One of the worst nights I ever spent in my life, this was not in a war, a foreign country, aboard a ship in time of storm, and I have experienced all this. Hearing the screams of a wife, as her husband abused her.
I had a problem in my house, the construction man advised that I sleep somewhere else. To save money on a motel, I decided to stay in a furnished duplex which I owned, all I had to take with me was clothing and some bed linens. During the night, in the adjoining duplex, I heard this awful abuse going on, a man beating his wife as she screamed for help. I had interviewed the couple before they moved into the house. He was a high school football star/player, and both had responsible jobs. They always paid their rent on time, and I had no complaints from anyone else. Other neighboring houses was not like hearing through a wall. Of course I did not have phone service in this apartment, had more sense than to interfere.
The next morning, I called my friend, the local sheriff, he said, “I will look into the matter, let me handle it. You stay out of it, don't ever get involved in a domestic dispute. More law enforcement officers are killed involving this than anything else.” One other time, years later, I witnessed the same thing, a small maid's apartment under my beach house had been rented to a couple. I heard the same type abuse one night, a young man striking his wife, she crying and screaming, begging him to stop. The next morning, I put a note on their door telling them to vacate immediately. One day on the beach, together, they both yelled insults at me.
I am convinced that there are people, particularly women, who thrive on abuse. These masochistic personalities are usually attracted to sadistic personalities. I can think of nothing more evil than a sadistic person, whether the abuse is toward another human being or an animal. We have all known animal abusers, and court records are full of human abuse, particularly children. Discipline is essential in the training of children, but abuse of any kind, on anyone, is never justified.
I cannot imagine a woman, any woman, sleeping in the same bed with a mate who is physically abusive. I have known several psychiatrists and psychologists in my professional life, they have told me that I would never believe the things they have heard in their practice. Nor, can I understand people who worship in an attitude of abusive conformity, death to unbelievers, the elimination of infidels. You may not understand why someone else does not appreciate your religious beliefs, and you may not understand their religious belief or unbelief, but you can still have a good relationship, you either decide in the beginning not to discuss your spirituality or discuss it with a motive of learning.
We all have needs, secular and temporal, physical and spiritual. The German people on the Wiemar Republic were desperate, destitute. Otherwise, you cannot explain why these intelligent people would elect Adolf Hitler. Since WWI, they had been swimming in an ocean of self-indulgence, trying to reclaim the good life, hyperinflation had taken over. Strife and bigotry ruled the day. German debt, Hitler's promise to solve the problems, made socialism inevitable. Envious eyes grabbed at savings and bank accounts, many of the financial speculators were Jewish, hyper-inflated German money was called “Jewish confetti”.
As has always been the case with academic atheists, communism, the ends justifies the means, it was easy to blame the minorities, because someone had to be blamed, someone must pay the cost. So, to the death chambers went the disabled, the disenfranchised, the Jews. The same old mantra still heard at every funeral home, every case of euthanasia, “better off, would not want to be a burden, in a better place.” Supposedly, these victims went to these death chambers, projected as work camps. They worked as slaves for I.G. Farben, and other chemical conglomerates. A sign at the entrance to Auschwitz said, in German, “Work makes you free”. It was German citizens, torturing and killing their fellow citizens.
Hitler did not hire foreigners to run his holocaust operation, any more than Janet Reno hired foreigners to come in and kill 85 women and children at the Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. It was FBI, American citizens, killing other American citizens. It was not foreigners brought in to assassinate a president, blow up a federal building, or the killing of Americans at Ruby Ridge (Randy Weaver's wife and child). Locally, the sheriff of New Hanover County did not hire outsiders to shoot a university student behind his door, it was a cold-blooded killing by a law officer who killed a young man going to open his door, and they not only killed the young man, but killed his dog, because it was barking. It was Americans, for some strange reason, sanitizing an area of Americans.
Coveting wealth and power, loving the adulation of men rather than God. Trying to satisfy lusts and greed, rather than yearning for the saving graces of all souls. Men and nations do what they do because they believe what they believe. And many times their beliefs are just rotten and evil. God “backed up” his message of love by giving up His only son on the cross for the sins of the entire world, which includes the sins of all nations and all people, even killers, whether an unborn baby, or a mother in a gas chamber. Jesus Christ was the personification of love, the perfect God/man, in the three years in which we have record of his life, He loved everyone and everyone loved Him. Almost always, there was a crowd around Him. He was rich, but for us, became poor. Born in a borrowed stable, buried in a borrowed tomb, never owned anything except one robe. Faith in him has worked for everyone who has ever tried it. It is a historical fact that although his followers might fail Him, He has never failed them.
Can any religion promote killing? In Islam, if you are not a Muslim, you are an infidel, and all infidels must die. Even in Mohammed's treaty of Hudaybiyyah, a treaty he made for his followers at Mecca, and those at Medina, clauses of the treaty call for death. In the 1988 Iraq-Iran war, 900,000 Muslims were killed. Thousands of Muslims have been killed in the Sudan-Darfur war and other areas of Africa, multiple thousands have been displaced. The beat goes on, rather, and the blasphemy of everything sacred to mankind: life, liberty, happiness, fades into the Twilight Zone of religious irascibility contrasted with the verisimilitude of love and grace
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