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[bèlla]

Oh, how I wish you were right. That would mean there were limits that normal people would not cross.

i have no interest in harming anyone nor do I contemplate things along those lines. But if you trespass me or the ones I love I will make you pay and won’t repent. Otherwise, I have no reason to do so.

Yet Hitler had no lack of those willing to participate in the Holocaust, and of those very few,

I have zero interest in killing people for the sake of sport.

Disturbing? Very much so, because it means average people are capable of monstrous things. But history has already shown this, over and over. As we're told in Jeremiah 17:9:

There are situations which may drive one to the point where torture is appealing but outside of those events it has no appeal.

At most we can hope and pray we'd never commit such evil, but unfortunately even great evil can be seen as a casual thing by the person who does it.

I needn’t hope and my reasons are sure. I wouldn’t reach that point for another save the ones I love.

~bella

 

[public hermit]

Oh, how I wish you were right. That would mean there were limits that normal people would not cross. Yet Hitler had no lack of those willing to participate in the Holocaust, and of those very few, if any, were clinically insane. A post-WWII psychological study was released or made public in the 1970s, and it showed no difference between Nazis and the average Westerner. The long defunct Science Digest had a short article about it with the words "...just plain folks.." in the title. That's where I first learned of it. As evil as the Holocaust was, most of the participants were psychologically average people.

Disturbing? Very much so, because it means average people are capable of monstrous things. But history has already shown this, over and over. As we're told in Jeremiah 17:9:

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?"

I thought it was C.S. Lewis who created the term "the banality of evil," but it turns out it was Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Six psychologists examined Eichmann and came away with the conclusion that he was average, without any mental illness. It was a psychologically average person who was one of the organizers of the Holocaust.

At most we can hope and pray we'd never commit such evil, but unfortunately even great evil can be seen as a casual thing by the person who does it.

Right, the banality of evil is just normal people going along with the flow and the cliches of the day, doing their job, obeying some kind of authority. Eichmann didn't think, he just repeated the jargon and ideas of his day. "Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a "monster," but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown." Hannah Arendt

Eichmann in Jerusalem - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[FireDragon76]

No we shouldn’t keep that in mind nor are most willing to do what he did. We may defend our loved ones from harm and respond in kind. But the majority don’t have the stomach for killing large groups of people or torturing them either. You’d need a thirst for sadism to do so.

~bella

Hannah Arendt talked about the banality of evil. The scary part of Nazi Germany was how otherwise recognizably ordinary Nazis were, only different from others in terms of ideology and dedication. Most Nazis believed in carrying out their extermination program in a programmatic way, like a ledger book or spreadsheet (indeed, primitive computers were even enlisted in their extermination program). This allowed them to distance themselves from the reality of what they were doing. Some were genuinely horrified by seeing violence up close, but often turned to drugs or alcohol to numb the cognitive dissonance. On the Eastern Front, some young soldiers in the Einzatzgruppen even committed suicide due to the moral injury they sustained "just following orders".

 

[bèlla]

Hannah Arendt talked about the banality of evil. The scary part of Nazi Germany was how otherwise recognizably ordinary Nazis were, only different from others in terms of ideology and dedication. they sustained "just following orders".

I think christians spend a lot of time in their heads about unimportant topics while neglecting what’s pertinent.

Give me a sensible person who loves the Lord, knows why they’re here and living with that in mind. And if given the choice that’s the one I’ll save. Not the dreamer, idealist, radical or extremist. But the one committed to their purpose whose fruit is evident.

~bella

 

[rebornfree]

Source: Joel Webbon Hopes The World Will Soon Learn To 'Humanize' Hitler

He obviously doesn't know about the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ! Or that God gives mankind freewill. In fact, does he know the gospel at all?

 

[chevyontheriver]

No we shouldn’t keep that in mind nor are most willing to do what he did. We may defend our loved ones from harm and respond in kind. But the majority don’t have the stomach for killing large groups of people or torturing them either. You’d need a thirst for sadism to do so.

~bella

The stomach for killing is easily developed. Hitler was probably a sensitive boy who would not swat a fly. But he sure got over it.

 

[chevyontheriver]

Hannah Arendt talked about the banality of evil. The scary part of Nazi Germany was how otherwise recognizably ordinary Nazis were, only different from others in terms of ideology and dedication.

The Stanley Milgram experiments showed how easy it was for 'good' people to do terrible things mostly because they were told to.

 

[ViaCrucis]

No we shouldn’t keep that in mind nor are most willing to do what he did. We may defend our loved ones from harm and respond in kind. But the majority don’t have the stomach for killing large groups of people or torturing them either. You’d need a thirst for sadism to do so.

~bella

And what breeds a thirst for sadism? What factors are involved that warp a mind to the point of embracing the kind of evil Hitler embraced? It doesn't happen in a vacuum. Hitler didn't come out of the womb already the worst monster of the 20th century, he became that.

