospel is the answer to this problem: He graciously and at inconceivable cost provided the means to give us rebirth into the goodness of Christ, and thus mend the chasm between God and man.

The problem with these discussions about God and evil are that they seldom consider attempting to evaluate it from a theocentric perspective, but rather an exclusively anthrocentric perspective. Common grace—that evil, while present, remains restrained and good things happen to bad people i.

All this drivel and personal incredulity is nothing more than petulant whining. An internally consistent explanation of these issues is laid out very clearly in the Bible, as conveyed by Jesus and the Apostles in the New Testament. Notably Romans deals with this issue extensively. You are welcome to do your due diligence and read it for yourself. The notable point is that God loves both, in spite of their evil. That is the message that Christianity preaches: I see the Christian view of God as all knowing, all powerful and all present. The crime or the action is never what was intended in a perfect world.

But the Christian story does not end there, it ends with good news, victory over evil. The son did not remain dead but was alive and out of the tomb three days later, according to Christian belief. At this point I am a temporal being, but I look forward to an eternity. My choice is to be with God for an eternity as he intended, with no suffering or pain, or an eternity separated from God. If he was all knowing, as you say, then he had foreknowledge of the results of the system he designed.

This means he is responsible for any and all evil arising from the system. There is no way around that. If the Jesus stories are true, then Jesus lost absolutely nothing. His death was in no way a substitution. Look at the facts……. He rose again in three days, became immortal, sat at the right hand of a god, and was destined to rule the world. Please explain how that in any way equates to the human experience of death.

That would mean that god sacrificed himself to himself to circumvent rules he himself put into place. I appreciate your feedback, Phil. I try to be pointed with my answers without being offensive. It is a hard line to toe. Thanks for more questions, and I apologise for my tardiness in replying.

There is more to the Jesus story, it is not only about death and resurrection. Prior to his death he lived for 30 years, thereabouts. He had a following due to his alleged authority and power for a period of roughly three years, recorded by eye witnesses and a man who decided to record a careful history. A man who was able to heal, raise people from the dead, teach religious leaders, calm storms, send pigs to drown, turn water into wine is quite impressive.

These stories, over years later, require faith to believe. As I ponder the death of Jesus I am struck by the torture and death. The friends that carefully laid his body in a borrowed tomb and the women that came to care for his body on the third day. With regards to omnibenevolent, I am not convinced. He loved the world Jn 3: Actually, the term omnibenevolent was new to me on this thread and I am still contemplating it.

Personally, I think that it is quite possible that a person named Jesus existed. There is certainly no definitive proof, but there is anecdotal evidence. For me the question is demonstrating that he was also a deity, or son of a deity depending on which type Christian you may be. The very earliest one was written some thirty years after the supposed crucifiction. It is also a fact that eye witness testimony is one of the most unreliable forms of testimony. That is why forensics is so important in major criminal trials.

Furthermore, the supposed miracles are at the level of modern day parlor tricks and are unimpressive even if it were possible to demonstrate that they actually happened. I am not sure whether you have actually read the gospels or the book of Acts? The gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts clearly include elements of first person account. John likewise makes an autobiographical comment in John I would dispute your assertion about eye-witness testimony insofar as persons involved in an event verses persons that perceived an event.

The Watergate Scandal is a case where a number of men were all involved. Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. Phil, yes, I have read the old and new Testaments several times through. It admittedly has been quite some time, though. But even if they were written in first person from beginning to end, it would provide questionable evidence at best.

However, even Biblical scholars agree generally that we have no idea who the authors of some of the gospels are and that in some instances, one borrows from the other. If the fact that some people died for what they believed makes the belief true, then it would make Islam true, as well as Hinduism, Bhuddism, and numerous other religions.

People die to this day for various religious and political ideologies, that does not establish the truthfulness of their beliefs. You can Google the accuracy of eyewitness accounts and find ample information demonstrating the questionable value of eyewitness accounts. The guilty go free and the innocent are convicted based on eyewitness accounts. For such a claim as people rising from the grave, far more evidence would be needed to substantiate the claim.

All claims are not equal in terms of weight, and therefore the quantity and quality of evidence needed to support the claims also will vary. If the only claim was that there was a man with the name of Jesus who lived in the middle east 2 thousand years ago, perhaps the gospels would suffice, because such a claim could easily be true and would carry little importance.

But when you throw in the miracles and god claims, the bar is raised substantially. It is the difference between me telling you there was a car in my garage or telling you there was a magical dragon in my garage. Milton, thank you so much for your reply. A few years ago I realised that caring for a person was far more convincing and compelling than arguing with them. But, I do not feel that you and I are arguing in the negative sense. There is no point in us discussing technical details back and forth as every claim that we each make can be rebutted by a counter claim.

