"I still see nothing in the five principals you cite that would prevent a sovereign nation from protecting it's self interest by killing all who are perceived as a threat to it's collective survival and pursuit of happiness."
What do you want? Do you want another principle saying the angel of God will stop people from doing such and such? That would simply be a lie. Rational self interest (in a secular society) only involves killing others in self defense. In a fanatical society it might involve killing others because they are from a different tribe or because they won't "convert".
"OTOH you have provided nothing to show that genocide is in any way consistent with Christ's teachings"
This is another straw man from you. I simply posted some web links in response to your silly "news flash". But for your information:
The bible is full of genocide. Genocide was supported by God and it was commanded by God and it was conducted by God. And who is God according to the Christian myth?
"The fact that Hitler would use religious allusions to justify his evil is not new"
No, it certainly isn't. The Inquisition comes to mind...
The church has already admitted guilt (over and over again) for centuries of anti-semitism and for complicity in the holocaust. So stop whistling in the dark. The cat has been out of the bag for sixty years. Passionate hate is not a genetic implant. Luther did not have a passionate hatred of Jews because of a wild gene.
"Three main factors shaped the behavior of the Christian Churches during the Nazi reign of terror in Germany and abroad. The first was the theological and doctrinal anti-Judaism that existed in parts of the Christian tradition. (Long before 1933, the anti-Judaism that existed within the Churches -- ranging from latent prejudice to the virulent diatribes of people like Martin Luther -- lent legitimacy to the racial anti-Semitism that emerged in the late nineteenth century.) The second factor was the Churches' historical role in creating "Christendom" -- the Western European culture that, since the era of the Roman emperor Constantine, had been explicitly and deliberately "Christian." The Churches' advocacy of a "Christian culture" led to a "sacralization of cultural identity" (as the theologian Miroslav Volf puts it), in which dominant, positive values were seen as "Christian" ones, while developments viewed negatively (such as secularism and Marxism) were attributed to "Jewish" influences"
adl.org
"...Churches throughout the world began to address their failures after 1945. Confessions of guilt have been issued by Catholic Churches in France and Germany, and most major Protestant denominations, beginning with the German Evangelical Church's Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in August 1945 (three months after the war in Europe ended). The early statements were vague, often referring only to the Churches' general lack of decisiveness in opposing Nazism. More recently, however, the Christian Churches have been far more specific -- recognizing that they not only failed to resist Nazism, but actually helped prepare the way for the mass destruction of Europe's Jews through centuries of proselytization, attacks on Judaism, and tacit or overt support for pogroms and other anti-Jewish violence.
These admissions of guilt are part of a difficult process, which still continues, in which Christians try to grasp exactly what happened to their Churches during the Holocaust. The examinations raise a number of questions: Were the Churches, by and large, passive while millions of innocent people were murdered? To what extent can we say they resisted? To what extent were they guilty of active complicity? Most importantly: Why did the Churches respond as they did? These are, obviously, complex questions, historically and theologically.
Factors Shaping Behavior of Christian Churches
Three main factors shaped the behavior of the Christian Churches during the Nazi reign of terror in Germany and abroad. The first was the theological and doctrinal anti-Judaism that existed in parts of the Christian tradition. (Long before 1933, the anti-Judaism that existed within the Churches -- ranging from latent prejudice to the virulent diatribes of people like Martin Luther -- lent legitimacy to the racial anti-Semitism that emerged in the late nineteenth century.) The second factor was the Churches' historical role in creating "Christendom" -- the Western European culture that, since the era of the Roman emperor Constantine, had been explicitly and deliberately "Christian." The Churches' advocacy of a "Christian culture" led to a "sacralization of cultural identity" (as the theologian Miroslav Volf puts it), in which dominant, positive values were seen as "Christian" ones, while developments viewed negatively (such as secularism and Marxism) were attributed to "Jewish" influences. Moreover, particularly in the German Evangelical Church (the largest Protestant Church in Germany), the allegiance to the concept of Christendom was linked to a strong nationalism, symbolized by German Protestantism's "Throne and Altar" alliance with state authority..." |
