Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
How can we teach our children that violence is not the answer in their own lives, when we endorse a government that is so quick to use violence to handle its own disputes?
I don't think that the human race does enough thinking about actual killing. It's sanitized for us by the media and politicians who push forward an active military industrial complex.
Our government kills thousands of innocents with drone strikes and most don't make the headlines. Spiritual and religious people too often don't know, or do know and find it acceptable. I understand some may say it is a necessary evil, but when our government has 11,000 to 21,000 causalities of innocent civilians using the drone strikes, it is time to reevaluate our policies and stand by our morals...what is religion without morals?
"Thou shalt not kill."
""An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.' But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." -Jesus
Quaker Norman Morrison set fire to himself to protest the Vietnam War, killing himself and leaving behind children. I disagree with that kind of extreme action, but people needed to stand up against that war. Today in Vietnam, there is a city named after him that lives on.
A very long time ago, in 2019, I had attended a drone strike protest....only a few people showed up and I was the only one with a sign focusing on the religious reasons for our government to not behave in such a way. In 2021, our government killed 10 innocent people with a drone strike by using an out of control policy...many children....and I attended another protest, with just a handful of the same people from 2019 and although they welcomed me and my religious message they wanted to know why more very religious people like me don't show up. I didn't know what to say.
It just seems to me like it is our responsibility to make our government follow proper morals and the most basic moral is opposing such violence.
I am sorry if this post crosses a line and do not mean for it to be bad. Please delete moderators if I am inappropriate here.
How can we teach our children that violence is not the answer in their own lives, when we endorse a government that is so quick to use violence to handle its own disputes?
Leaving aside the question of whether violence is ever an answer (even you say not that the government should never use violence, just not to be "so quick" in doing so), I think it is very similar to why there is so much denial and inaction in the face of the climate crisis. You can point out the scientific facts of the matter until you are blue in the face, you can make eloquent speeches about the immorality of business-as-usual, you can riff all you want on the terrible urgency of the matter, you can, like Greta Thunberg, go and wag your finger in the face of the oligarchs at Davos. But there's tremendous inertia and a tremendous leadership vacuum in the matter, so nothing changes, even as things fall down around our ears. There's also the fact that we are inherently not much moved by disasters that aren't unfolding in realtime for us personally.
It's like that with war. The war in Ukraine is undeniably a terrible one, but it's on the other side of the planet and the connection to any resulting shortages of food or fuel or disruptions in supply chains or pricing instability is very diffuse and not exclusive. So in the face of needing to drag your sorry touche out of bed in the morning to stagger off to work, there's not enough immediacy to push you to make a sign and join a protest which you know full well isn't going to move the needle anyway.
Ukraine is also a good example in that it was started and is persisted in by the will of one crazy person who would, if he could, consume a dozen or a hundred such countries in the service of his lust for power. To defend ourselves even by proxy against something like that seems like a regrettable necessity. People demand negotiated peace, but how do you negotiate with a completely depraved and irrational person with no sense of connection or interdependence on others? You can't. You can only destroy them or starve them out. Both require meeting violence with violence. We can of course do a postmortem and say, we should have avoided this or that needless provocation, or we should have acted sooner, perhaps after the annexation of Crimea. But even if we had done all those things "right" we might have ended up with the same net amount of warfare, or worse.
Indeed in the long run one can argue that the only way out of such provocations that doesn't end in global nuclear war is to give Russia enough rope to hang itself -- to expend its war machine and economy to its own ruin, making it a self-limiting problem. Let it wear itself out. Why do you think we are so slow and measured providing war implements to the Ukranians? They are being used to grind down Russia, while themselves being ground down. Cynical calculus or the only way? I don't pretend to know for sure.
I mention all this not to argue about the politics of the war but to point out that pacifism, counter-intuitively, can lead to even more violence than war itself, given what is known about human nature. Yes in theory we should all hold hands and get along but there's always some group refusing to do so, and then what?
From what I can gather from the peace movement the "then what" is faith that it will work out somehow, and you know how I feel about THAT.
Do you have a reputable source that can corroborate your claims?
And why do you believe we don't care?
Yes, I would like to see a link to support those numbers, too. Facts are important. The link in that paragraph is about a few hundred people being killed by drone strikes during the Obama administration, thereby obviously dated.
Good post, mordant, but I am not sure it answers QB's question about why religious people don't speak up more against war.
Your point that it won't make a difference is valid, but still...maybe the speaking up in and of itself has some value. Maybe the children will hear it and someday say, "hey, yeah, this is stupid.
I watch the news about the war in Ukraine, especially where I am, where refugees are coming in who have left people behind, and as old and cynical as I am, I still ask why the hell we humans keep doing this.
Well I have been doing my part for the last 20 years..I vote Libertarian for national elections.
The Libertarians are against war and believe the military should only exist to defend our shores, not to implement foreign policy.
How can we teach our children that violence is not the answer in their own lives, when we endorse a government that is so quick to use violence to handle its own disputes?
I don't think that the human race does enough thinking about actual killing. It's sanitized for us by the media and politicians who push forward an active military industrial complex.
Our government kills thousands of innocents with drone strikes and most don't make the headlines. Spiritual and religious people too often don't know, or do know and find it acceptable. I understand some may say it is a necessary evil, but when our government has 11,000 to 21,000 causalities of innocent civilians using the drone strikes, it is time to reevaluate our policies and stand by our morals...what is religion without morals?
"Thou shalt not kill."
""An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.' But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also." -Jesus
Quaker Norman Morrison set fire to himself to protest the Vietnam War, killing himself and leaving behind children. I disagree with that kind of extreme action, but people needed to stand up against that war. Today in Vietnam, there is a city named after him that lives on.
A very long time ago, in 2019, I had attended a drone strike protest....only a few people showed up and I was the only one with a sign focusing on the religious reasons for our government to not behave in such a way. In 2021, our government killed 10 innocent people with a drone strike by using an out of control policy...many children....and I attended another protest, with just a handful of the same people from 2019 and although they welcomed me and my religious message they wanted to know why more very religious people like me don't show up. I didn't know what to say.
It just seems to me like it is our responsibility to make our government follow proper morals and the most basic moral is opposing such violence.
I am sorry if this post crosses a line and do not mean for it to be bad. Please delete moderators if I am inappropriate here.
Thou shalt not kill means “don’t murder”.
In the Bible, the people of Israel, with God’s approval and support, killed lots of people, generally people who were in battle. Killing them was accepted.
Well I have been doing my part for the last 20 years..I vote Libertarian for national elections.
The Libertarians are against war and believe the military should only exist to defend our shores, not to implement foreign policy.
Political discussions in general are forbidden in R&S, and so I expect this post to be reported; however, in the context of this thread, are you saying that you have religious anti-war sentiments that moved you to express them in this way? Please clarify.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