Thank for reminding me that, if I truly believe that Jesus is the son of God, and that God exists, it is more powerful for me to live as one who learns from and follows him i. The narrative of Jesus records a man who loved the outcast and took the religious leaders to task. He was not impressed with knowledge, he was impressed with care and service.

Can you have good without evil? Without evil, how do we know what is good? The whole of human civilization and culture fights against natural selection. We can certainly build a moral framework based on human relations using the Golden Rule, for example, which antedates Christianity and is common to many cultures without invoking a deity at all. For example, if another species were dominant, that reproduced by some other means, the concept of rape might be meaningless. It is only a crime in a human society that values autonomy. Christians are very ready to thank God for finding them a parking palce or saving one person in a plane-crash, but not to blame Him for letting the plane-crash — or a tsunami killing hundreds of thousands — happen.

The story of the miracle of the blind man only underlines the problem: In light of the culture of the time, forcing the man who raped the woman to marry her was culturally appropriate as both a solution and a disincentive to rape. Having the rapist marry her would be compensatory to the irreparable damage he caused to her. Men knowing that they would be forced into a marriage with a woman that may be below his station or ambitions would disincentivize him from raping her in the first place.

It is also worth noting that if he would not marry her he would be stoned to death. All of what you articulated there goes back to the main point of the author and the beginnings of her pursuit of God: Why do we have a sense of right and wrong? Evolutionary sociological and psychological arguments fail miserably to deal with this, and philosophy takes ardent note of that.

From the Christian evaluation, the suffering of this life is infinitesimal compared to the glory of eternity to come. And the suffering of this life is necessary to point us toward God and to terms with the fallen state of humanity and the creation at large. Chapter and verse for the stoning, please. My reading was that he would just have to pay the bride price without getting the bride.

Why would we fight against what is, according to you, essentially who we are? You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what natural selection is. You seem to think it involved constant physical battles between individuals or species, or tribes, or something. Nothing of the sort. Human consciousness changes everything. The concept that Darwin posited, which was flawed in a number of sense was simply a derivation of earlier work by a man who like many men do not want to accept that they are a created being, and thus accountable to their creator whether we wish to be, choose to be, or not — it just is.

As such there is no need for ethics, morality or such, because survival is the only criteria. The argument is valid. I am only arguing that a being that has the power to stop evil and does not is not a wholly moral being. And this is not an argument against the existence of God, but of the Christian God specifically.

But, again, Christianity specifically deals with this. As for the creation, God created it for the purpose of humanity and human free will. Though what we are discussing here is not an issue of free will, but restraint. Free will is a matter of the ability to make fully autonomous decisions. Restraining those decisions being carried out is another thing altogether. I am arguing against the existence of the Christian god, because the author specifically references the Christian god.

If you wish to argue the pros and cons for any one of the thousands of other gods, we can, but not within this thread. Demonstrate your assertion that a god created the universe for humanity and free will. I was just making an observation on that matter. I know you are arguing against the true God. How would you like me to demonstrate it? What criteria would you like fulfilled? It would probably be faster for you to just go and read the accounts.

My answer would be that an omniscient god would know what that evidence would be in my case. So i will await his submission of that evidence. In the meantime, i have no reason to believe. I think that is fair. I would recommend it to you. I will pray that God will reveal Himself to you on the grounds that are necessary for you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who searches finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

What man among you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! Therefore, whatever you want others to do for you, do also the same for them—this is the Law and the Prophets. For the gate is wide and the road is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who go through it.

How narrow is the gate and difficult the road that leads to life, and few find it. If you will concede the possibility that He is there, and if so you would wish to find Him, then He will most surely find you. CD, I have no problem conceding a god may exist. I just know that there is no convincing evidence for it to be true. Milton, your thinking is still fundamentally anthropocentric, and more specifically Milton-centric.

On the justice of suffering: God partially gives us what we want — a world where his presence and justice is distant or non-existent. This is not a mistake; it too is a lesson in human evil and call to repent. Why do hundreds die in natural disasters? Why are children mistreated and slain? You and me and people just like us. Why does God not step in and stop it? But in the meantime he wants us to recognise our utter general culpability and turn to him for mercy. Yet we would rather blame him for giving us exactly what we corporately asked for — to rule ourselves and our world in our own way.

Now, there are half a dozen possible objections to this. But if any of them hold, then we are in a worse place — if there is no God who will judge, then there is no justice, no right, no wrong. These are all things we make up to try to make ourselves feel better in a dog-eat-dog world. As for evidence of God, why do you assume the problem is a lack of evidence? There are none so blind as those who will not see. But he does offer some of us two gifts — the gift of realisation that we need him, and the gift of salvation.

