Yet, this tendency is not just public or limited to grand policy. Human beings tend to defend their own goodness and righteousness when confronted with the horrors beings commit. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, except when it creates blinders that prevent us from sharing the human lot with those benighted evildoers among us. We congratulate ourselves on our own goodness to our peril, however, because inside all of us is a horrible monster creaming and slavering to be released.
On this thread over at ER's blog is the following comment that wonderfully summarizes the view that some of us human beings are more equal than others (the reference to Cologne Cathedral concerns the fact that it was spared, not out of reverence, but practicality because pilots used it as a navigation reference):
I tend to consider that it takes all kinds to make a world, and unfortunately some of those kinds really suck. Do you count yourself amongst those who refuse to identify evil when they see it? I do not identify myself as being the same as evildoers. Thus, I feel no shame for being a human being. That one point alone just is.(emphasis added)
I forget the dastardly deeds of the Crusaders until someone deems it necessary to bring it up again, and usually to put forth some moral equivalency between Christianity and other religions or ideologies.(emphasis added)
Is it possible that the Cologne Cathedral was spared for both reasons? That is, maybe they preferred to spare such places and then realized that it's military value helps seal the deal. I'll go with that until proved wrong. You can believe there is no honor within anyone in the military if that's where you're leaning.
"Human beings can never kill each other without killing God."
That may be true. But I suspect God is able to distinguish between the intention behind a murderous suicide bomber and the intention behind a soldier or cop defending a civilian. It takes a human to infer there's no difference.(emphasis added)
The first highlighted point speaks for itself - the wonderful declaration of the self-righteousness of the good.
The second is a strange notion. How can there not be a moral equivalence between Christianity and other religions? The greatest theologian of the 20th century, Karl Barth, spent hundreds of pages in the thousands of pages of his multi-volume Church Dogmatics piercing the bubble of self-satisfaction of Christians, lulled in to unreality by a sense of their own superiority. Barth was at pains to point out that the church in all its various forms was as sinful an institution as any other (a point America's own Reinhold Niebuhr was making in a different way and in a different context at about the same time) and we forget this to our peril. Barth was a witness to the degradation of the church at the hands of the Nazis, and mourned the fact that Christian triumphalism had played a part in the demonic self-destruction of the Church in Germany.
As to the last highlighted comment, all I can say is that the commenter introduces an idea that I had never thought of before - that he and he alone understands the mind of God when it comes to discerning the moral worth of human actions. Apparently, killing those in need of killing is fine with God, and the commenter. If this person truly believes this, and worships this God, I want no part of god at all, because his god is a monster willing to sacrifice human lives for some illusion called goodness.
Of course, we could respond by pointing out the idea of sin. I know this is a word that irritates people, but it does serve the useful function of reminding us that, as human beings, we share certain defects with the worst among us. We could remind the commenter that the imputation of goodness and righteousness comes through grace, not through anything we do, or think of doing, or through our intentions or will or anything else. We could remind the commenter that, in the end, whether we are Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacey, or Geoffrey Kruse-Safford, we all stand at the foot of the cross, accused, tried, and convicted. This does not free us from the necessity of judging the actions of others; it is, or should be, a brake upon our own smug sense of our own inherent worth, however.
The temptation to view ourselves as good, especially in the face of monstrous evil is only human, and perfectly understandable. The trick is to not fall in to that trap. The cure for evil is not goodness, but a recognition of our own participation in evil actions, and prayer that we can do better, recognizing that, of course, we will fail. One of the best ways to cure the Manichaean impulse is to flatten out the distinction between the good "us" and the evil "them" and to see all of us as human beings.
