Prior to World War 2 New Orthodox theologians and their philosophical friends in the secular world believed that sin was ignorance and education was the cure.
I agree that ignorance (particularly that promoted by organised religion) leads to the unfortunate situation where people can be mislead, taken advantage of and exploited, but what "New Orthodox Theologians" ever promoted education as the cure for sin??
Post World War 2 these theologians abandoned this belief wholesale. They witnessed the most educated nation on Earth commit the unspeakable Holocaust - 6 million Jews slaughtered.
Nazi Germany was propelled and equipped by highly educated men, yet this education/knowledge did not cure sin, it is a fact that the intelligence of these men was used to perfect sin via the atrocities committed against the Jewish race.
Oh dear God, where do you get this stuff??
Sure Nazi Germany had some of the leading scientist minds in the world, but what makes you think that these individuals were responsible for the political decisions made by the government?
I think you'll find that most of the people who commited the atrocities on the ground weren't necessarily what you'd call the educated elite: they were a minority of thugs caught up in the political wing of the German military amchine.
Most of the educated German high class served as officers in the Wermacht. I don't believe that you can sustain the charge that most of the professional German officers soldiers were involved in commiting atrocities.
New Orthodoxy returned to the spring/source/Bible for answers. They re-discovered that which was already there. Man has a "bent" in his nature, a proclivity to want to do evil/sin. They were re-awakened
to the Biblical truth of original sin.
Who did what and where now?
Again, WTF is this New Orthodoxy? The Catholic church that fundies are desparately trying to divorce themselves from ever since they embraced evolution?
I love the convuloted thought processes that lie behind distinguishing one Christian interpretation from another: you all believe in the same messiah, you are all the same religion: Christianity. If you divorce yourself from the "orthodoxy" you divorce yourself from the history of your own faith. In your eyes, did Christinity simply stop during the Dark Ages?
If anything, WW2 was responsible for a whole scale departure from faith when it was seen by many just how useless faith is at providing assistance to the problems of the real world.
The Doctrine of Original Sin says: Because of Adam/Eve sin, we are born separated from God with a sinning nature. We are not sinners because we commit sins, rather, we commit sin because we are sinners.
Man is no more inherently "evil" (a ridiculously sibjective concept) than any other lifeform. If we were so evil, as you propose we would have wiped ourselves out a long time ago. The same evolutionarily derived morality that prevents other animals from wiping out their own species and their own young, has given us adequate means of developing a morality so that we prevail.
Religion, in particular Christianity, has proved itself to be a dreadful source of determining right from wrong.
Yet, most importantly, the truth of what God said about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is apparent: There is NO POWER in the knowledge of good and evil to CHOOSE the good over the evil APART from God.
I urge you to understand the above statement.
I can't. It's worded really badly.
The most educated nation on Earth, Nazi Germany demonstrates this truth/fact.
How do you figure that Germany was the most educated country in the world in the 1930's. Do you have literacy figures to back this up? You may be right: I am just curious because Germany was suffering big time from the depression and had significant unemployment in the early thirties.
Knowledge and education is not the cure for sin.
It's a dam good start towards overcoming superstition, blind adherence to totalitarian nutters, and to disposing of religious intolerance.
You've seen the statistics about how many people in the US prison system are Christians.
How many highly educated people are presently partaking in wars in the world now?
What are the figures for the correlation between literacy rates and political turmoil in the world at the moment?? I think you'll find those figures rebut your proposition.
Every American and European university professor who provides the justification and rationale and excuses for the murdercide of defenseless Israeli civilians are adopting the mantle of the Nazi's, using their ultra educational status/credentials as a tool to sin/murder Jews. They are the New Neo-Nazi's.
I am always appalled when Christians drop these bombshell generalisations.
How thoroughly have you researched the history of the middle eastern conflict? I think you'll find that there are very much two sides to the story.
Knowledge and education is most definitely the cure for most of your posts on this forum.
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