For those he gifts with the first, the second follows easily. Perhaps in his mercy and plan he will offer them to you. Finally, let me observe that when the Apostles speak in public in the book of Acts , their ultimate focus in not on the crucifixion of Jesus but on his resurrection. To their thinking, the resurrection of the Christ is the sign that he is King and the judgement of God is coming upon the world Acts 2: The apparent reign of ignorance and evil is coming to an end; do not be caught up in its fall.

God in his mercy offers you a way back to him. You have actually put thought into your reply. Unfortunately, I disagree with your reasoning. My main point is that if god is omnipotent and omnibenevolent then he has both the ability and the desire to end immorality. Is he is incapable or unwilling?

It is irrelevant that he may step in at some point in the future and stop it. The point is that he can stop it now and chooses not to. Therefore, if he exists, he is immoral. Let me give my original question to you, because virtually everyone else on this thread has dodged the question and not answered it. Maybe you will be the first to have the courage. If you could stop a child from being raped without any risk to you or others, would it be immoral not to stop it? If you think it is immoral, then you and I agree….

If I could stop a child from being raped, without any risk to myself or others, would it be immoral for me not to stop it? In accordance with human conceptions of morality, it would be immoral for me to stand idly by. Is God bound by human conceptions of morality? Did evil break me? Yes, but only until I allowed myself to be loved back to wholeness. Why do children starve to death? There is ample food to provide for every being on Earth. Look into the vast amounts of perfectly good food disposed of every day because of its aesthetics bananas are a great example!

Why is all of this perfectly good food thrown away? Because it is a financial drain to transport this food to the starving, when they cannot pay even a cent towards the cost, significantly impacting profits. As far as communism is concerned, it works very well in theory, but every failed example throughout history failed because of human greed in those at the centre the greed which also causes capitalism to fail! He designed the entire system knowing beforehand what the consequences of his choices would be and he was okay with those choices.

How is he not culpable? As much as we might like to be, or believe that we are, we are not gods, so cannot perceive nor judge His actions or lack thereof, depending on perception by our own standards. The Bible however, says that God knows our every thought before we have them, not that He chose them for us.

Though, as I said, many people have different perspectives on this topic — many of which make not a shred of sense to me! To follow the logic that God is culpable for sending people into a world in which He knew the cost of our poor actions would be like saying a knife maker is culpable for designing a kitchen knife that someone used to kill somebody, or a teacher is culpable for setting a test that students would fail, if they chose not to study in preparation. We all have the opportunity to make good choices, or terrible choices. Something is moral or it is,not.

Why would you imply it is somwhow moral for your god to allow a child to be raped, but immoral for humans to do so? The act of rape is to me immoral, and so is allowing it to happen when you could easily stop it. Whether god stopped a rape in another instance is irrelevant. I am concerned with the ones he does not stop.

If Christians say human morals are derived from god and are objective in nature, then how can our moral standards be different? In what context is child rape moral? To say your god would allow someone to rape a child just so the child could hit rock bottom and maybe recover sometime in the future to learn some lesson is obscene. Allowing children to be raped to teach then a lesson about life is a horrendous idea. How can you even think that could somehow be moral? Is that the best an all-loving god can do???

What about those who do not recover? Finally, I find it odd that you are telling me you believe it is impossible for an all-knowing, all powerful being to overcome the drawbacks of a human economic system and feed starving children. If that is so, then he is surely no god. I am surprised you are proposing to limit the power of your god in such a manner. On the other hand, if he could have prevented the course of history that brought us to this point, then there would perhaps be no starving children.

If that is so, then he remains responsible for those results. Obviously, I write as a human being, and my opinions and perspectives are my own, which I have formed based on my own limited understanding and life experiences. I may be dead-wrong, and as I am absolutely no theologian, I stress that my perspectives represent only myself, not my family, my church, my denomination, and certainly not Christianity as a whole. I do have a friend however, who is a very learned woman of God, and a priest.

I will send her this link and see if she wishes to answer some of your questions more accurately and concisely than I will ever be able to without years of studying theology! On saying that though, here is my completely worthless! People with faith in God understand that we are nowhere near being on a level playing field with Him, so will not ever assume to judge His actions, based on our limited understanding. Not only do we have no right, but we are somewhat concerned for the state of our immortal souls! We are each tempted, we each question and doubt, and we each place higher value on human concerns and endeavours, and the pursuit of immediate gratification, rather than the things that really matter.

