3 ms·

These are all straw-men. "Hitler was evil" is an absolute judgement of Hitler, and not in any way of the events and people surrounding him. His blame doesn't ab

These are all straw-men. "Hitler was evil" is an absolute judgement of Hitler, and not in any way of the events and people surrounding him. His blame doesn't absolve anyone of any of their responsibilities for the Holocaust or any other incident in history. It is but a singular example to make my point. Evil is not a purely religious construct. For it to be, so then would morality - but it's not. Do you believe that, in general, murder and rape are wrong? If you do, you have defined a moral compass - even if you're staunchly atheist. It's true that religion often comes with a pre-defined morality that is expected to be adopted, but as humans, we define morality and what that means to us all the time outside the context of religion.

coldtea 12y ago
>These are all straw-men. "Hitler was evil" is an absolute judgement of Hitler He was a human -- even likable when you get to know him they say (he sure made millions of Germans like him). What was "evil", if you want, was his ideals and more especially them put in practice (the war, the holocaust, the S.S. etc). To say he was evil implies he was something different than the next person. But ordinary people, the kind that would have been a friendly librarian or baker, when caught up in some historical dynamics can end up doing monstrous acts (e.g. in Nazi Germany, in Cambodia, in Nigeria, etc). Hanna Arendt wrote compellingly about how the most "evil" man in the camps was in fact a banal bureucrat. I also dislike how we selectively call some people evil. How many call Truman, the guy who gave the OK to bomb to oblivion two civilian towns, evil? Or maybe if Hitler had only killed 200.000 civilians in the course of the war it would have been OK?