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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.
That's a problem, though, isn't it? This way of thinking makes it easier to justufy the killing. All one has to do is convince the people that God is on their side so killing is OK.
Remember that those parts of the Bible were written by the very people who claimed God said it was OK to kill their enemies.
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.
I think speaking up has some value even if it doesn't result in immediate change, sure.
Large parts of Christianity in the US identify closely with an increasingly extremist far right mindset that equates anything less that military response as weakness. This runs counter to the New Testament bias towards love and peace, which feels weak to them. Given that, they are not going to speak against war or in favor of peace and goodwill. Evildoers must be punished, in the style of the Old Testament jewish war god. Reconciliation and peace don't flourish in the context of black and white, us vs them, reward vs punishment thinking that much of US Christianity is either steeped in or cowed by.
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.
This is a great post. Any mother who loves her children would never want to see them turn into war mongering politicians and, least of all, become "warfighters" ( a new term for soldiers).
This conversation is more effective at taking Christians to task than anything atheists can dream up to attack their beliefs in Jesus.
There are also bad Americans who have killed people all over the world. No one is killing Americans just because they are Americans.
That's pretty naive to suggest that "bad Americans" are anywhere remotely as dangerous as Islamic terrorism.
And no, I'm not suggesting that all Muslims are bad, or even a sizeable percentage. But for the most part, it's not Americans wearing suicide vests in the hope of getting to paradise where we can spend eternity with 72 virgins.
Someone has to fight evil sometimes. In order to keep women and children safe for example. I don't think anyone in his right mind is pro war. In general. We are not so advanced as to live in peace and harmony forever. Unfortunately this is a world of duality. Even in Higher Ages there were/will be sociopaths like Stalin for instance. What to do with him? Give him roses and kisses when he comes to kill you all...
I had this discussion with an American friend. And I asked him, "What are you going to do if now, this moment, a guy comes with a hammer to kill you? Tell me." He never gave me a response. Like, I don't know..."I'll fight until I'll kill him first."
In theory it sounds so wonderful all this discussion about peace. Until the bad guys come for you.
I say, more peace on this planet comes when there will be more peace in more people. In their minds.
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.
Good question, like so many others...
I've developed a fair amount of frustration from always having to be spectator when it comes to these kinds of questions and considerations that none of us can really know much about looking from the outside in. Hard for me to believe the leaders of a government like ours doesn't do far more than you seem to give credit for in the way of assessment and use of our military, before "pulling the trigger," but of course history has well demonstrated that none of us can be too confident about that sort of thing.
And why too aren't there more men demonstrating for women's rights? More white people demonstrating for the rights of people of color. More straight people advocating for the rights of the LGBT community? Always seems the more I learn about all that goes on in politics, more questions are raised than answered...
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.
We just had Biden here in our local area assessing the storm damage and all California has gone through as a result of recent environmental disasters. Highlighting much in the way of how climate change is affecting us now and will do so well into the future. When he was done making his speech (in case you didn't catch this on the news), the very first question out of the reporter's mouth had to do with the classified documents controversy. Needless to say, the question irked him a bit, but to his credit he addressed it anyway. After admonishing the reporter for somewhat minimizing the problems for California he was there to address.
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.
Facts are important?
We are participating in the same forum. Aren't we?
That's a problem, though, isn't it? This way of thinking makes it easier to justufy the killing. All one has to do is convince the people that God is on their side so killing is OK.
Remember that those parts of the Bible were written by the very people who claimed God said it was OK to kill their enemies.
Mightyqueen, I would encourage you to read the Bible and acknowledge what it is. Your posts don’t suggest that you are familiar with it.
For example, you stated that prayer can’t stop a battle. But Joshua 10:13 certainly suggests that prayer can have direct effects on a battle, even stopping the sun. Do you not know what power prayer has, according to the Bible?
And you seem to be staying that the Bible contains statements that are “a problem”. The Bible is God’s Word (2 Timothy 3:16). I find it extremely difficult to accept the Old Testament and the bloodbath in it. But it has to be accepted as God’s Word, and if we acknowledge that God is perfect and all-loving, which He is (Mathew 5:48 and 1 John 4:16), then His actions need to be viewed as perfect and loving. It’s very hard to do with the Old Testament, but it must be done.
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