As I said above, I certainly did not mean to imply that a child would go through such an ordeal for any kind of lesson. Their suffering is as a result of the evil afflicting another individual. I do however, believe that we can learn from all suffering that we experience. I know I sure have. I also posit that anyone who truly finds God can find healing of any and all things that they suffer, experience, or — the most unpopular stance — commit. What it boils down to, in my humble opinion, is that any situation, no matter how base, how vile, how debilitating, can be injected with hope and eventual healing through faith; that all hurts can be healed through God.

I do not believe it is impossible for God to cure the wrongs of the world. The Earth was created with more than enough for everyone, yet the gift to humanity of free will, along with temptation, caused all of this to crumble. To somebody who does not have faith, death is the endgame, so to think of people dying from starvation, after a life albeit extraordinarily short in far too many cases of suffering is unconscionable and disgusting — hence your mistrust and hostility towards faith, as God is then to blame for this.

When one does not have any faith in anything outside of physical human experience, the ills of life are all that matter; they are the most important and debilitating questions in existence. When one does have faith, the ills of life are infinitely easier to bear.

If you imagine the primary purpose of life as an opportunity to experience existence both with and without God, so that when you are faced with an opportunity to choose how to spend your eternity, your choice will be informed by your life experiences, the suffering of a godless world is easier to understand, endure and see through. I have to distance myself enormously and place this conversation on a hypothetical plane in my mind in order to have this discussion at all, as the reality of suffering and starving children throughout the world causes me significant distress.

The fact that there are children in agony due to their lack of food and clean water in parts of the world, whilst people in my own small corner of the globe throw elaborate birthday parties for their dogs, sickens me. I feel the pain of these people especially the mothers, with whom I can most strongly identify , and I try to help in my small ways, through child sponsorship and feeding some of the local poor, when I can.

I also thank God every single day for the riches my family can enjoy. I see the good that many Christian and non-Christian organisations do to try to remedy the situations and alleviate the suffering, then I also see the individuals affected by greed who exploit even these organisations most often from within. In these, I again see lives with and without God.

I see that free will and life are gifts given to humanity such that we might experience existence both with and without God, and be able to make our decision at the time of judgement. I also look forward to a world that is free from all of this. He will however, always be there to pick up the pieces and to heal the hurts, as well as to allow good to come from any evil experienced.

In my personal experience, my incredible hurts drove me away from the path that I was on to medicine, and instead redirected me to education. So if you had the power to prevent rapists from brutally raping children without any risk to yourself or to others, would you prevent such heinous acts? Or would you sit there and do nothing? Which of those two courses of action or inaction do you think would present you as a more morally sound person? So you would stop the rape. The most important question here is the implicit one — what obligates me to act?

Adolf Hitler in popular culture

If the oppressor is powerful, I may draw persecution to myself, or even be unjustly blamed for his offence. Conversely, the more social support I get for intervening, the more likely I am to go out of my way to perform it. Firstly, this is not a new question. Consider Psalm 10, a lament to God that the powerful are getting away with evil. Secondly, while we act from a very limited moral and temporal perspective, God does not.

Broadly speaking, to turn a blind eye to evil that I could prevent is to condone or even participate in it. If I see one of my enemies mistreating another, am I bound to prevent it? This is the first reckoning. But there is an alternative reckoning. God will not and cannot overlook evil, or dismiss it cheaply. Instead, Jesus, Son of God, comes to be human, to suffer as a human, to be rejected by humans, to die as a human, and to be judged by God as the innocent ideal human in place of all other rebellious evil humans.

In that death, he takes the evil done upon himself. Moreover, he takes the evil suffered upon himself also. For me to overlook evil is immoral. Sorry, but if your god does not intervene and stop an immoral act, then he is complicit in the act. His future acts cannot unrape the child. I think that having another person pay the penalty for your own immorality is a sick concept.

If your great grandfather killed someone, would you think it fair that they put you in prison for his transgression? No, that is the response of a man who is truly unaware of his own depravity. I answered your question, and you complain about it because my answer holds you and I as guilty as the hypothetical rapist. We humans have a wonderful moral system. God has a slightly different system. He starts with his own perfection, compares that to his rebellious, treasonous creation, and withdraws from us because he does not want to destroy us utterly.

Well, many cultures have had some variant on that. But I am saying that, in the scheme of things, our day-to-day evil is not unique — rather, it demonstrates and confirms that we really are cosmically evil. Then he is immoral for doing so. This is precisely what you would expect if there was no god determining outcomes. Your responses to 2,3 and 5 carry no weight whatsoever. If I say that fairies boil water, and you say that giants blowing bubbles boil water, showing that the water boils proves nothing either way, since we already agree on that.