When I look around me in the world, do I see a lot of decent people? I see LOTS of good and decent people. I also see a LOT of people who justify all kinds of awful things. And here's the terrifying part: I see lots of good and decent people make moral compromises. On some level, we all do that, it may be something tiny, something almost insignificant--but each and every one of us has justified a negative thought, a dark impulse, a venomous word spoken in anger.

Nobody is born an Adolf Hitler. Hitlers are made, not conceived.

Yes, Hitler is an anomaly--not because Hitler is something other than human; but because all the dark impulses present in human beings was shaped, molded, and given a platform of power. In another age, Hitler may have been your plumber who happens to be a bigot. In another place, Hitler may have just been a racist internet troll.

We must all, all of us, be vigilant in holding back the monster. Because the monster is us. Human beings murder human beings; human beings exploit, rape, kill, oppress. The hurricane isn't a monster, the pack of wolves aren't monsters, not even the Bubonic Plague is a monster. Monsters aren't other, they're us.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[ViaCrucis]

I have zero interest in killing people for the sake of sport.

Neither do most people who do evil abominable things. When Joel Webbon says "Christians must recover the lost virtue of Hatred" (yes, he said that) do you imagine he says that thinking "Yes, I am an evil person, advocating for evil, and gosh darn I love being evil". Because I can probably guarantee, with a pretty good degree of certainty, that in his own mind he thinks what he is advocating is good, righteous, and right.

Do we imagine the people who have gone into public places and committed mass killings always think, "I am bad, and I like being bad"--I just don't think that's what usually happens. Are there people who may think that way? Sure, mental illness comes in a lot of forms. But I just don't think most people who do truly awful things think of themselves as "bad people", and that what they are doing is "just for fun". They do these things because they believe themselves to be doing the right thing.

Do we imagine that the ancient Romans, when they arrested and put Christians to death, did so because they saw themselves as evil and just enjoyed being evil and killing people for fun? Because we have the records, the reports, the words of those who condemned and killed Christians--and pretty consistently they believed that their actions were just, right, good--they were defending the Roman way of life, they were protecting Roman civilization. They believed that Christians were an existential threat, and that the gods would show their disfavor to Rome if Christians weren't dealt with; the charges made against Christians were that Christians were "atheists", that Christians were "haters of mankind". They put Christians to death because they believed Christians were undermining the values and virtues of Rome, they were a genuine threat against Caesar's legitimate lordship, they had to either recant or die, because to let them keep being would mean, at best, a loss of Roman family and social values that kept everything held together; at worst the ire of the gods would result in a loss of the gods blessing and favor--that could spell disaster, calamity, an end of the world as they knew it.

A lot of that should sound very familiar.

People don't wake up one day sporting a pair of horns and a forked tail. They are going about their lives, raising children, going to work, shopping in the market--and they also happen to think that Jews/Muslims/Christians/Black people/homosexuals/Asians/immigrants/fill-in-the-blank-here are dangerous, evil, going to destroy civilization, and so must be dealt with, harshly, in order to preserve civilization.

Because here is the entire Webbon quote I referenced earlier:

"Christians must recover the lost virtue of hatred. If not Christianity will survive, but the West will be finished."

-CryptoLutheran

 

[Tuur]

God loves each and every one of us so much that God the Son died on the cross that we might be saved. Yet God hates sin. That gets into love the sinner but hate the sin. We can easily confuse to two, so much that we hate the sinner even though we ourselves are sinners, too. Yet in loving the sinner we can also mistake the two, and smile and nod and give sin a pass. Yet God, who loves us so much that He sent His only begotten Son to die on the cross to pay the price for our sins hates the sin that we do.

I don't know if that's what Webbon means and honestly don't care. I do know that while God loves us, He hates sin. If we hate the sinner, we need to remember God loves sinners so much that God the Son died to save us. But if we wink at sin, we need to remember that our salvation cost the life of God the Son through an excruciating death. To wink at sin cheapens the blood of Christ.

 

[JustaPewFiller]

Hmmm....

Maybe I'm just seeing it differently and I Webbon himself does talk about Hitler a lot in the article.

But, when I read what Webbon wants his world to look like, I didn't think of Hitler at all.

Lets take another look what he wants.

Under his preferred form of Christian nationalist theocracy, Webbon wants to see the Apostles’ Creed added to the Constitution; abortion, pornography, no-fault divorce, in vitro fertilization, and birth control outlawed; non-Christians kept out of his neighborhood and out of public office; Catholics relegated to second-class citizenship; immigrants shot for trying to enter the country; adulterers put to death; women banned from voting and publicly executed for making false claims of sexual assault; and the government used to "absolutely terrorize" his political enemies.

We don't have to go all the way back to Hitler to see something like that. We can see a system very similar to that today if we go to the other side of the world.

To me, what he describes sounds very similar to the system the Taliban has implemented in Afghanistan. You could take the current Taliban regime, replace Islam with Christianity and replace the robes with conservative western attire and you would have pretty much spot-on what Webbon wants.

I think a Taliban comparison is more spot-on than a Hitler comparison.