In my writings, rantings and general scriptus vomitus, people have accused me of making blanket statements against people. And honestly, they're correct. I am not ashamed of this. I do, on occasion, blame the innocent for harm done by those in their group. You may be asking yourself what kind of person would hold an entire group of people responsible for actions that only some of them have committed. The answer is WE do... all of us.
I've always found it a bit comical how many people will jump out of the woodwork to defend a hundreds-of-millions-of-members group like Christians from little ol' me, and I've been doing some thinking about it because it simply doesn't make a lot of sense.
What I find the most fascinating about this psychological knee-jerk is that it demonstrates that we would ultimately rather absolve the innocent than blame the guilty.
To paraphrase a conversation I once had:
"Catholic priests are horrible! More of them turn up having molested children every day!"
Response:
"It's unfair to say that. Not ALL Catholic priests do that!"
How quickly we lean toward forgiveness of a group by demonstrating what it's NOT doing than condemning them for what they ARE doing. But wait a minute here... If the whole group isn't collectively guilty because some priests are not molesting children, then why isn't also the whole group collectively guilty because some of them are? If it's wrong to proclaim a whole group guilty for something being done by part of the group, isn't it just as wrong to proclaim them innocent for the same reason? It's as if the fact that 10 priests raping children is acceptable as long as 20 of them weren't! And this is a logical atrocity that I hear spewed over and over, by people from all walks of life.
If one person condemns ALL of the police force for shooting unarmed
people, another person will absolve ALL of the police force for spending
a quiet night with doughnuts and somehow walk away, happy with himself
that he corrected such a fallible blanket statement.
Where exactly is the line drawn? If 2 out of a million people abstain from stabbing penguins, are they still all innocent because "Not ALL of them stab penguins!" How much of a group must be guilty before the whole group is? Who sets this number and what basis do they use? The fact is we ALL set this line for ourselves based on who we are and what we believe. And in spite of what you, yes YOU, might think, no one's "group guilt line" is any more or less correct than your own.
And, unsurprisingly, this defense of the innocent only applies to statements we don't already agree with.
Remember when I said we all hold groups responsible for the actions of a few? By percentage, only a small number of Nazis ever killed any Jews. As as distasteful as the topic is, it's just a fact. The majority of the Nazi war force held desk jobs, repaired equipment, drove supply vehicles... fairly menial tasks. They certainly weren't all running through the street blowing away members of a specific religion. Yet where are all the people to jump up and defend the Nazis when I proclaim that the Nazis were collectively an evil group?
In a society where we consider someone who downloads kiddie porn just as guilty as the person who took the pictures, how can we disassociate the blame between a Christian who is protesting against gay rights and the very pastor who encouraged it simply because he's not also standing on the street with a sign? It simply makes no sense.
My only hint of an answer to this lies in a certain selfishness. Very few of us knows or cares about any Nazis or child molesters. On the other hand, quite a few of us have friends or family who are Catholic, police officers or Christians. Our "group guilt lines" are in direct connection with our desire to fool ourselves into thinking we couldn't possibly care for a complete scum bag or two. If the group in question isn't present or able to defend themselves, we judge them all. If, on the other hand, we know a member or two of the group and have judged them to be good people, then it's wrong to judge the whole group, no matter what they do.
But keep this in mind. The very moment we make the choice to separate who is guilty and who is not, we are doing the same thing as those who have judged us. 70 years ago, would it really have been less ignorant to have a moral separation between the "good" and "bad" black people than to judge them all bad?
Either we're all guilty or we're not, folks. And the fact is, we're all guilty. And while I find it inspiring that human beings tend to favor innocence to guilt, I have been judged far too often to think I'm qualified to separate the wheat from the chaff. Thus, my personal "group guilt line" is set very low. If you disagree with it, that's fine. But you might want to take a look at where you've set yours and ask if it's any more correct.
