Ideas and Consequences
(The following was a portion of my letter to my congregation on 8 April 2021) Viktor Frankl, a Jewish neurologist and psychiatrist, survived the Nazi concentration camps of Aushwitz and Dachau during World War 2. He became famous later for his book Man’s Search for Meaning which he wrote many years after his nightmarish confinement. In 1995, around his 90 th birthday, Frankl was interviewed in First Things . He made this very interesting observation: “ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers .” Here is where I’m going with this: Ideas have consequences. People act, make decisions, and do things—good, evil, or otherwise—and those actions don’t just drop out of thin air. Those actions, our actions, come from ideas of right and wrong, good and bad. That’s why it’s important to have teac...
