Alia Midoun
Professor Miyamato
REL 222/501
March 3rd, 2007
Writing Assignment #5
There are people in this world who simply take advantage of everyone else. They have everything they need and anything they do not have is thrown at them. One thing that seems to have always put every single person on the same level is praying for personal salvation and working our way into heaven with good deeds and living a prosperous life. However, it seems that today people are ignoring what salvation is and how it is achieved and using personal power to outsmart the words of religion. Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls this “cheap grace”. We have all heard the use of the saying, “You are cheap” when someone tries to bargain or get a better deal out of something that is worth more than the original offer. Cheap grace is a term used to describe those who ultimately are “cheap”—they try to appear as though they are giving people who provide for those less fortune. However, giving is one thing, but if you can afford to give a dollar, without causing a dent in any personal income, then that is “cheap grace”. Dietrich says, “Grace without price; Grace without cost!” to demonstrate how grace cannot be bought.
When we choose to give as much as we can afford and maybe even more than we can afford then that is true grace. If you give a tip to a waitress, lower than the standard percent, and it is only because you have no desire to provide a tip but merely do it out of the principle of what is expected then you are cheap—a forty dollar bill should not get a waitress a low tip of two dollars. We try to pay for salvation by making ourselves feel good when we donate an extremely small portion of money to an organization, but what if we can afford to donate more? Should we not give what we can afford to give? Just because we give money does not mean we are good people. Salvation is given to those who redeem themselves not out of personal interest but out of the interest of others—we should not do things to make ourselves feel good, but instead do things to make others feel good. In Dietrich Bonhoeffers words, he describes cheap grace as, “…grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices” (259).
In the Nazi era millions of people were killed—the Jews, the homosexuals, the disabled, the gypsies. Under the power of Hitler, Germany was flourishing in their new Aryan cleansing process, using camps to stash up anyone who was not blonde hair, blues eyes. Through the many horrible forms of torture, Hitler managed to wipe out a great deal of the Jewish population of Europe. In the Nazi regime there were two belief systems: Social Darwinism and ‘Racial Hygiene’. Social Darwinism was thought to be a support of the ‘Racial Hygiene’ movement. The ‘Racial Hygiene’ concept was a form of gene cleansing (or racial cleansing)—the idea was to keep the gene pool pure by protecting it and improving it, and in result creating the ultimate race—in some sense it was thought to be patriotic to protect the Aryan race. Anyone who was thought to have the “good genes”, that the Nazi regime protected, was encouraged to practice the same idea of improving the race by having children and discourage anyone who not part of that “ultimate” race. This is what greats a genocide. Racial cleansing is one of the largest forms of genocide, as one race tries to wipe out another and become the more dominate powerful race. Fritz Lenz was the leading professor for ‘Racial Hygiene’ at Munich who said, “as things are now, it is only a minority of our fellow citizens who are so endowed that their unrestricted procreation is good for one race” (Humanity, 322). The Nazi’s would sterilize people who they thought to be “life of lesser value” (323) because they wanted to have the ideal/perfect generation of children or the “’right’ sort of children” (323).
Another belief system which was used under the Nazi rule was what was to be considered the “Darker side of Nietzsche” where the Nazi’s only used certain aspects of Fredrick Nietzsche’s concepts that fit their needs, such as the phrase, “The extinction of many types of people is just as desirable as any form of reproduction” along with “the tendency must be towards the rendering extinct of the wretched, the deformed, the degenerate” (325). The Nazi’s used Nietzsche’s beliefs to justify their cruelty which they practiced against their victims, using his self-creation theories. Glover states, “Hitler also followed Nietzsche in seeing humanitarian morality in terms of poisoning. The military collapse of 1918 was the consequence of ‘an ethical and moral poisoning, of a diminution in the instinct of self-preservation and its preconditions, which for many years had begun to undermine the foundations of the people and the Reich’. For Hitler, unlike Nietzsche, the Jews were the chief poisoners; ‘The nationalizations of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated’” (326) which analyzes the idea on how Hitler used and molded Nietzsche beliefs to rationalize his actions and give them more meaning.
In the Holocaust genocide, erosion of moral identity took place in a form of brainwashing as well as racial identity. The people were lead to believe that they were the ultimate race and to maintain that status they had to begin racial cleansing, keeping their gene pool pure. If your gene pool was not pure then you were a “lesser life” and in no state of mind would anyone want to be told that they were worth less than another person’s life because of their “racial impurities”. People were told that this was the way it was meant to be done. The other problem was that if you weren’t with Hitler, you were against him. Anyone who defied the Nazi regime would be prosecuted in the same way that a Jewish person was. The Nazi regime gave you the chance, if they asked you to be a member; it was more of a way of saying that you had to work with them in order to protect your family and your own life. Questioning or going against the regime would only lead to death. In the end, there was not much of a choice for the people of Germany.
Martin Luther King Jr. tells us that disobeying the law is sometimes necessary. By justifying civil disobedience, he is saying that unjust laws must be disobeyed and should never be followed. He says, “Any law that degrades human personality is unjust” (349), which means that laws which consist of discrimination should never be followed. He uses the example of the Nazi regime, telling us that in Nazi-Germany it was illegal to protect or harbor a Jew, yet he says, if he had been in Nazi-Germany he would have protected and harbored a Jew, and completely disregarded the fact that it was illegal only because the law was unjust. Or if he was in a communist country that suppressed the idea of religion, he would disobey those laws and would “openly advocate disobeying these antireligious laws”. Martin Luther King uses the words of St. Thomas Aquinas stating “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and national law” (349). In summary, all laws that promote racism, segregation or violate basic human rights should and will be disobeyed.