If you want to argue for a moral system which will affirm the goodness of man, the floor is yours. Then why does the Christian god interfere with free will in the Bible, and why do Christians pray in a way that would interfere with the free will of the person being prayed for? Christians argue that their god values free will above the well being if his creation. My argument was pointing out that such a god evidently places the free will of the offender above that of the victim as well.

Take it up with Him. Hugh7, Three objections occur to me: First, It is not clear that the need for free will on the part perpetrators should supersede the need to prevent unjust suffering on the part of their victims—always, sometimes, or as often as seems to be the case. Second, according to the Bible, God DOES occasionally intervene in the lives of his creations and thus implicitly deny their free will.

Third, Believers are constantly praying precisely that God will intervene in the lives of His creations, thus implicitly denying the free will of agents in those cases where prayers are supposedly answered in a positive way. How can you have it both ways? It is not me who needs to explain those things, but you. I do believe God is quite the interventionist. God intervened in the life of His creation not only when He created us but when He saved us creating the way to be right with Him.

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. And yet he chooses not to intervene to stop child rapists, or to save starving children, or prevent tsunamis or earthquakes or hurricanes…. Thanks for your reply. Basically, any being that would allow such things when it vould easily stop them is malevolent. No, your crabbed and hidebound viewpoint is that any being that allows any evil to happen is malevolent.

This is entirely your own opinion, based on you limiting yourself to the earthly, human effects of any action. There are lots of people who claim,that in an odd way, getting cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them. There are people who suffered unimaginably yet say it was the best thing that ever happened to them. Your reasoning is shallow. What was the thing gained by the child that was raped? What was the big lesson formthe millions of children that starve to desth or die from horrible diseases every year? What was the big lesson for a quarter million people swept away by a tsunami?

That God is supreme. And has divine authority and he can allow evil to touch us if we refuse to turn to him. Explain that to a child that is starveng to death or to infants and todlers killed in the catastrophe your god chose to allow. You assume that the only thing that matters is what happens here on earth. This is the atheist self referential loop. If you want to argue with religion then you must take it as it is, not cut out parts of it. Your childish imagining is that the only thing that happens is what happens on earth, as if God should be some sort of Big Mommy in the Sky.

Whether there is something to worry about other than here on earth is completely beside the point. If you can prevent a child from being raped with no risk to yourself at all and you do not, have you acted morally? So they try to defuse the query by employing a red herring. IMO, the best counter attack is to keep repeating the question until they admit their tenuous position. Hi Pierre, I was just wondering why you believe suffering occurs? Why do you believe people do horrific things to each other? Annie — It could be for one of a number of reasons or a combination of those reasons.

Among those that come to mind are anger, hatred, greed, lack of compassion, revenge, mental illness, lack of empathy, sadism, etc. I see no differnce between the rate at which evil falls upon beleivers of any religion and the rate at which it falls upon the general population, somthat does not hold up under scrutiny. Do you believe that all evil is the result of your god choosing to allow evil, or only some of it?

If only some, how do you objectively tell the difference? At the end of the day, if you are capable of preventing evil and look the other way, you are complicit in the evil. If I saw a child being raped, I would do all I could to stop it. That is the difference betwee me and your god. Milton — check this out. Milton — another one for you. You seem to know a lot about God. You do not know the mind of God. The New Colossus , the sequel to Wolfenstein: Blazkowicz meets an elderly, sickly Adolf Hitler with evident signs of suffering from dementia while on an undercover mission in the planet Venus.

In the game Call of Duty: World at War , at the end of a victorious multiplayer match when playing as the German Army , when the march song is played the background Hitler can also be heard saying during it "Vor uns liegt Deutschland, in uns marschiert Deutschland, und hinter uns kommt Deutschland! The point and click adaptation of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade features an interactive meeting between the player and Adolf Hitler.

The player can ask Hitler to give him an autograph on a book or a free pass, or can punch Hitler which results in Indiana's death. The main antagonist in the NES game Golgo Top Secret Episode is Smirk, a cyborg version of Hitler. When one of his clones is shot during the final boss fight, its head will fly towards the screen to attack the player, clearly resembling him.

The last boss of the game is Hitler, who is resurrected by evil scientists. In the US version of the game, the name of the boss was changed to Master-D, in order to appease Nintendo's censorship policies, although he still resembles Hitler. In the modern remake Bionic Commando: Rearmed , the same character appears and though still clearly resembling Hitler, is never named. Hitler is the main antagonist in Operation Darkness. Small roles for Hitler are in Snoopy vs. Rekishi no Katasumi de Here the world-renowned physicist Albert Einstein had traveled back in time and chronoshifted or "deleted from time" Hitler before his rise to power.

