By Ted Almen

For once, I am not going to mention the name of Donald Trump in my column. Oh no, I just mentioned Donald Trump. And now I did it again, I said Donald Trump…

And so goes the bit from ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail,’ a classic movie from 1975 which I first saw at one of the two downtown movie theaters formerly in Willmar, and have subsequently watched over and over again. Parts of the movie, as I’ve mentioned in a previous column, are famously quotable, if not always 100 percent accurately. “English pig-dog, I fart in your general direction, you wiper of other people’s bottoms. Your father was a hamster and your mother smelled of elderberries,” for example. And did you know you can purchase elderberry extract from the Potpourri Health Foods store in Willmar? I have no idea what elderberries smell like, nor what they can do for you.

(The lede sentence is a take-off from the Knights Who Say Ni, in case you’re wondering. Check out Monty Python if you are in the mood for a flick that is so dumb it’s hilarious.)

Anyway, back to not mentioning Donald Trump in this week’s column — damn, did it again. What I actually wanted to write about was a something seriously dumb — as opposed to fun-dumb — which was posted as a letter to the editor in a regional newspaper about the time when Alex Pretti had been gunned down in cold blood on a street in Minneapolis by incompetent and criminally culpable ICE agents. The letter writer, believe it or not, was attempting to justify this homicide by quoting the Bible:

“The apostle Paul in Romans 13:2, of the Holy Bible, states: “Whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do will bring judgement on themselves.”

And my first reaction to this was: “So Hitler was right after all?”

Of course not, but as ludicrous as that statement is, the simple-mindedness of a supposed Christian in skewing words of the Good Book to cover evil-doing is more likely to cause people to reject religion than to accept such a misinterpretation of scripture. While I will be the first to admit that I am far from being any kind of a Biblical scholar, even such a poor student as myself can understand that in no way does the Bible — and especially not the New Testament — condone the shooting of a man 10 times in the back as he was being restrained on the ground by a half dozen men. It just does not calculate.

While researching this subject some words of wisdom appeared on my computer screen from a place called Bayside Church which addressed Romans 13:1-7. Not inconsequently, the author of said insight also pointed to my knee-jerk reaction about Adolph Hitler’s lack of Godly authority, and noted that besides the six million Jews who everyone knows were exterminated by the Nazis during WWII, there were another five million non-Jewish people murdered (not even mentioning the 15 million military deaths and millions more civilian deaths due to that brutal war).

“Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, blacks, the physically and mentally disabled, political opponents of the Nazis, dissenting clergy, resistance fighters, prisoners of war, Slavic peoples, and many individuals from the artistic communities whose opinions and works Hitler condemned.” All were in Hitler’s sights as poisoning the blood of his ideal Aryan Nation.

A few years ago I was loaned a book on the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor in Nazi Germany. This man railed against the atrocities he and every other minister and priest and civilian in that nation were seeing unfold before their eyes. Unlike the courageous and devoted Bonhoeffer, most people remained silent, or in the realm of thinking by the aforementioned letter writer, they just accepted the infallibility and sanctity of authority. By their compliance, the German citizenry which included most of the so-called reverends (some who rationalized the Third Reich in their services), had a hand in the horrors. Bonhoeffer was martyred for his outspoken beliefs just weeks before the fall of Hitler.

People like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and more recently the late Congressman John Lewis (“Get in good trouble”), Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and others (service members should not obey “illegal orders”) and Alex Pretti who stepped in between a woman and the ICE agents who were assaulting her are reminders that, if anything, authority by itself is no promise of righteousness. Blind faith and unwavering loyalty are great attributes for a dog, but God gave man a brain to discern right from wrong. People honor their Maker when they actually use it.