When they heard this,"Go and take your place in the temple area, and tell the people everything about this life."
they went to the temple early in the morning and taught.
"When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home."
When an angel commands you to do something, you do it. It doesn't matter that the authorities will be upset, or that what you're doing seems without precedent and is certainly unexpected. We could wish our instructions were so clear as that which the disciples received; and our position in the Lord's chain of command so apparent.
"What makes this situation much more disturbing is the awareness that 'if it could happen on such a massive scale elsewhere, then it can happen anywhere; it is all within the range of human possibility, and like it or not, Auschwitz expands the universe of consciousness no less than landing on the moon."
By 1998. the world had watched helplessly the genocides in Rwanda, Boznia, and other nations. Although the world agreed that the slaughter was immoral and indecent, it violated no international agreement. A sovereign state may do whatever it chooses to its own citizens within its own boundaries. Mr. Trump's invasions of Venezuela and Iran notwithstanding.
In the first chapters, Bauman recalled the myth of progress that dominates our thinking. We have heard all our lives how the human creature has struggled since prehistoric times to master its savage impulses with rationality, and that we are indeed making progress in that contest. They tell us we are not like our barbaric ancestors; modern religions no longer condone the reckless waste of human life which we find even in the Bible. We have laws and lawyers, statutes, and legally authorized officers to make sure we behave in a civilized way toward one another. Despite whatever disagreements our legislatures may struggle over, they are committed to law and order, and recognizing everyone's rights.
The Holocaust should have destroyed that myth but experts have managed to relegate the entire story to an aberration, an unfortunate relapse to an archaic past which will probably never happen again. The empires which managed the world in 1900 have passed away; and besides, Putin's project of restoring the USSR is doomed to failure.
In 1998, Bauman sought to shed a sobering light on that and other myths, and to show how modernity enabled, encouraged, and facilitated the Nazi attempt to rid Europe and the world of Jews. There remains nothing today in our value-free, economically-driven society to prevent its happening again. Science and technology continue to create new medical, pharmacological, and military methods without regard to their uses or moral consequences. They do it because it can be done. Experts in AI admit they do not know how it corrects its own mistakes.
Anxious responses from professional ethicists are always too little, too late, and too cautious; and in a free speech society their considered opinions weigh no more than those of any illiterate consumer.
In today's reading from the Acts of the Apostles we hear of Peter and John's obedience after the Angel set them free. They hardly needed his command; they were eager to preach and the opportunity was there; bureaucracies, police, rules, and protocols notwithstanding. It's the captain and court officers who must proceed cautiously, "because they were afraid of being stoned by the people."
With all due respect to rationality and the progress of STEM, we need and must follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit in this post-modern, post-Holocaust, post-scientific, post-Christian world. God knows the future and where we are going. He will direct those who listen.
