Žižek on secular humanism and the Shoah

"When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offense against human laws, something was lost." [Habermas]

Which is why secular-humanist reactions to phenomena like the Shoah or the gulag (amongst others) are experienced as insufficient: in order to reach the level of such phenomena, something much stronger is needed, something akin to the old religious topic of a cosmic perversion or catastrophe in which the world itself is "out of joint"—when one confronts a phenomenon like the Shoah, the only appropriate reaction is to ask the perplexed question Why did the heavens not darken?" (the title of Arno Mayor's book). Therein resides the paradox of the theological significance of the Shoah: although it is usually conceived as the ultimate challenge to theology (if there is a God and if he is good, how could he have allowed such a horror to take place?), it is at the same time only theology that can provide the frame enabling us to somehow approach the scope of the catastrophe—the fiasco of God is still the fiasco of /God/.

Slavoj Žižek, God in Pain, pp.157f.