Similar to the Nazis are Holocaust deniers.

I seem to find people that I have great objections to to fall into one of two main categories.

The first are people who are driven to believe or advocate for something that they, deep down in their hearts, know to be immoral. But they "rationalize" their advocacy of this position.

This first type comes in a number of flavors, one of the most prominent being modern-day Pharisees of the type that Jesus condemned (it has been argued that Jesus gave the Pharisees a raw deal, but I get what He was complaining about). You often find in this group fundamentalists and literalists of whatever religious text they believe in who take things to extremes. There is also another subgroup who are emotionally and psychologically twisted.

The second type are conspiracy theorists, pseudoscience types and other believers in the unbelievable.

Sometimes, these people are good moral people; they just have certain hangups when it comes to skeptical and rational reasoning, including a desire to make reality conform to their wishes and hopes. Others have more nefarious reasons, especially cases where they misuse (or are misused by) the human tendency to group conformity and respect for authority to promulgate (or believe in) "alternative facts".

I mention these two groups because Holocaust deniers can be in either group, but Nazis seem to be more in the first.

My personal experience with a Holocaust denier was the following.

At the period in my life when I was an active believer in Ayn Rand's ideas and also a member of the US Libertarian Party, a member of the Unitarian Universalist church I went to decided to run for a local election as a Libertarian. So I helped him out.

He was more of the "conspiracy theorist" type, but the sort of person who advocated "far-out" ideas just because he loved playing with ideas and then being "in-your-face" in advocating them. Some fellow parishioners could not stand him. Me, I am the type who likes to play with ideas, so I was willing to play along with him.

Because I love a good argument, I have ended up in cordial conversations with all sorts of people, including Creation Research, 6,000 years old, Noah and the Flood, Bible believers who happened to be PhDs who worked at Bell Labs, and at other times, people who were members of the Communist Party. In short, religious and political types of all flavors.

But Holocaust denial is taking the game too far. He was arguing a type of extreme skepticism that maintained that the historical evidence is unbelievable.

My nature is to be, at first, agreeable. So my objections arise after they leave, a form of "L'esprit de l'escalier" if you will.

In this case, when this person made this argument, I was faced with a dilemma, one that is actually easy to resolve. I could (a) believe him or (b) believe my father.

My father was born in 1924 in Eindhoven. He went through hell in World War II. He did tell stories about it - sometimes. Like when the soldiers shot two young Jewish girls and left them to bleed to death in the street. And no one could help. Or the story of one of his brothers, who was convicted of underground activities and gassed. As far as I can tell, it was one of these mobile gas chambers that used carbon monoxide from the engine. It didn't always work completely. Oma pulled her son's body from the pile but he was not dead. But it did destroy this young man's health: he died in 1950.

But what is the appropriate reaction? That evening, I listened in silence. And brooded over this person and his viewpoint for days. What makes a person want to be so much of an intellectual rebel that they would take this kind of stance?

I don't know. Like so many other conspiracy theorist types, I just don't get it. I can play with ideas to a certain extent but eventually my skepticism and reality testing (along with, I hope, enough human decency to know when a stance blasphemes the Holy Spirit) will bring me to back down to earth. I just can't fathom this type who goes to extremes and stays there.

In a case like that, I have no answer. I also have no grounds for discussion from then on.

I never saw or talked to him again.