No-Fault Holocaust

April 23, 1999

In his twenty years of teaching Professor Robert Simon has never met a student who denied that the Holocaust occurred. But he does find students who can't bring themselves to say that killing millions of people is wrong. He reports that about 10 to 20 percent of his students think this way.

Another professor reports a similar problem in her creative writing class at Pasadena City College. She taught her class Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. It's a short story about a small American farm town where one person is killed each year to make the crops grow. In the tale, a woman is ritually stoned to death by her husband, her 12-year-old daughter, and her 4-year-old son.

In the past Jackson's message about blind conformity always spoke to her student's sense of right and wrong. No longer is that true. A new generation raised on non-judgementalism find it hard to say that stoning someone is wrong. One woman in the class was asked if she believed in human sacrifice. The student replied, "I really don't know. If it was a religion of long standing [perhaps]." The professor was stunned. This women student wrote passionately of saving the whales, of concern for rain forests, of her rescue and tender care of a stray dog.

I suggest to you that this is a legacy of moral relativism and multiculturalism. Students are taught to tolerate various moral perspectives and cultural mores. Ultimately, they take these ideas to their logical absurdity. Thus, they refuse to condemn the Holocaust or even human sacrifice whether it be fictional (in The Lottery) or real (as in the history of the Aztecs). In the end, we have a no-fault Holocaust.

I'm Kerby Anderson of Probe Ministries, and that's my opinion.