Absolutely, I bear responsibility for believing them. Granted, I was not permitted to believe anything else, having been raised in this religion. But the difference between pulling the trigger because you were ordered to do so and pulling the trigger because you wanted to, on your own, is irrelevant. We were still a party to it. The trigger was still pulled. We may have recruited others, or shunned people we once cared about, or watched as our children or the children of others died for one medical reason or another.
But the reason why our responsibility is far less is because we reached a point where conscience proved more important to us than following orders. We took a stand, and lived with the consequences. For that, we can at least find some solace for whatever part we may have had in it.
Also, the fact that we were not the ones GIVING the orders--unless you were an elder or maybe a parent or recruited someone--tends to help us gain a little solace. That may seem contradictory to what I just said earlier, but it's true. We didn't make the rules. We just lived by them or enforced them. That does make us partially responsible, but not entirely so.
--Christopher