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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Its Complicated
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shamwari
Shipmate
# 15556
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Posted
Ever since the Parliamentary debate on Syria I have been aware of a ground swell of apologetic and confessional remarks to the people of Syria for what might happen. Along the lines of "Not my fault Guv".
Can we debate the issues involved?
: To what extent can I be 'guilty' of actions taken by others with which I disagree and am opposed?
: Is the blame not equally to be shared? Syria ( and other States) have given home and succour to an evil entity. By the same token the rise of ISIS ( or whatever other name ) has been enabled by the fall-out of Western adventures such as the war in Iraq.
: Is there a "guilt thing" operating here? By which I mean that many people ( usually Christians) think that apologising for something is 'cathartic' whether or not we were complicit? Confession may be good for the soul but is it possible to confess 'vicariously'? And is not a vicarious confession as often as not merely a selfish attempt to cleanse our own conscience and 'get off the hook'?
: if the answer is Yes, vicarious confession is possible, then what follows? For every confession there is supposed to be a penance involved. Else confession is just a matter of words and words are easy. Follow-up actions are required and reparation is due. What follow-up is envisaged by those apologising to the Syrian people?
: And, in a world where the only moral choices open to us are not between Good/Evil, but between two evils then ought we not to distinguish between Good/Evil and Right/Wrong.? Is it not true that often we do the right thing ( i.e. choose the lesser of two evils) whilst acknowledging that whatever we do is not the Good thing?
There seems to me to be a lot of emotional hogwash being mouthed which might make us feel better and give us a better conscience, but which is fundamentally dishonest.
Discuss.
Posts: 1914 | From: from the abyss of misunderstanding | Registered: Mar 2010
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Martin60
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# 368
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Posted
What, it's evil not to oppose evil with killing? Then Jesus was evil.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Raptor Eye
Shipmate
# 16649
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Posted
There is corporate as well as individual responsibility that we are accountable for, before God. When we are going along with what is being done without speaking out, or actively working to help those badly affected, shrugging our shoulders and saying 'What are you gonna do?' we're not serving God. Nor are we serving God unless we do the right thing, rather than accepting an evil because it's not as bad as another.
Good intentions are no good. Love demands action, even if it is only the action of our jaws.
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Be still, and know that I am God! Psalm 46.10
Posts: 4359 | From: The United Kingdom | Registered: Sep 2011
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Enoch
Shipmate
# 14322
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by shamwari:
Ever since the Parliamentary debate on Syria I have been aware of a ground swell of apologetic and confessional remarks to the people of Syria for what might happen. Along the lines of "Not my fault Guv".
Can we debate the issues involved?
: To what extent can I be 'guilty' of actions taken by others with which I disagree and am opposed?
Not at all. Not unless you are silent specifically in a way that conveys consent. quote:
: Is the blame not equally to be shared? Syria ( and other States) have given home and succour to an evil entity.
The rest of the world is not answerable for the shortcomings of the Syrian government since 1963, any more than I am answerable for the failure of the US to introduce gun control. quote:
By the same token the rise of ISIS ( or whatever other name ) has been enabled by the fall-out of Western adventures such as the war in Iraq.
Even though it was militarily successful, the UK government does have quite a large share of responsibility for fouling up the peace. However, that does not make it responsible for everything else that has happened there since. One could just as well argue that having given the Iraqis the opportunity to make a fresh start, there are some prominent Iraqis who bear a large dollop of responsibility for making such a pigs ear of what should have been a really good opportunity for them. quote:
: Is there a "guilt thing" operating here? By which I mean that many people ( usually Christians) think that apologising for something is 'cathartic' whether or not we were complicit? Confession may be good for the soul but is it possible to confess 'vicariously'?
No. Each person is answerable for their own sins. Jer 31:29-30 inter alia quote:
And is not a vicarious confession as often as not merely a selfish attempt to cleanse our own conscience and 'get off the hook'?
In my experience, it's usually an excuse to go through the motions of confessing sins that are not yours and about which you can do nothing, as a convenient way of avoiding the ones that are yours, and about which you could and should do something.
Sins for which 'we are all guilty' are sins that 'they' do, ones that nobody actually does anything about. quote:
: if the answer is Yes, vicarious confession is possible,
It isn't. The answer is No. quote:
then what follows? For every confession there is supposed to be a penance involved. Else confession is just a matter of words and words are easy. Follow-up actions are required and reparation is due. What follow-up is envisaged by those apologising to the Syrian people?
: And, in a world where the only moral choices open to us are not between Good/Evil, but between two evils then ought we not to distinguish between Good/Evil and Right/Wrong.? Is it not true that often we do the right thing ( i.e. choose the lesser of two evils) whilst acknowledging that whatever we do is not the Good thing?
There's an important distinction between the Perfect thing, which may well be impossible, and a Better than some of the Alternatives thing which it is within your power to do.
This is an aspect of what Incarnation is about. quote:
There seems to me to be a lot of emotional hogwash being mouthed which might make us feel better and give us a better conscience, but which is fundamentally dishonest.