The resulting power vacuum led to the Soviet Union invading Europe with Joseph Stalin assuming a role very similar to Hitler's. Germany then joins the Allies in the battle against the Soviet Union, and the general who gives the player's orders in the video sequences is German. In the PC video game War Front: A new chancellor comes to power and under his rule, Operation Sea Lion succeeds and Nazi Germany successfully conquers Britain.

Instead of committing suicide, he was killed by the Assassins. The recent update on the Xbox can have players create avatars that also can resemble Hitler. So far, Microsoft has not banned anyone from using Hitler-like avatars. In the game The Saboteur , excerpts from Hitler's speeches play over loudspeakers throughout a Nazi-occupied Paris during several cutscenes. A conspiracy theory named In-Lakech in Persona 2: Innocent Sin claims that Hitler was smuggled out of Germany by his elite guard, the Last Battalion, and moved to Antarctica.

Furthermore, he wields the Lance of Longinus , referred to as the Spear Of Destiny which the real Adolf Hitler had an interest in possessing , and plans to raise the ship Xibalba from beneath Sumaru City and awaken the Bolontiku, who guided the evolution of apes to man and will guide the evolution of man to the ultimate being, "Idealian".

In EC Comics ' Weird Fantasy 14 story Exile , Earth is revealed to be a penal planet where all people with the "evil" gene are sent and they are transporting their latest prisoner and speculating on his influence on the prison planet just as it is revealed he is Adolf Hitler. DC Comics feature Hitler on several occasions.

In Strange Adventures , in issue 3 December January , there is a story in which Hitler is captured by space aliens just before his attempted suicide. A fake corpse is left for the SS to find. As punishment for Hitler's crimes, he is imprisoned for life alone on a rocket ship which will travel through space until he dies the rocket ship can automatically manufacture its own food for him ; during his waking hours, he is forced to listen to an endless loop recording of all the speeches he has ever made. The character known as the Unknown Soldier , who first appeared in June , kills Hitler, impersonates him for a short time, then pretends his death was a suicide.

Planning to give the clone the same persona as the original, Bedlam gives him a mentally retarded Jewish maid, several films of the Holocaust, and a handgun, Bedlam's intention being for the clone to embrace Nazism and ultimately murder the maid to "prove himself" as Hitler. Instead, the clone—realizing his connection to the atrocities he views— commits suicide.

Now pretending to be a superhero called Dynaman, he plots in resurrecting Nazi ideals with the aid of the Ultra-Humanite. He possessed a magical item, the Spear of Destiny , which gave him control over superpowered beings that entered Nazi territory, an explanation for why the Justice Society of America did not enter Berlin and end the war. He was shown to have helped in the creation of super-strong Arayn supervillain Captain Nazi. He is shown cryogenically frozen by Vandal Savage , who has replaced him as Fuhrer, not just of Germany, but the whole world. He is never named, but the character's identity is unmistakable.

His body ruined, the brain is transplanted to the body of a large gorilla. Suffering amnesia and calling himself Brainiape, the chimera possesses great psionic powers and joins the Chicago, IL criminal organization known as the Vicious Circle , eventually becoming its leader. He remembers his past only in when he encounters Hellboy again, alongside the Vicious Circle's enemy, the meta-talented policeman called Dragon. The ape body is killed, and it is revealed that Hitler's brain had mutated and could live unaided by any technology or host body, ambulatory on tiny legs.

Marvel Comics ' villain Hate-Monger is revealed to be the consciousness of Hitler transferred to a cloned body by Nazi scientist Arnim Zola. The original Hitler, rather than committing suicide, was confronted by the Human Torch and his sidekick Toro after Eva Braun committed suicide. The two heroes set Hitler ablaze as he attempted to set off a bomb. As he died, he commanded one of his loyal followers nearby to tell the world he had committed suicide.

The clone is killed in Fantastic Four 21 when the Invisible Girl makes him hit his own troops with his hate-ray, causing them to shoot him for getting them into a battle with the Fantastic Four. At the time of his death he was planning to start wars using a ray which caused hatred and to which only he possessed the antidote to, having started with a South American country.

He preached ideas of bigotry also while in America. In another story, Hitler is seen in the Hellish realm of the demon Mephisto. In Weird War Tales 58 "Death of a dictator" Hitler kills a raving man dressed in rags before going into suspended animation in the belief history will repeat and he will be able to rebuild the Third Reich. The story ends with our Hitler with long hair being killed in exactly the same manner the raving man dressed in rags was. The final panel reveals that the scientist was all too correct in that history would repeat as our Hitler's killer looks exactly like he did originally and he is going to his suspended animation chamber and these events will replay themselves In the Spanish comic series Hitler , published in Spain by Mercocomic and in France by Elvifrance , Hitler fakes his death by using a double, escapes Germany along with Martin Bormann both disguised as Russian soldiers , then suffers from amnesia and, of all things, becomes an agent of the KGB with the mission of hunting down Nazis.

