Theos-Talk Archives (June 1995 Message tl00056)

guru@nellie2.demon.co.uk (Dr. A.M.Bain) writes:

> A thought .... Liesel writes:
>
> > I can write this with sympathy, and I know it's true that the
> > Germans too suffered, but it's most difficult for me to give them
> > "an understanding as perfect as the sympathy which he gives a the
> > sufferer." I've stood in the middle of Frankfurt (in 1972),
> > listened to an ambulance syren chasing by, &

I agree with Liesel that we need to understand these people and
feel compassion for the oppressor as well as the oppressed, as we
are all suffering.  THe master-minds behind the Third Reich are
probably suffering horribly in Avichi, and the others suffering
persecutions in this world, until they learn compassion.  We are
very much linked to everyone else.

> This "Virtue of Harmlessness" sounds a bit like the Christian
> idea of turning the other cheek.  Seems to me that some might use
> "turning the other cheek" as an excuse for "looking the other
> way."

No, these are quite different ideas.  We should do what we can to
prevent a repetition of the atrocities carried out during WWII -
(actually they're going on in Bosnia right now - what are you
doing about it?) But that doesn't mean we should hate all
Germans, for example.

> Here in England at the end of WWII the government sent out
> newsreel footage containing the full pictorial horrors of what
> the liberating troops filmed when they went into Bergen-Belsen
> for the first time - the piles of corpses, the pitiful state of
> those still barely alive, the German guards being made to carry
> the dead to mass graves, etc., etc.

Let's not have any illusions that this was the first or last time
such acts have occurred, nor project all the blame on to the
Germans during WWII.  A very short time ago the British were
raking in money from the slave trade and forcing opium onto the
Chinese.  No country is entirely composed of Saints.  Stalin and
Mao both killed more people than Hitler did.  My point is that
the elimination of such violence should be a concern of all
humanity.

> in different ways.  And some idiot will try to tell me that all
> those Jews and others must have deserved it for some unknown
> "karma" generated in previous lives.  B...sh.t.

We are all constantly changing, and all heading towards death of
the physical body.  To some people it happens sooner than others.
Human history is full of blood shed.  It seems to be tied into
"the Plan", although this horrible to contemplate.  While we
suffer as individuals, the Divine life within does not seem to
suffer in quite the same way.  My point here, is that maybe from
one point of view it wasn't as horrible really as it seems to us
now.  Doesn't that Bhagavid Gita say that the real person is
neither born nor dies?

ASTREA