I agree. I don't think anyone could disagree with that. quote:
Discuss.
Have I said enough?
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Brexit wrexit - Sir Graham Watson
Posts: 7610 | From: Bristol UK(was European Green Capital 2015, now Ljubljana) | Registered: Nov 2008
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
Heck - that's a lot of questions
Are you asking specifics (easier) or generalities? The generalities are harder because as you say - action is demanded - and that will be different for each situation
There are also lines that divide an individuals sphere of action and responsibility, a governments, and that demanded by God. Which do you choose?
Talking as a country, we have meddled in middle eastern politics for over a century, and a lot of the current mess lies to some degree on British and French heads, with subsequent layers of US and Russian cold war politics, and topped by a recent total abdicatipon of responsibility around the invasion of Iraq and the stop-go-stop-go-dither and bomb that contributed to the mess arising from the arab spring. We have also collectively allowed ourselves to be manipulated by Israeli lobbying in the US and by Saudi oil money. Can one person be blamed for all of that? or one country? In that context, the current decision to bomb is fraught with all kinds of dangers, particularly that it can pour more oil on troubled water and recruit more people to ISIS. All one can say is that manipulations for the interests of each country have on teh long term bedevilled all countries - the "great game" of spying and intrigue is a recipe for long term disaster, primarily because it operates on the basis of beggar thy neighbour. I don't see a collective contrition or desire to change any of that.
As individuals - frankly, I don't think that breast beating, attempting to take on collective responsibility does anyone any good. We each have a sphere of influence, and attempting anything outside it is futile. However, most people have a very shrunken and atrophied sense of their personal capacity to act and influence. I keep looking at the global warming potential for forcing mass migration, and think that the current refugee crisis from Syria is small beer compared to what might happen. We don't have the structures in our society to handle this kind of thing, partly because we have placed a lot of restrictive laws to control street trading, building regulation, child protection, professional qualification standards, etc - all worthy causes in a stable world, and points of insufficient elasticity (which will therefore make things bust elsewhere) in an unstable world. If society is to be more flexible to deal with uncertain change, we have to take back ownership of personal responsibility rather than pass it all on to the state (and therefore, someone else). That's hard. It's much easier to take responsibility away from people than to give it back to them.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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Crœsos
Shipmate
# 238
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by shamwari:
: Is the blame not equally to be shared? Syria ( and other States) have given home and succour to an evil entity. By the same token the rise of ISIS ( or whatever other name ) has been enabled by the fall-out of Western adventures such as the war in Iraq.
This assessment seems to be the opposite of reality. ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever has not been "given home and succour" by the Syrian state, they've seized a home by force of arms from the Syrian (and Iraqi) state and are attempting to replace the Syrian and Iraqi governments. You appear to be arguing that Assad is secretly helping a group devoted to his overthrow.
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Humani nil a me alienum puto
Posts: 10706 | From: Sardis, Lydia | Registered: May 2001
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Ricardus
Shipmate
# 8757
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
If society is to be more flexible to deal with uncertain change, we have to take back ownership of personal responsibility rather than pass it all on to the state (and therefore, someone else). That's hard. It's much easier to take responsibility away from people than to give it back to them.
Doesn't it normally work the other way? In moments of crisis, the government invests itself with emergency powers, i.e. the normal response to a crisis is for power to pass from the individual to the state.
(I believe the original meaning of 'dictator' was an official who took absolute power in a crisis.)
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Then the dog ran before, and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail. -- Tobit 11:9 (Douai-Rheims)
Posts: 7247 | From: Liverpool, UK | Registered: Nov 2004
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
If society is to be more flexible to deal with uncertain change, we have to take back ownership of personal responsibility rather than pass it all on to the state (and therefore, someone else). That's hard. It's much easier to take responsibility away from people than to give it back to them.
Doesn't it normally work the other way? In moments of crisis, the government invests itself with emergency powers, i.e. the normal response to a crisis is for power to pass from the individual to the state.
(I believe the original meaning of 'dictator' was an official who took absolute power in a crisis.)
Yes - you're right - but then we will all eventually be living in dictatorships as food, water, weather and population displacement pressures increase.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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Kaplan Corday
Shipmate
# 16119
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by itsarumdo:
In that context, the current decision to bomb is fraught with all kinds of dangers, particularly that it can pour more oil on troubled water and recruit more people to ISIS.
I suspect the imagery you are after is pouring oil/petrol on a fire.
Posts: 3355 | Registered: Jan 2011
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Kaplan Corday
Shipmate
# 16119
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by shamwari:
And is not a vicarious confession as often as not merely a selfish attempt to cleanse our own conscience and 'get off the hook'?
It is often nothing more than moral exhibitionism, in which someone who had no actual participation in the measure of which they disapprove says, "Look at how much more honest and aware and humble and penitent I am than the rest of you".
An example was the Christians running around during the late 1990s apologising for the commencement of the Crusades 900 years previously.
It is appropriate for Christians to feel shame over something like the Inquisition, but to apologise presupposes some sort of active guilt.
