Character and Impact

Click to see the physiology/sociology/psychology path.  Cross reference that with what you know.

Walking down main street with my dad, we were talking about good and bad people. We happened to be in front of the bank, so dad said, "What if a fellow walking by here has to fight for all he's worth to NOT rob the bank; it's hard, but he manages. Among us, which is the hero?"

No two of us are the same, of course. No two are equally equipped, no two are equally complete or prepared, equally weak or strong. Every encounter is unique. We get to choose, but even that labor is ours alone.

It's worth the labor to understand that I and my  adversary have arrived here by different paths.  It's likely that neither was a perfectly noble journey, and equally likely that there were perhaps moments of magnificence for both.  

There's probably a reason he told us that.

Shall I then judge the one with whom I might walk as somehow inferior because he hasn't seen what I've seen and reached the same conclusions?   

We can ignore this concept and move on, of course.  And waste a few more years before we consider it again.  We do that.  It's a shame, but we do.  We make excuses and stay angry ... or we make progress and change.

Revelation or Regulation

Why would anyone go visit a church?  What would bring someone to a place like that?

The youth are perhaps more likely to get it and be changed.

I sometimes think maybe people visit churches because they want to get things right.  They want to learn how to have a good heart, find a connection with God and walk with Him and his family instead of on their own, alone.

The church can help with that.  Encounters with God in worship and in real truth are stunning, heart and mind changing.  The church can hinder that, too, if it begins with rules and conformance and requirements.  That's just religion.

Revelatory or Regulatory?  What kind of help do folks need?

The job of the church is perhaps most importantly to encourage and facilitate a relationship with God our Father.  Unveiling the truths and goodness of God and introducing folks to Him, that's the good the church can do.

Muslim and Christian with their
respective symbols, united.

Christian protesters shield praying Muslims in Nigeria.

Muslims similarly stand guard around Christian Churches.

When a religious institution goes beyond facilitating that relationship and begins focusing primarily on rules, it is no longer a church, really, it's more like a private club.  And it's an exclusive 'us and them' sort of arrangement.  "All of us are going to heaven, but you guys are on the outside because you don't believe the right way or you don't worship the right way.  Or you sprinkled instead of dunking."

(Just last week, a sweet lady told us, she had visited a church in her new city.  During prayer with her eyes closed, she had lifted her hands ... and the ushers escorted her out.  She wept.)

Folks come needing revelation not regulation.  They come with wondering hearts, hungry to know Him truly.  They don't need to be told what to believe or how to behave.  They need to find and know the truth for themselves, to discover what they can believe genuinely and follow truly, not just parroting someone's formula.

Kampala, Uganda - The young people understand ...

The 'real thing' is much bigger than Sunday morning church attendance, by the way.  Perhaps culturally a bit volatile as well.

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Sometimes faith turns into religion. Devotion becomes obligation, and suddenly you feel like you’re just going through the motions. Know what I mean?

Desensitization

He was a fighter pilot, a champion fencer, an

accomplished violinist... and a fanatical Nazi.

Reinhard Haydrich planned and conducted

mass executions in WWII.  
Historians regard him as the darkest figure

within the Nazi elite. Hitler described him as
"the man with the iron heart". He was the
founding head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD),
an intelligence organisation charged with
seeking out and neutralizing resistance to
the Nazi Party via arrests, deportations, and
killings. He helped organize Kristallnacht,

a series of coordinated attacks against Jews

throughout Nazi Germany and parts of 

Austria on 9–10 November 1938.

The attacks, carried out by SA stormtroopers

and civilians, presaged the Holocaust. Upon

his arrival in Prague, Heydrich sought to

eliminate opposition to the Nazi occupation

by suppressing Czech culture and deporting

and executing members of the Czech 

resistance.  He was directly responsible for

the Einsatzgruppen, the special task forces

that traveled in the wake of the German

armies to round up and kill Jews and others

deemed undesirable by the regime.

Haydrich was assassinated by the Czech

resistance in 1942.

(NC-17 Subject and Content)
The voice of the people has an impact, and public resistance can interfere with national plans.  How leadership responds, though, can be problematic.

Portrayed as a mercy death for the suffering, the German euthanasia program killed 70,000 beginning in 1939. Targeting the disabled and incurable, children and adults were killed.  Hitler's attempt to purify the race raised troublesome public resistance; the Catholic church openly opposed the policy.  The program supposedly ended in 1941, but another 200,000 victims followed. (ref) (ref)

It was presented to the public as a merciful deliverance from suffering.  Little if any of the killing, however, was done to alleviate pain or suffering on the part of the victims. The bulk of the evidence, including faked death certificates, deception of the victims and of the victims families, and widespread use of cremation, indicates the killing was done solely according to the socio-political aims and beliefs of the perpetrators. [ref]

The Nazis portrayed Germany as a targeted victim of foreign aggressors, as a peace-loving nation forced to take up arms to protect its populace, to defend Europe against Communism. The war aims professed at each stage almost always disguised the actual Nazi intentions of expansion and racial warfare. This was propaganda of deception, designed to desensitize or misdirect the German civilians and the international community.

