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                   Unintended Viciousness
                        A d v e r t i s e m e n t

     This translated conversation begins in German.
Sieger means victor. (web note: this refers to text of the story
on page 101 of the book.)

    Ray Suarez creates his monster (page 98) not out of any
maliciousness, but like Victor Frankenstein, out of a desire to
enlighten. Ray, of course, is counting on Frances and Leonard to
keep such egregious errors from going unchecked. He is not the
solipsist acting in isolation from the community that Catherine and
many of her students think is the problem to which Mary Shelley
was pointing in Frankenstein (page 50). The harm that results from
a well intended effort gone wrong is no less than that resulting from
an intentional injury. As discouraging glimpsing the contribution to
human suffering made by unruly moral tendency may be, it does
point to the considerable benefit that greater care would bring.
     Martin Luther saw the Church of Rome’s lack of compassion
for Jews as the reason for its failure to save them through
conversion to Christianity. Confident that his gentler approach
would succeed, Luther wrote of Jesus having been born a Jew.
Thus began Luther’s two part plan 1) to convince Jews that Jesus is
their Messiah and 2) to tell them that Jesus is God. The problems
with Luther’s plan are not difficult to see, if a simple, sincere and
fair review is undertaken. It was the God of Abraham who made
Moses appear to be a god to Pharoah. Abraham showed Nimrod
that idolatry would eventually lead to the worship of man (page
74). When Moses and transfigured Jesus meet, neither falls at the
other’s feet. Luther, lacking the courtesy of Nimrod, would not
listen to the delegation of Jews who came to him to explain why his
expectations of Jews were unwise. Soon Luther was condemning
Jews for being ungrateful for his effort to save them. The same
moral tendency, with which Luther set out to save the Jews of
Germany, led him to call upon the princes of Germany to do them
great harm.
     In Godwin’s view, it matters more that injustice be prevented
than it matters that people who have no intention of doing injustice
be protected from being exposed as having caused unintended
injustice. The examples of Luther, Suarez and others offered in
these advertisements are not the result of a desire to knock them,
but are included because they illustrate the error of misguided moral
tendency that is responsible for so much human misery.
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            To a Candid World, Copyright 1998,  Thomas Wolfsehr