A Time to Teach and a Time to Kick Then in their Teeth

Many of you are still mad at me that I make no quarter for Holocaust deniers, thinking that what these folks need is just good plain patience and reasoning, someone sitting down and holding their hands and explaining to them calmly and serenely that the Holocaust happened, and that it was not the fault of the Jews.

Maybe this will help explain my position.  It's from an email I sent to a Facebook friend.

There is at the root of antisemistism something that's not able to be educated, in my opinion. When a Facebook commenter says, "The Jews elected every president since WWII and the Jews assassinated JFK," there's nothing to say to "educate" that man except addressing the demon he's dancing with, "Get thee behind me, Satan." 

Take yesterday. I'm on the fence on gun control. But three anti-gun-control commenters said the following:

1. Gun control is a violation of the Tenth Commandment, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods."

2. The state has no authority to regulate arms because the state owns nukes.

3. "No pencil pusher is gonna tell me what my self-defense needs are."

Now at one point I was naive enough to think such clowns could be educated, that if we took the time we could show them the errors of their ways. But this is the internet and they are just idiots.

There is good faith and bad faith. When Paul says "the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith", he is saying at least that without a good faith effort to approach an issue, no deeper faith can get in. 

This does not mean that people of good faith should not be educated. However, when it comes to the bigots who are willful bigots, well, if they resist education, shake the dust off your feet as a witness against them and move on.

Could I be wrong about this?  Of course, but I've been on the internet enough now to spot red flags when I see them.

Take today on Facebook.  A friend is hailing the book Silence, which is about Catholics in Japan.  A commenter gets offended and says the book is horrible and anything but Catholic.  Intrigued, and having not read the book, I ask for reasons why the book is not Catholic in this commenter's opinion.  He says it's because the main character "apostasizes" (renounces the Faith).  "In what way does he apostasize?" I ask.

"He apostasizes apostasizes," he answers.  "I'm not going to discuss this with you further."

Well, after a few hours, other commenters noted that the main character is forced to apostosize under severe and unrelenting torture of himself and his friends.

So he hardly "apostasizes apostasizes" - in fact such a forced recantation might not be apostasy at all.

But I saw this guy waving the red flag, the red flag of "All depictions of sin are in themselves sinful!" and so I egged him on, and in his impatience and defensiveness he revealed that I was right.

At any rate, dear readers, I admit my response to some of these people and issues may strike you as judgmental and harsh, but only good faith should be met by good faith.

Bad faith should be met by moving on.

More from Facebook

I swear I am not making this up.

A Facebook friend who refers to the Holocaust as "a historical CLAIM" said the following to me.

X:  How can you say I am an anti-semite?  What do you mean by "Jew"?  What do you mean by "anti-semite"?

KEVIN:  Someone told me that you believe that Obama won the election because the Jews wanted him to.  If that's true, what do you mean by "Jew"?

X:  Not a single president since WWII has won for any other reason.  (inserts link to a website that blames the Jews for the Holocaust)

KEVIN:  Do you want to take your comment and link down?  I won't, as it proves my point, but it's making you look pretty bad, so you might want to.

X:  I can believe in unicorns if I want to, can't I? So what if I say JFK was shot by the Massad? That's the freedom we have and enjoy by the blood shed by so many...

In other words, the Jews elected Kennedy and then the Jewish secret police assassinated Kennedy.

You can't make this stuff up.

Oh, and Mr. X is a rad trad Catholic.  And yet all of my rad trad friends are telling me, "I have never met a Jew hater among Catholic traditionalists."  Well, that's the ONLY PLACE I meet them.

 

 

 

It's the Deniers of This who Hate Pope Francis

From Wikipedia ...

In 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, anticipated that someday an attempt would be made to recharacterize the Nazi crimes as propaganda and took steps against it:

The same day^[18] I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never been able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain however, that I have never at any time experienced an equal sense of shock.

I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that "the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda". Some members of the visiting party were unable to go through with the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton's headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and the British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.^[19]

Eisenhower, upon finding the victims of the death camps, ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead. He wrote the following to General Marshall after visiting a German internment camp near Gotha, Germany:

The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said that he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to "propaganda."

Turning the Other Cheek is an Act of Mercy

Have you ever noticed that we can't hurt someone or do an injustice to someone without vilifying that person first?  We can't do a dirty deed unless we've rationalized it.  Part of the witness of Christ Himself was His "passive resistance" at His trial.  By allowing us to do what we did to Him, He showed us our sins and shamed us.  Had He resisted, we would have said, "Well, this man deserves it!  Listen to how he spoke to the High Priest!  Look at how angry he got!  Listen to how he curses us from the cross!  Look at how he spits back when we spit on him!"

But in accepting His persecution and in suffering willingly and for the most part silently - indeed in praying for us as we tortured and killed Him -  He prevented us from convincing ourselves that we were in the right - or at least He inserted a lingering doubt.  And as we jeered Him, maybe one or two of us felt a touch of shame.

Thus "resist not evil" and "turn the other cheek" is really an act of mercy toward the aggressor - it not only keeps you from losing yourself to wrath and giving in to the lust for vengeance, it keeps your enemy from the handy trick of convincing himself that he's justified in hating you and hurting you.  Turning the other cheek is more for his sake than for yours.