Today In History - Nuremberg Trials

I have this little feature on my iGoogle homepage that gives little facts about the day in history. The unschooler in me loves it - I can invest as much or as little of myself in learning about the things I am interested in. Yesterday was the anniversary of Lincolns 1846 Gettysburg Address. Today was the anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials. I did not realize as I read it how many people were tried and put to death. Astounding - and yet not a drip in the bucket compared to those who were killed and brutalized at their hands.
I got to thinking about whether or not something like Nazi Germany or the Gestapo could formulate again. Maybe I'm totally naive and they already exist right under my nose. There is certainly enough hate in the world. There are so many lessons to be learned from the Holocaust, but some have been twisted in translation. I think much of our whole culture of "tolerance" has come from this. Tolerance can be a good thing - when we learn to tolerate differences among us like skin color, religion, ethnicity, gender, handicaps and disabilities, etc. These are things people are born into and cannot change. The scary thing is that this tolerance has been spread in a thick layer across all sorts of things, and in essences asks us to say that sin is not sin. Let's face it, as Christians we are not so good at loving the sinner and hating the sin - and in so doing, we have put a label on our backs that says "intolerant" which instead of drawing people to Christ, has pushed them away. We have got to learn to love while we are saying as Christ said to those around us "go and sin no more", or we are just adding to the culture of hate.
Maybe I should point out, Hitler thought he was doing God's work of ethnic cleansing. Sin should make us angry - but let's remember who the real enemy is and look at others with the compassion that says, "there but for the grace of God go I."

You may now be excused to go and peruse blogs with cookie recipes!