I’m not Hitler! (I)

“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.”

Malcolm Muggeridge

I still don’t understand why more people are not surprised.  Maybe it’s just the way we grow up these days – convinced that all we have to do is ferret out the bad apples and we’ll be one big happy family on the starship Enterprise in the not so distant future.

But far too many of us still don’t understand the crux of Muggeridge’s quote.  They think that humanity is at heart good and that things will keep getting better and better until one day we’ll be able to jettison those old, tired beliefs that try to teach us the truth about ourselves.  And our propensity to grade on a curve doesn’t help at all.  I mean, as long as the likes of Hitler are in the class, we’ll always be able to point to someone else and say, “at least I’m not him!”

But where’s the line?  At what points do we go from good to bad to outright evil? And who gets to decide? (I’ve asked this before!)

There are plenty of people who think Donald Trump is a bad man at best.  And yet, more than 74 million people voted for him in the 2020 election. And many of those votes came from people who were convinced the opponent and his party were bad at best too. So I guess you could say, if we were to have a vote on just what makes a person “evil,” the results would be quite interesting.  Mother Teresa? A saint (literally!)! Hitler? Slam dunk evil. Biden? Hmmm… Trump? Well….?

The problem is, of course, if we keep comparing ourselves to the Hitlers of the world, we’ll never come out on the bottom. And there might be quite a few of us who think Ghandi ain’t that hot – we could probably take him if we really just buckled down a bit and helped a few more old ladies across the street.

But God has other plans.  He basically says “my standard is perfection, and I’m going to show you how it’s done myself.”  And the truth is, if we want to compare ourselves to others, we should probably use his scale. Because he made us. I would think there would be no problem with our creator demanding that we follow his standards.

And so if we were to put Jesus in the class, he’d break the curve.  Think about it. What would the spectrum look like if we put Jesus on it? Imagine drawing a line between two dots on a piece of paper.  You write “Jesus” over the dot on the left end of the line, and you write “Hitler” over the dot on the right.  Then you put an “X” somewhere on the line where you think your name fits.

I’d venture to say quite a few people might put their “X” somewhere in the vicinity of Jesus.  I mean, we’re not Jesus, but we sure as heck aren’t Hitler, right?

But what I’m telling you – and oh, I know this is an incredibly unpopular (and certainly misunderstood) position (that’s why this is only part I) – is that if you have any sense of yourself and God, you’d think that “X” was Hitler’s best friend.  And that would be on a piece of paper the length of a football field.  It’s a poor analogy, and not because it hurts your feelings.  It’s a poor analogy because it still doesn’t get us to the truth.

But we just don’t want to go there. Like Muggeridge says, the evidence is staring us right in the face and we want nothing to do with it.  Because I’m not Hitler!

And sadly, that’s good enough for far too many of us.

See part II here.