Well, I suggest you try, charlotte quin. If a group was founded by evil people, but the innate purpose of the group is not harmful (such as a dance club), and the evil which spawned it, is dispelled, and located in the past, ignore it. The ghosts of the past should be laid to rest in such instances, if nobody even knows of the history, let alone practices whatever unpleasantness they were practicing when the ass-clowns were running the circus, so to speak, then the present members cannot be held responsible for the acts of their predecessors, any more than I or you could be held responsible if our distant ancestors proved to be vikings who conceived our forefathers by rape and pillage It is the responsibility of those who DID the bad things, not those who simply use a place intended for positive activity for that purpose, when some of its previous inhabitants proved to be assholes. You bear no guilt, unless you yourself participated in, or could have stopped it and did not act to do so. Although in the last case, IMO the guilt born is less than that of the architects of the ill-deed(s). And if you tried, and failed after doing your best, or left a bunch of scumbags to torment other scumbags then you bear no guilt, and the graves of old sins need not be disinterred. The ghosts of the past should, in some cases, remain just that.
Just try to enjoy yourself, and do as you would be done by. In vanishingly few and far between sets of circumstances could the above two principles together equate to wronging others. And unless the 'as you would be done by' includes sadomasochism, etc. then do unto others as thou wouldst be done unto, take things easy and try have a good time is a good path to walk in life. And try to recognize that even the best of us, cannot accomplish having the best outcome of a situation occur in all things. We are human, and humans are fallible. You can't take the poison out of a snake in the grass, the best you can do is to warn others there is a serpent in their midst and point out its position.
And just because a PLACE has even the worst of histories, it does not mean that it must remain a place of evildoing. Take Auschwitz for example. Once a place of torture and murder of the worst kinds, doubtless including many of our own sub-species, now the place is a memorial. That doesn't mean the jews who go there now, bear the guilt of the nazis who comitted the atrocities. A place itself is just that, it cannot commit an act, only living beings can commit a deliberate act, wrong, right, benign or vile.
CQ, thats the best I can offer, at least, without knowing the specific history and current situation. But it is offered in the spirit of support, and in the hope of providing comfort. Don't eat yourself up inside over what others have done in the past.
My own thoughts...I now know what to get my old man for xmas. At least one big bottle of good dark rum. My uncle, is easy to get for. Or rather, make for. I'd have included some booze but recently, probably as a result of some relatively recently DX'd Wegener's granulomatosis, he's on various meds, and I don't want to risk harming him, although I'll certainly do a lot of digging into Wegener's, more reading than I know already on methotrexate, etc., and he had to go into hospital just a few days ago after a stroke (he's had multiple TIAs, not sure about this one, it may well have been more major than 'just' a transient infarct) I've not seen him since, so if I get him any booze, and I won't, without much reading to make sure I know potential consequences, and if I do, I'll tell him he's free to give it away to others, or return it to the store for the money, and that I'll get him something else.
He IS easy to please in one way though. Every year, I make him a big batch of homemade ginger-spiced oat flapjacks, because this guy has an appetite big enough for the two of us put together, with room left over, even after my old man joins the xmas get together. My uncle has a stomach that can eat for the three of us and then for itself. Before coming back for seconds. And he LOVES flapjacks. I've never had a complaint yet. In fact I reckon NOT making a batch of xmas flapjacks could be grounds for complaint
Its as easy to please him that way as it is to ensure a tank of piranha fish are satisfied. (although I think he'd probably object if I tried to feed him raw, semi-living fish, or human bodyparts. Probably. Certainly the raw, dying fish complete with guts. Might get away with a 'next year, try something different' if I brought him a rack of honey-roast people-ribs though
I reckon in the next life, he'll get reincarnated as a starfish, since they are capable of quite literally everting their stomach through their mouths to eat
(they use their tube-feet on the arms to wrench apart bivalve mollusks, at least in many cases, although some eat coral, such as the nasty little sucker called the crown of thorns, which devastates coral reefs in plague proportions sometimes, and to boot, has pretty few and far between candidates by way of predator species due to its having about a foot-wide central disc body covered, as are the tops of the arms in viciously sharp spines, coated in some pretty seriously nasty venom)
Not the sort of thing that strikes one as an ideal breakfast. But I bet he'd love the whole 'temporarily puke out your stomach in order to get it to the food faster' gig. (that said, I've tried oysters, and for all some people rave about them, eating a deceased loogie (I refuse outright to do what some do to the poor creatures, and swallow them alive, after severing their adductor muscle, again, whilst they are alive [the muscle bivalves like clams, oysters, razor-shells etc. use to open and shut their shells), even in such primitive creatures as crustaceans, brutally injuring a creature and then swallowing it alive disgusts me.
They may, or may not be capable neurologically of perceiving 'pain', as opposed to reflexive escape due to nociceptive stimulus, but given the moral consequences of being wrong and assuming they cannot, I can only take the view that the only right way to use them for food, is to at least grant them a death designed to minimize suffering if they are capable of it, just in case, same goes with things like lobster, I couldn't boil one alive, and stand there listening to it scream. It might be reflexive, it might not. But if it isn't, then that is brutality of a most abhorrent kind being meted out to a living creature. And, whilst I eat meat, I sure as shit don't keep a cow around in the garden, go out and slice a fucking steak off it and burn the wound shut to keep it from bleeding out before I can eat the rest. The question is often asked 'why should we stun them electrically' (there is a device available for electrically shocking a lobster senseless before its cooked, available commercially, called 'crustastun'), but rather, why should we not. The only answer I could think of someone could rationally give is money spent on the device. But at what price can the right to potentially torture an animal be bought? IMO, there is not one payable which justifies it, even if its a maybe. Only thing to do is assume that such treatment IS barbaric and act accordingly when they are to be eaten. I'm willing to go so far as to assume a single-celled organism like an amoeba cannot suffer, but you'd not get me inflicting such treatment on even such an organism as a jellyfish, with a distributed nerve-net in lieu of a traditional brain, since the price of getting the facts wrong, is both extreme and to be paid by the creature.
(the whole uncle reincarnated as a starfish mental image kinda sent me on a bit of a mental tangent) I'm odd like that. Who'da thunk it, a dyed in the wool spazz being odd (usually its the NTs that are fucking weird buggers, I'm otherwise perfectly normal
)
At least the voices in my head tell us me am normal.
, and quacks like a 