Later on in the story, he recovers his memory and ends up in an asylum for the mentally disturbed. The strip included a sequence of episodes in which the story's hero Charley and his unit are stationed opposite the regiment of young Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler in December Charley and Hitler fight hand-to-hand in one scene, nearly killing each other. Hitler is portrayed as a somewhat eccentric and scruffy soldier, ill-tempered but brave, albeit selfishly so.

Hitler was mentioned in Hellsing created the Millennium group. Also in Drifters , he founded the Orte Empire. Most if not all cartoons with Hitler and the Nazis as the antagonists ended up with the American hero cartoon character such as Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck making a mockery out of Hitler and his people. Many songs tell a story about Hitler one way or the other, for example "Gotterdammerung" by Stratovarius directly mentions the history of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Bowie has also been quoted saying "Hitler was the first rock star" and, at one time, wanted to direct a film based on the life of Heinrich Himmler.

It tells the story of how Hitler was plagued by paranoia and began to hate the Jewish people and religion. Australian comedy troupe the Doug Anthony Allstars had a song called "Mexican Hitler", which told the story of what Hitler would have been like if he was born Mexican. Antony and the Johnsons have released the song "Hitler in My Heart" on their debut in which the term "Hitler" is generally used as a metaphore for the bad within oneself - likewise in the song "Crack Hitler" by Faith No More from Angel Dust.

Other songs take a more serious approach and deal with Hitler's impact on the world. The song discusses the devastation Hitler caused in Europe. The song discusses Hitler's role in the Holocaust. There are some examples of parodies involving Hitler.

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It is one of his most well-known tunes. Mel Brooks dressed as Hitler sings from behind a desk while male dancers in pants, harnesses and SS caps made of black leather and female dancers in fishnet stockings dance wildly with each other around Hitler on a large dance floor with a checkerboard design. Parodied clips from the film Downfall have proliferated internationally via YouTube and other video sites.

The most frequently used clip is the scene where Hitler receives news of the advancing Red Army vastly outnumbering the forces commanded by Felix Steiner. They are subtitled with references to Hitler becoming angry over various facets of modern pop culture such as politics, online gaming, movies, television, music, sports and many other local or international events.

The phenomenon started in English but has spread to other languages including Japanese massive number of videos on Nico Nico Douga on various topics , Chinese influenced by Japan, comments on Wenzhou train collision and many other sensational topics mainly on Tudou and Youku.

In addition, Hong Kong people used the clip to criticize social events, like Cable TV un-subscription, salt shortage due to misbelief of salt being able to protect from radiation from the Fukushima nuclear disaster , Bulgarian to ridicule Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanov for being a State Security agent during the communist dictatorship and for being a poacher [30] , Romanian for the presidential election , Croatian comments about frequent affairs in the government , Serbian regarding poor results by football team FK Red Star , French about the weather , Spanish about a wide variety of topics mainly related to Argentine and Chilean local events , Indonesian mainly about local politics, presidential elections, cultures, and also everyday life , and Hebrew about the difficulty of finding parking space in Tel Aviv [31].

The Last Ten Days , or even films that have little or nothing to do with Downfall , are also juxtaposed for humorous effect. A trend involving the use of computer-generated imagery or special effects, such as superimposing Hitler's head on various videos, are also starting to become popular. On April 21, , Constantin Film , the production and distribution company responsible for the film, initiated a massive removal of parody videos on YouTube. Godwin's Law states "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one".

From this is derived an additional formulation, also encountered online, which states "The first person to mention the Third Reich automatically loses the argument". Hitler", where he faces Darth Vader portrayed by co-creator Nice Peter in a rap battle. In , in Season two's first episode, "Hitler vs. Auden turned from Marxist politics to Christian commitment, expressed in poems that attractively combine classical form with vernacular relaxedness. Christian belief suffused the verse plays of T. Eliot and Christopher Fry. While Graham Greene continued the powerful merging of thriller plots with studies of moral and psychological ambiguity that he had developed through the s, his Roman Catholicism loomed especially large in novels such as The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair Less-traditional spiritual solace was found in Eastern mysticism by Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood and by Robert Graves , who maintained an impressive output of taut, graceful lyric poetry behind which lay the creed he expressed in The White Goddess , a matriarchal mythology revering the female principle.

