My point: For instance, while I usually think of lying is wrong, I think the germans who hid Anne Frank in their home did the right thing. So there are times when "bearing false witness" is the morally right thing to do.
The response: The deception is, taking only "well they hid Anne Frank" out of context without looking at the entire scope of who else it effected and how it effected them. We're only given the happy ending so we assume it's all okay. But as surely as Dr King Jr could effect change without breaking the law, change could have come about for Anne Frank without lying too.
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Right, so the people who helped Anne Frank are in Hell for lying, Anne Frank is in Hell for not accepting Jesus, and the Nazis are in Heaven because they were God fearing Christians just following orders.
change could have come about for Anne Frank without lying too.
Yep, a change in her breathing ability.
but then fundies would expect God to protect them regardless. And if he didn't, well it was all a part of his grand plan.
Wow, you barely have a grasp on reality, do you? Check your hsitory, it wasn't Germans that hid the Frank family. Amsterdam is where they were hiding, not Germany. And the Dutch family that hid them didn't lie. I would bet every penny I Have that the family wasn't ever asked "Is the Frank family in your attic?" They were turned in by a worker who hinted he would take money to keep quiet about him remembering a stair case behind the bookcase.
But leave it to a fundie to find a way to do something that is supposedly against his own religion by twisting it to say his religion says is Oooo Kay!
...change could have come about for Anne Frank without lying too.
[Germans begin dragging Anne Frank outside to the truck which will take her to the nearest kontzenlagger ]
Anne Frank: Do you enjoy this sort of thing?!?
Nazi Guard: What do you mean?
AF: You know, stomping around, shouting at people, shoving them into ovens. What is it? The machismo, the S.S. uniform, the low-slung Luger?...
NG: Well, the hours are good...
AF: They'd have to be!
NG: But now that you come to mention it...most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy.
According to my (Dutch) father, this was discussed in churches during Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Some Christians, when asked by Germans, "Are there any jews in your house?", would self-righteously say, "I won't tell you."
The house would be torched.
Also, please check the dictionary for the difference between effect and affect.
There are situations where lying just is the right thing to do (like, in Anne Frank's case, saving an innocent girl from murderous thugs, until she was eventually caught -- you obviously haven't read her diary), and any God who throws folks in Hell for that deserves not worship but utter contempt.
It was a Dutch family that hid Anne Frank. The Germans were the ones with the swastika's, going all 'sieg heil' and shit.
change could have come about for Anne Frank without lying too
Yeah, she would have died a lot sooner. Great belief-system you have there, Brian.
Germans did not hide Anne Frank. She was hidden in Amsterdam by Dutch citizens.
If you can't even get the facts of your example straight, how the hell do you expect anyone to take anything else you say seriously?
I didn't know that Anne Frank's life had a happy ending. Dying in a concentration camp, along with all of the rest of her family aside from her father, is a happy ending?
What happy ending did Anne Frank get, I wonder? Last I heard she and her sister both died in Auschwitz just a few weeks befoe the allied troops liberated the camps.
Hey asshole - into historical revisionism much?
Any lie will send you to hell?
So if I'm asked, "Does this dress make my butt look big?" I will be damned no matter what I may answer.
Sure, I heard the ovens in Auschwitz were much more roomy than the flat Anne Frank's family was hidden.
"change could have come about for Anne Frank without lying too."
Yeah.... She could have changed from a live person into a dead person.
"We're only given the happy ending so we assume it's all okay."
See above. Re: Nazis
...the happy ending?
What happy ending?
Yeah...how exactly could you have said "I am keeping a family of Jews hidden in my attic" to the Nazis, and still have come to a happy "dancing bunnies and flower-sniffing unicorns under a rainbow" ending? You surely have no idea what reality is, do you? The lies were necessary, and anything but lying in that situation would have been tantamont to a murder-suicide.
Yeah. If only she had just cooperated with the Nazis, she would have lived. Just like all those other poor souls who cooperated their way right into Auschwitz.
Wait, aren't these the people who come out and beat their chest and say we have to fight the terrorists because not doing so would be like Chamberlin and the Nazis before WWII? How nice that this quote came from Hypocrite.
Did you even read that book? Germans didn't hide Anne Frank, the book took place in Holland.
Grigadil, just so you know, she wasn't gassed, she died of Typhus.
Right. Remember to always follow the 10 commandments, even if doing so means that you and your family are going to be dragged to the camps.
I'm sure that's just what Jesus would want.
Do you even fucking KNOW what happened to Anne Frank? It would have only happened sooner if Miep and that other fellow hadn't protected her family. It's not a "happy ending" in any way, and no amount of saying "it could have been different!" would have changed that they would likely have not survived as long as they did, had Miep and her husband not stepped in.
I'm sure Anne Frank was insanely happy to be gassed with her family.
Technically, she (along with her sister Margot) actually died of typhus in the camps a few weeks before it was to be liberated, according to people who knew her there.
They were then thrown into a mass grave.
One of her journal entries (and I'm poorly paraphrasing) said that she "believed that people are essentially good, but they are taught to do bad things."
I agree with this beautiful young woman, who after she died was buried with as much dignity as a piece of trash, more than you.
Yes, it's possible she could have survived without needing to lie, in the sense that it's possible we could reason with fundamentalists and they would all stop their terrorism. Possible, but really not likely.
A change without lying, eh?
Yes, the Nazis would have been hapy to change her vital signs.
You are a sad and pathetic sort, aren't you?
I think Bryan doesn't quite understand the concept of King's civil disobedience.
Disobedience means that he disobeyed the law.("Broke" as one might say.) In fact, he was arrested at least four times for his actions.
Way to dishonor Dr. King, and Miep and her family, dust-for-brains. Also, happy ending? If you count Anne Frank dying in a concentration camp from typhus as a happy ending, then you're sicker than I first thought.
Moral absolutism always fails, because it stubbornly refuses to take catch-22s into account. Yeah, it would be nice if we could always stick to our moral convictions, but there are situations where you end up violating one of them no matter what you do. In this case, sure, I could stick to your guns about how lying is bad, but in doing so, I would be violating by principles about protecting little girls from dying slow, horrible deaths in concentration camps.
Fwiw Miep, the principal helper of the Franks and other Jews hiding with them, was an ethnic German, an Austrian from Vienna. By chance the officer of the men who came to arrest the Jews was also from Vienna, and she shamed him as a Viennese who could do such a thing. She said that this coincidence was probably why she and her husband were not also arrested for hiding Jews, a serious crime under the Nazis.
1. Dutch, not German. (As many of you had said.)
Wait, aren´t Anna Frank, the Germans who hide them and the Nazis in Hell anyway, because they didn´t believe in your particular brand of Christianity?
But as surely as Dr King Jr could effect change without breaking the law
But he did break the law, that's why he and his followers went to jail numerous times.
It was Dutch people, and they hid her in the office building where her father had had an office before Jew-led companies were made illegal.
They hid Anne AND seven others. They knew what they did; they knew it was dangerous and could cost them their lives. The helper known as Miep Gies wrote a book about it decades later, and she seemed to think that it was definitely worth it.
What happy ending? That they were betrayed by someone, captured and sent to different concentration camps where everyone except her father Otto died? Yup, definitely a happy ending for him when he learned that his two daughters were dead.
If they had not hidden her, she and the other seven would probably have died three years earlier.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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