“Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world.”

If I can’t aspire to be the Lamb of God, can I at least aspire to be the Jackass of God?

Cringing or apologising is different than the image though. And WWII had an instantaneously more devastating effect on Europe than an elongated movement away from slavery. Germany was a broken country. And maybe that’s part of it… Germany lost and had to accept reparations and therefore guilt etc. (White) America never lost but learnt… judgmental clarity is therefore lacking.

Just to narrow this further, is there a non-American example? No doubt you can find a crazy Frenchman, but – and this may not be popular – this may well be an American cultural-historical rather than ethnic problem. The colonial powers just don’t talk about it on anywhere near the same scale.

The scriptures affirm that the first is not true (Children not guilty of the sins of their fathers) but that the second is (unto the ‘fourth’ generation)

It is obvious there are consequences of the choices, errors or otherwise, of previous generations. The question is what to do about them. The superstitious, emotional approach is to try to take on these errors as personal errors and ritually atone for them. This is called ‘scapegoating’. (In this case, the people have made themselves the scapegoats.)

In the scripture, the messiah takes the role of scapegoat, and ‘ritually atones’ for all error, past and future. However, his role in this regard is unitive, only he can do it due to various properties of his being (being God, for instance.) One of the forms of the messiah is the ‘suffering servant’, one who takes others’ errors upon himself and their afflictions upon himself, to remove them. Note that this process would be idiotic and insane if the ‘sufferer’ could not remove them. (How they are removed is a different subject.)

So it’s clear this is simply a form of a messiah-complex, something not unheard of in Christian history, but likely not unique to Christendom. The last time I can think of a significant display oft his was in self-flagellation during the Plague times. The difference though seems to be that these ‘sufferings’ (in video above) are not intended to ‘remove’ anyone else’s guilt, which is always a key to the behavior being inspired by Christianity. They are suffering to remove their own felt guilt for behavior someone else did; the Christian instead suffers to remove the guilt or consequences experiences by others because of what THEY did. (“I am the chief of all sinners.”)

Calling this behavior pagan does a disservice to pagans. It is debased without any genuine humility. About this particular deadly thought, John Cassian wrote, “The man who is afflicted by self esteem, if he cannot glory in his riches, he will glory in his rags.”

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2000-05-01/news/0005010158_1_slave-trade-benin-president-mathieu-kerekou

So, you don’t see the present day Mongolians getting all weepy in front of the billion descendants of all the people their ancestors subjugated / nearly exterminated. They thing Genghis Khan is awesome. Then again, no one cares about Mongolia anymore except as one giant mining operations with some yak butter tea on the side. Almost all of their exports are coal, copper, and iron ore which almost all go to China.

What about Turks and Armenians or anybody who pissed off the Sultan in the Ottoman empire? Ha! If, “Well you know, they really had it coming,” isn’t in the first three sentences of the response, you are dealing with one Turk out of a thousand. But there are no more Ottomans.

I’ve never seen a Russian get apologetic about Siberians or Central Asias, or Chinese about Tibetans, or Arabs and the Caliphate.

Is there one other example?