The whole concept of collective responsibility is both irrational and dangerous, the classic case being the blaming of every Jew for Christ's death.
I recently reviewed a history of the expulsion of the German populations from countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia in the immediate aftermath of WWII.
Most were women. children and the elderly, some had been anti-Nazi, and many had, like the majority in most of the populations of occupied countries, simply kept their heads down and their mouths shut in order to survive.
However by virtue of being German they were treated as all complicit in the atrocities committed by the recent German occupiers, and consequently vilified, robbed, imprisoned, enslaved, neglected, starved, sexually abused and beaten prior to repatriation, and in some cases executed.
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
What you expect mate? Christianity?
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Moo
Ship's tough old bird
# 107
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Kaplan Corday:
I recently reviewed a history of the expulsion of the German populations from countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia in the immediate aftermath of WWII.
Most were women. children and the elderly, some had been anti-Nazi, and many had, like the majority in most of the populations of occupied countries, simply kept their heads down and their mouths shut in order to survive.
However by virtue of being German they were treated as all complicit in the atrocities committed by the recent German occupiers, and consequently vilified, robbed, imprisoned, enslaved, neglected, starved, sexually abused and beaten prior to repatriation, and in some cases executed.
The rationale wasn't entirely that all Germans were guilty; it's more complicated than that. Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia under the pretext that the Germans in the Sudetenland were being mistreated. Many (most?) of them did not see it that way. At the end of the war the Czechs were determined that Germany would never again have that pretext for invading Czechoslovakia. There was certainly plenty of vindictiveness also, but not all the Czechs felt it.
Moo
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Kerygmania host
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See you later, alligator.
Posts: 20365 | From: Alleghany Mountains of Virginia | Registered: May 2001
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TurquoiseTastic
Fish of a different color
# 8978
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Enoch:
quote:
Originally posted by shamwari:
And is not a vicarious confession as often as not merely a selfish attempt to cleanse our own conscience and 'get off the hook'?
In my experience, it's usually an excuse to go through the motions of confessing sins that are not yours and about which you can do nothing, as a convenient way of avoiding the ones that are yours, and about which you could and should do something.
I think this is what Jesus meant in the following passage (Matthew 23):
29 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. 30 And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31 So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!
Posts: 1092 | From: Hants., UK | Registered: Jan 2005
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PaulTH*
Shipmate
# 320
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
The rationale wasn't entirely that all Germans were guilty; it's more complicated than that. Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia under the pretext that the Germans in the Sudetenland were being mistreated.
Hitler was the master of pretexts. But his plan was to restore Germany to it's ultimate glory. Bohemia, with Prague as its capital, was part of the Holy Roman Empire of the Habsburgs. So Hitler had to get it back. The same was true of his attack on Poland. from the 12th to the 17th century, Poland had access to the sea at Danzig. Prussia, later East Prussia, wasn't part of the Empire. With the union of Brandenburg, Prussia and Pomerania and the obliteration of Poland by its partition between Prussia, Russia and Austria, the 2nd Reich extended along the Baltic coast as far as Konigsburg (modern day Kaliningrad in Russia). When the Treaty of Versailles recreated Poland as an independent state, it gave access to the Baltic via the Polish corridor which cut a hole through Germany. Hitler was a megolomaniac who aimed to remake Germany to it's largest territorial size. Good that he was stopped.
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Yours in Christ
Paul
Posts: 6387 | From: White Cliffs Country | Registered: May 2001
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PaulTH*
Shipmate
# 320
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Kaplan Corday:
I recently reviewed a history of the expulsion of the German populations from countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia in the immediate aftermath of WWII
Unfortunately, in their desire to bring the war to an end, Churchill and Roosevelt danced with the devil Stalin. At Tehran and at Yalta. Stalin's demands for his help were the ethnic cleansing of Germans from East of the Oder/Neisse line. This meant that cities such as Stettin (now Polish Szczeczin) and Breslau (now Polish Wroclaw) which had been German for many generations were emptied of their German populations, who were given no compensation for losses of property, and sent on their way. At the same time, the Soviet Union wasn't required to return the Kresy territories to Poland which it stole in 1939, and which now form parts of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. So Poland was compensated for lost territory to the Soviets by the annexation and ethnic cleansing of German territory.
I don't know if they could have done anything differently. Europe was in every way exhausted by six years of war. To prolong it by going against Stalin may have been a task beyond anyone's ability. But some people got a raw deal from it. None more than the displaced Germans many of whom probably never supported Hitler.
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Yours in Christ
Paul
Posts: 6387 | From: White Cliffs Country | Registered: May 2001
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Kaplan Corday
Shipmate
# 16119
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
The rationale wasn't entirely that all Germans were guilty
No, of course not.
As well as getting rid of any pretext for a future German invasion, and an internal minority which might have supported such an invasion, there was also a belief that the principle of self-determination, ie that borders should correspond with ethnic homogeneity, had not been adequately implemented by the Versailles settlement, and that here was the opportunity to finally get it right.
Plus the chance to loot German property.
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