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Hi cnorman18. I've been reading your posts for a minute. I don't know any Jews, and it's been pretty interesting to learn about all things Jewish from you. I haven't ever posted in this board because I usually don't have much to add to the discussion, but it often makes for interesting reading.
Anyway, I can attempt to understand, but probably don't fully, why reading some stuff from an anti-semite can anger a Jew and posting something like that...well I don't blame you. Those people are bad guys, end of story, and being angry with them is normal for me as a non-Jew. I couldn't really begin to understand what a Jew would think.
But I think it's a little over the line and misdirected, especially the bit about I had nothing to do with that being the wrong answer. That's a gross oversimplification, and I'll tell you why:
Me myself, I'm mostly German, a smattering of other white backgrounds, and part American Indian, who came to the US before the Civil War, never owned a slave, and fought for the North. One set of my grandparents were the types of not really into church and all that Catholics that got a divorce and both remarried, while the other set was and still is mad devout Catholics, and all three of my grandfathers fought in WWII. I'm of the "don't really care"-ism religion, but my ma and my grandma and my wife all is, my whole ancestry as far as I can figure is and was some form of Christian. My daughter probably will be too, and that's cool with me. Or maybe she won't. Anyway, my wife is half Mexican, and half Polish, which, incidentally, both of her Grandparents fled Poland around the time the Nazis came around, but they are/were Catholic and both blind, so they'd have gotten it from the Nazis just the same regardless of religion. And that's just what I could figure out, I don't even know about the majority of my family.
See what I mean? If you want to be bringing up things that didn't even happen in my lifetime, where do I even start? I'd have to apologize to myself, who I'm not even mad at, for driving myself off my own land. My daughter's got all kinds of reasons to be mad at herself for being a Polish German who fled from herself into land she stole from herself in both New York and Texas...?
That's a bit ridiculous, no?
I mean, what you're asking here is for me, when the day comes I have to explain this stuff to her, that she should feel bad about the Holocaust and all that other stuff she had nothing to do with. I'm not going to tell her that, and I'm not personally going to feel bad either.
Maybe I missed the point, but that's what I got out of it.
Thanks for your comments. You're not the only respondent, as you see, who has made these observations, so let me try to break it down.
"Does any individual Christian living today bear either direct or indirect responsibility for the Holocaust?"
No.
"Does Christianity as an institution?"
Yes.
"Why?"
Because the same doctrines and attitudes that led to and provided reasons for, not only the Holocaust, but the innumerable other atrocities inflicted upon Jews through the centuries, are still being taught and tolerated, and that connection remains unacknowledged.
"Should individual Christians be made aware of these facts and asked to confront them?"
Yes.
"Why?"
So that the Church can collectively take responsibility for the results of these teachings and attitudes and discard or change them.
"But you indicated that, at least sometimes, individual Christians
are guilty in some way."
When they themselves exhibit those same attitudes and beliefs, and speak to Jews from an assumed position of moral and spiritial superiority--or when they tolerate or ignore blatant, murderous hatred and vicious falsehoods being openly expressed in their midst--personal guilt is beyond doubt, and ought to be called by its proper name and confronted.
Have you absorbed those attitudes, or do you hold those beliefs? It would appear not. Would you stand by silently in the face of open bigotry? That I cannot answer, but I would hope not. I certainly have no warrant to assume that you would.
Given all that, what guilt would apply to you here? You have concluded "None," and with that I would agree.
If I have only given you, and others, something to think about--well, I had no other goal; and I had that goal more on the other forum, most certainly, than here.
Atheists do not have the blind spots and assumptions of holiness and superiority that
some Christians clearly do; and from what I have seen, they are more inclined to stand up for justice and truth than to support their opposites. Indeed, a dedication to truth and an opposition to lies are the very foundations of skepticism and atheism, are they not?
