Then you are cherry picking and we must agree to disagree.
Not cherry picking, but discriminating between sins. Genocide is qualitatively and quantitatively much worse than adultery, though both proceed out the same detachment from a relationship with our Creator. Let me remind myself here that I’m not a theologian, but just a guy in a room with a computer…
At any time and place where atrocities and injustice abound, there are people who stand fast and draw a line. Your implicit contention is that it’s people of “true faith” that resist. My contention is that it’s people who put principle and personal ethics above personal safety and when you adjust for revisionist bias, religion doesn’t fare too well.
All true morality originates in God. It is possible for man alone to construct a moral framework. The communists did a pretty good job of being thoughtful of the workers who were being smashed by the industrial revolution. In the end, though, because of their detachment from God’s morality, they became monsters who used workers as badly as the capitalists did… maybe worse. Meantime, capitalist societies developed new structures that protected people, something that Marx and his students didn’t foresee. These capitalist societies were founded upon the Judeo-Christian ethic. The communist societies specifically rejected that ethic, and in fact set about persecuting it, trying to wipe it out. There’s a connection.
Nobody does anything under the influence of alcohol or religion that he or she isn’t prone to doing sober or with a mind uncontaminated by religious teachings.
I think that is true. Catholicism teaches that man cannot choose true evil, but only a lesser good. The nature of sin is that man chooses to do things that, while not evil in and of themselves, are less than the ultimate good that God has in store for us if we will “seek Him first.”
Not nearly as unique as you might believe. Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are not exactly shining examples, are they? Yet again, we’ll have to agree to disagree.
We probably don’t disagree as to the nature of the so-called War on Terror. I am alarmed by things that have been going on the past few years. I am further alarmed that the Christian (primarily evangelical/Protestant, but some Catholic as well) “community” in the U.S. seems to be on the cheerleader side of this. But, I have faith that true religion will ultimately bring its opinion to bear and bring us back. Defeat has a way of tempering behavior, as the Germans and Japanese learned a half-century ago. The Catholic Church at the hierarchical level has been preaching against many aspects of this WoT thing all along. I imagine you’d find some common ground with us on this.
I have my own sources about the Allied Occupation, thank you very much. I doubt you can trump face to face conversations with plenty of Germans who lived through it.
Speaking of eyewitness accounts, there is an excellent book about the collapse of the German resistance after D-Day:
Armageddon, by Max Hastings. Very even-handed to both sides, and based largely on attributed eyewitness descriptions. As I recall there is discussion of the German POW issue you brought up.
Getting blown up by bombs or shot is worse than the systematic and intentional starvation and deprivation? I don’t think so. And yet again, we’ll have to agree to disagree.
Sure it is worse. In the final weeks of the war, as German armed forces folded in, they were being massacred. By this time, most of these young men were literally children. Most of the true believers were already dead or captured. As a general rule, Soviets were taking few prisoners, and as a general rule, Americans and Brits who, knowing the war was almost over and not wanting to be the last casualty, were taking no chances. They blew up everything and everyone that even hinted at being enemy. The skies over Germany were filled with hungry fighter pilots looking for targets, all of which had already been bombed and strafed several times before. There was no distinguishing between enemy and refugee by the strafers. Anything moving on the ground was shot up and blown up. There were no strategic targets left after mid-1944, so Bomber Command and the 8th Air Force were going back over the rubble, just to stay busy.
I have no hesitation in saying that those young Germans rounded up behind barbed wire for a few weeks after hostilities came to an end, were in FAR better and safer shape than they would have been absent a surrender.
