It was a different time! You can’t judge by today’s standards!

Mass murder excuse #23.

Only, we’ve always known that it is gravely immoral to deliberately kill innocent human beings. And people knew it in 1945. For instance, Servant of God Dorothy Day knew it.

The difference between a saint and the rest of us is not that a saint knows super duper secret mystical stuff the rest of us don’t. It’s typically that a saint believes and lives ordinary common sense things we are too frightened or inconvenienced to believe and live, even though we know we should. That’s why they inspire us to be better people. It’s also why we so often put them to death.

“The Saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed, that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote.” – G.K. Chesterton

Speaking of saints who inspire (me) and irritate (all consequentialists and apologists for grave intrinsic evil), the inimitably delphic Zippy Catholic makes a pungent observation about the insistence on using fantasy scenarios in order to come up with some way of rationalizing acts that the Church says merit “firm and unequivocal condemnation” as a “crime against God and man”.