Illustration from a children's book.  The
headlines say "Jews are our misfortune"
and "How the Jew cheats." Germany, 1936.

Hitler's Aryan purification plans continued.  With deliberate portrayal of Jews in the media as 'racially inferior', simple animals with behavior akin to 'rats' in a marketplace. Public opinion in Hitler's Germany eventually bent toward favoring separation of some sort.  Hitler, having learned his lesson from the outcry caused by his euthanasia project, worked through the media and kept the truth hidden from the public.  

The later campaign to rid Germany of Jews was disguised as a re-settlement program with nice passenger trains for the folks departing.  It seemed good to the victims, moving away from the discriminatory environment where they'd lost their common rights as citizens.  The slaughter happened outside the country and behind the scenes. 

Jewish women and children before being shot
by the SD. A beach near Liepaja in Latvia, 
15 December 1941.

Initially, only a few knew what was happening. Thousands, thirty-three thousand in just two days at Kiev's Babi Yar, then millions died.  Children were executed by gun, lethal injection, and gassing along with adults.

Auschwitz, August 1944: a network of German concentration

and extermination camps built during World War II in Poland.

 It consisted of Auschwitz I, II–Birkenau, III–Monowitz, and 

45 satellite camps.  (RAF Aerial Reconnaissance)

As the war turned against Germany and the Russian army advanced through eastern Europe and towards the death camps, the evidence had to be destroyed before the public became aware of what had happened. The Nazis tried to erase all traces of the camps and planted trees, for instance, when they had destroyed the extermination facilities.

A government of the people, by and for the people must conform to standards of legal and ethical conduct as well as requirements for transparency and accountability. When leadership becomes secretive and propagandic, manipulating legal definitions of this or that, we get slaves or rats or disenfranchised inferiors that we can treat differently, and there's a cost behind the scenes.

  

That's why our children are referred to as fetuses before they're born.
So we can treat them differently.



It's a matter of socio-political preference and ideology, not mercy.  Had you noticed?

Related references:.[Extermination Continued After the War].[NIH.gov].[Nazi Doctors].[Action T4].[Mercy Killing].[Racial Science] 

If you had a heart problem, would you know?

... would we know? 

When we look, it's visible there in us and in our actions.  Disappointing.

Selfishness pervades our lives, almost as though it were embedded in our DNA.   (Mine, mine!)  An honest introspection discovers that a measure of it remains even after many years of intending otherwise.  

We all hope for such a heart that we ourselves might become part of a greater good, don't we?

Maybe it's within our reach; a gift for the taking.

                    Nobility and grace, courage and determination, selflessness and genuine love ... 

Science has no explanation for these, but we all know how they inspire us and change things for the better.  Perhaps only God understands.  We should ask.

Losing religion

In our twenties, we heard someone talking about fundamentalism and thought it sounded helpful with plenty of rules and explanations. We decided that's what we'd be.  It didn't last, but it was helpful to see why.  

The presumption of knowing God so well that we could say who would or wouldn't be loved and brought in ..., well, it smelled pretty bad after awhile.  Being able to judge others wasn't helpful.  Being among the very few who would be saved while all the rest of these billions were condemned to hell, that was cancerous, almost.  None of that anger and condemnation is supportable from the bible, at least the way I read it.

Church?  Or fantasy land?  What is it?

So, what might we embrace in good conscience about God, his son, and his invitation? Ah, that's the question.

What to do with 'church' is part of the problem, but it isn't first. First is what you can in good conscience believe; not wish, not hope, not anything but actually believe. Anything else is a bit dishonest, at least I think so.

A big question that follows quickly is 'what is it all for?' What do I do with the belief I have.

So now we're frighteningly intrigued; tiptoeing gingerly around the corner where you can just see the very edge of the light that shines around the good God ... stunned, we wonder what's next?

Go to church? Sit in a pew for a few years? Go just on Sunday mornings, or on Wednesday nights too? Wait a minute; I'm not sure any of that is relevant yet. Is it?

Wait, wait, wait, wait! I just skirted the edge of something so huge, I wept and didn't know why. I think I want to go stay there for awhile; I think there's a part of me that lives there, or should. 

(OK, now you can go to a church, but not to sit. Go to find others who've been to the place you saw and can lead you back there and show you around.)

Membership, attendance, being part of a culture with a particular bent, none will satisfy that desire to enter the room and know for yourself. Such knowing and belief are honest, and surprisingly strong for being so.