 Hi, welcome to a real conversation in English between two native English speakers. I'm Liz Wade, and this is Adam Navas. Hi, Adam. Hello, Liz. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm fine. Good. And we are going to talk about one of our recent spotlight programs. This week's program, Bonhoeffer, Making Difficult Choices. If you have not listened to that program or seen it on YouTube yet, you can find a link in the description. And actually, while you're looking down in the description, make sure that you notice that join button to become a member of our channel so that you can get extra perks, including PDFs of scripts. That's a very difficult word to say. PDFs. PDFs. And other exclusive member videos and all sorts of great things like that. And while you're there as well, click that little Subscribe button if you haven't already, and then click the bell to always get a notification when there's a new video, because we have a lot of good stuff, I think, and we don't want you to miss any of it. If you are listening on Spreaker, you can also find that link, listen to that program, and then have your say in our conversation by posting a comment on Facebook or sending us an email or visiting our website at www.spotlightenglish.com, any of those methods to get in touch with us and join this conversation, because we really do love to hear what you have to say. And I think this program especially is a great opportunity for you to share your opinions, because it is about ethical choices, which is always an interesting topic to me. We can imagine what we would do in situations that we learn about. And so this one, Adam, you wrote this program. I did. And it's fascinated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which is the— Yeah, I was actually—I was going to ask two questions of you. Oh, okay. First, what made you write this program? And if you could tell us a little bit about it. So you've already started, so you go for it. So Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and a pastor living in Germany during the 1930s, 40s, when they were Nazis. And what was fascinating about him is he actually came to the United States and studied some of the ant-nonviolent actions that were going on in the United States to change some of the society where we are. Decided it was more important to go back and to fight against what he saw as evil and hateful, and I think most of the world agrees now it was, but also how those beliefs went up against reality and how his life story actually—he got involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, a failed plot, but a plot nonetheless, and he eventually was caught and imprisoned and killed for those plans, but he thought it's still a good thing to kill one person. And so, of course, we hear that, and it's very easy when your life is not being threatened or when other people's lives are not being threatened to say, well, it's never good to kill somebody. Yeah, well, this program begins with a shocking question like, would you ever kill someone? Yeah. And of course, all people, hopefully, are going to say, no, I would never kill someone. But then, you know, you learn a little bit more of the situation and the question I think that ethical question of the program is, would you save or sorry, would you kill one person to save millions? And it's actually not—it's not a guarantee, right? If he had killed Hitler, maybe someone else would have stepped into his place. Maybe it would have been worse. Who knows, right? But that question, what do you do? What is the good choice, right? What is the ethical choice? So I think that's really interesting. I think it's a good idea to set the scene a little bit, to think about what sort of situation he was in there. So the Nazi party was rising to power, right? So they were gaining more power in Germany. And there were German people who said that what they were doing was wrong and they did work against the Nazis. But one of the things that I think really hit Bonhoeffer, or Bonhoeffer, it's a German name so it's really difficult for us to say, one of those things that really affected his life was that he was a person in the church who was a leader, right? He was a pastor, right? Yeah. Yeah. The Nazi party said that any church that wasn't a nationalist church was illegal. And so I think that's really what started to me in this story, what makes it seem like when he really started saying, wait a minute, that is not what I believe about being a Christian. Right. Yeah. He took what many of Jesus', well, all of Jesus' teachings very seriously. And there's a series of programs, or a series of teachings in the Bible called the Beatitudes, which are a series of blessings for people who are poor and who are troubled and are, I'm going to say put upon, but there must be a better way of, down-trodden, oppressed. Oppressed, yeah. Yeah. Good one. And so he took those seriously and said, you know, we need to care about these people who are being hurt, like there are a lot of stories in the Bible about Jesus' teachings in the Bible about like caring for your neighbor and taking that very seriously. And he really felt like he had to act. And even when he was eventually killed, he was willing to act knowing that if he got caught, he understood that what would happen. And he accepted that. Right. He accepted that. Because of course, that was a super dangerous thing that he was doing, right, plotting to assassinate a country's leader. Yeah. And I think it's really easy for us to say, well, Hitler was a bad person. The Bonhoeffer was a good person. However, there are plenty of times where we judge situations like I can't believe that person tried to kill that world leader because they're just values, their way of seeing, but they thought they were doing what they were supposed to do. So it's really hard to get into the mind of someone who is still a person, right? What could they be thinking that I could relate to even though I don't understand why they would do that? Right. There is like a famous, I will say like quote-unquote ethical question about like would you go back in time if you could, and this is like silly, right? Yeah. This is a sillier thing. And like kill Hitler as a baby, like before even ran game to power. And you can say that about like any terrible leader figure, right? Who ends up killing hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. Right, exactly. Like if you could prevent a genocide by killing this person as a baby. I think that's something for our listeners and watchers to put in the comments. Would you go, would you, if you could, yeah, what would you do if you could? See Adam, some of our listeners might know if they have watched or listened for a very long time that I am a huge sci-fi fan. I thought you were going to go somewhere with this. And I think that I have seen enough science fiction to know that when you go back in the timeline, you only mess things up. It never goes well. You don't make things better. So yeah, I don't, I personally probably would not go back and kill baby Hitler even, yeah. I don't think I could kill a baby. Teenage Hitler. Yeah. Yeah. What a crazy conversation we're having right now. I know. It's a little odd. We apologize to anyone who wanted to come to here and hear a pleasant conversation about pizza, ice cream or sport and instead this is what you got. So getting back to this science fiction, going back in time never works. But what I do think, but that's just, that's just TV science fiction. Real time travel could go well. But I think the point, because science fiction usually has a point that is applicable for us in our current situation, even without time traveling devices, right? And I think it just means that we have a lot of work to do here, right? To make our world a better place where we are now and to continue to make the best decisions that we can. And I think I hadn't thought about this before this conversation, but part of what we are doing to try and make this world a better place is the Ten Ways to Fight Hate series. And I think that is actually a really good sort of companion or partner to this program. So maybe the question of what you would do if you were Bonhoeffer isn't something that you know how to answer, but going forward and making the world a better place, that is something that we can do and we can learn more about it and we have ten programs all about it. Well, not ten yet, but they're coming. And so I think that is hopefully a helpful thing for our listeners and, yeah, for everybody, for me to think about, for you to think about. And I hope we're never in a situation where we have to kill anyone. Yeah. Yeah. Let's end on that. If you have gotten this far in this conversation about some very weird and, I don't know, things that make me feel uneasy, kudos to you. Good job. Good job. If you would like to learn more about membership, again, push that join button that's right under this video or follow the link if you're listening to this as a podcast. We hope that you can subscribe, that you have, that you constantly download our podcast. We think it's great. And that you can check out our website, spotlightenglish.com. You can find us on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And yeah, let us know what you think about this program, what you would do in an ethical situation. And until next time, listen, watch, practice, learn, Spotlight Out.