Allegory and symbol set wide resonances quivering, so that short books make large statements. Her best-known novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , for example, makes events in a s Edinburgh classroom replicate in miniature the rise of fascism in Europe. The stylized novels of Henry Green , such as Concluding and Nothing , also seem to be precursors of the terse, compressed fiction that Spark and Golding brought to such distinction.

This kind of fiction, it was argued by Iris Murdoch , a philosopher as well as a novelist, ran antiliberal risks in its preference for allegory , pattern, and symbol over the social capaciousness and realistic rendition of character at which the great 19th-century novels excelled.

A Severed Head is the most incisive and entertaining of her elaborately artificial works; The Bell best achieves the psychological and emotional complexity she found so valuable in classic 19th-century fiction. While restricting themselves to socially limited canvases, novelists such as Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor , and Barbara Pym continued the tradition of depicting emotional and psychological nuance that Murdoch felt was dangerously neglected in midth-century novels. In contrast to their wry comedies of sense and sensibility and to the packed parables of Golding and Spark was yet another type of fiction, produced by a group of writers who became known as the Angry Young Men.

From authors such as John Braine , John Wain also a notable poet , Alan Sillitoe , Stan Barstow , and David Storey also a significant dramatist came a spate of novels often ruggedly autobiographical in origin and near documentary in approach. The predominant subject of these books was social mobility , usually from the northern working class to the southern middle class. Satiric watchfulness of social change was also the specialty of Kingsley Amis , whose deriding of the reactionary and pompous in his first novel, Lucky Jim , led to his being labeled an Angry Young Man.

As Amis grew older, though, his irascibility vehemently swiveled toward left-wing and progressive targets, and he established himself as a Tory satirist in the vein of Waugh or Powell. Thoughtfulness about the form of the novel and relationships between past and present fiction showed itself most stimulatingly in the works—generally campus novels—of the academically based novelists Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. From the late s onward, the outstanding trend in fiction was enthrallment with empire.

The first phase of this focused on imperial disillusion and dissolution. Three half-satiric, half-elegiac novels by J. Then, in the s, postcolonial voices made themselves audible. The Satanic Verses was understood differently in the Islamic world , to the extent that the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa, in effect a death sentence [later suspended], on Rushdie.

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Nor was India alone in inspiring vigorous postcolonial writing. Particularly notable is An Insular Possession , which vividly harks back to the founding of Hong Kong. Naipaul in his most ambitious novel, A Bend in the River Naipaul also chronicled aftermaths of empire around the globe and particularly in his native Caribbean. Nearer England, the strife in Northern Ireland provoked fictional response, among which the bleak, graceful novels and short stories of William Trevor and Bernard MacLaverty stand out. Money is the most effectively focused of his books. The most gifted exponent of this kind of writing, which sought immediate access to the realm of the subconscious, was Angela Carter , whose exotic and erotic imagination unrolled most eerily and resplendently in her short-story collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories Jeanette Winterson also wrote in this vein.

Having distinguished herself earlier in a realistic mode, as did authors such as Drabble and Pat Barker, Doris Lessing published a sequence of science fiction novels about issues of gender and colonialism, Canopus in Argos—Archives — As the end of the century approached, an urge to look back—at starting points, previous eras, fictional prototypes—was widely evident. The historical novel enjoyed an exceptional heyday. Beryl Bainbridge , who began her fiction career as a writer of quirky black comedies about northern provincial life, turned her attention to Victorian and Edwardian misadventures: Many novels juxtaposed a present-day narrative with one set in the past.

It also made extensive use of period pastiche, another enthusiasm of novelists toward the end of the 20th century. In addition to the interest in remote and recent history, a concern with tracing aftereffects became dominatingly present in fiction. Most subtly and powerfully exhibiting this, Ian McEwan —who came to notice in the s as an unnervingly emotionless observer of contemporary decadence—grew into imaginative maturity with novels set largely in Berlin in the s The Innocent [] and in Europe in Black Dogs [].

These repercussions are also felt in Last Orders , a masterpiece of quiet authenticity by Graham Swift , a novelist who, since his acclaimed Waterland , showed himself to be acutely responsive to the atmosphere of retrospect and of concern with the consequences of the past that suffused English fiction as the second millennium neared.

In its place emerged what came to be known with characteristic understatement as The Movement. Poets such as D. The preeminent practitioner of this style was Philip Larkin , who had earlier displayed some of its qualities in two novels: Jill and A Girl in Winter In contrast to the rueful traditionalism of their work is the poetry of Ted Hughes , who succeeded Betjeman as poet laureate — In extraordinarily vigorous verse, beginning with his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain , Hughes captured the ferocity, vitality, and splendour of the natural world.

It also shows a deep receptivity to the way the contemporary world is underlain by strata of history.