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298 D Chapter Ninety-One d Conversion There was little doubt in my mind that the God I sought was going to be different from the one I, as a child, had been taught not just to worship, but to fear. There would be little resemblance between the awesome, nameless, unimaginable God and the white-bearded, stern old patriarch on his golden throne who, surrounded by angels and archangels, sat in judgment over “the living and the dead”; this was a procedure by which He, assisted by Jesus and the Holy Spirit, separating the chaff from the wheat, divided humans into two categories , those who had believed in Him, His son, and the Holy Spirit, and those who had not.While the pearly gates to heaven opened for the believers, the faithless were doomed to purgatory and eternal hell; it was that simple! So far, my search for God seemed to have consisted chiefly of questions to which, in all likelihood, there were no answers.A most crucial one was why He, in His omnipotence, had chosen to leave His only begotten son, the Messiah, sent by Him into the world, to die a miserable death on the cross? I had come to the conclusion that, if my redemption depended on regarding this act of bloody barbarism as one of heavenly mercy, I wanted no part of it anymore. The Christian acceptance of blood as the ultimate cleansing factor had always seemed revolting to me.A popular children’s prayer suggested“Thy grace and Jesus’blood will wash away all sins.”The cross,a stark and frightening instrument of torture,synonymous with suffering and salvation alike,now appeared to me as a symbol of sacrilegious obscenity,whether displayed in a church,a museum,as a work of art,or particularly as an“ornament”—a piece of jewelry around someone’s neck. If Jesus was truly divine, how could his followers violate God’s explicit commandment, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above”? This unequivocal order had never been revoked , altered, or supplemented, so the wretched figure of the crucified Jesus caused me to cringe with compassion for him and embarrassment for those who tolerated this outrageous blasphemy. The “dogma of the Holy Spirit” as part of a “Trinity,” totally incomprehensible to me, was as easily dismissed as the myth of the Immaculate Conception, the virgin birth of Jesus and the cult built around his mother Mary, the “mother of God.” What I began to see clearly was the disastrous part Christendom had played in the history of mankind. In the name of the“Prince of Peace,”violent crimes, instigated and sanctioned by the church,had been committed for almost two millennia: from the Crusades,the The Promised Land 299 Spanish Inquisition, Martin Luther’s suggestion to burn the synagogues of those Jews who stubbornly refused to accept the divinity of Jesus, all the way to their nearly total eradication amidst an enlightened and civilized Christian society. During the Holocaust, in the hour of its greatest challenge, when the need for simple, decent human behavior became a vital issue,the church of Jesus Christ,including the figure of the“HolyFather,”declaredinfallibledeputyof God,provedadisasterof hithertounknown dimensions.Only fifty years following the Shoah would there be a pope who asked the Jews’ forgiveness for the Catholic Church’s fatal role during the Third Reich.It was not,as Martin hadexpresseditsoappropriatelyinhisGöttingenaddresstostudentsin1946,thatthechurch had done little, if anything, over the centuries to stem anti-Semitism in all its unexplained and unsurpassed cruelty; it had done nothing! The institutional church had not just been a fellow traveler of evil, but, in fact, was the instigator of all the pain and suffering connected with the abuse of those who refused to accept Christ as the Savior. When the centuries-old legend of the Jews being responsible for the death of God’s son proved to be insufficiently effective, a brand-new concept of them as a foreign, alien, and therefore evil“race”was not only not protested, but actually supported by the Christian church. The statement of the self-styled German philosopher Heinrich von Treitschke, “The Jews are our misfortune!” was taken up with blissful enthusiasm. This eagerly accepted ideology, allowed to grow and fester without restraint, spread like a poisonous fungus, ultimately leading to the almost total elimination of the Jews as an unwanted race. The straight road to Auschwitz, in clear contrast...

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