Iraq war fuels terror. I just wondered if it'd ever be admitted to.
Honestly, did you think it'd go differently? Violence breeds violence. Injustice breeds further injustice.
How long must we go over this?
Didn't the Master speak to this?
But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.
If the Master teaches that this is the better way, why would we think that in matters of politics or global terrorism that it'd be different. It's a sad thing to me that so many people under the label Christian do not see a connection between the man's teachings and their world. Truly something has been lost.
4 comments:
"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." -- George Santayana
Do you remember reading what happens when evil is not responded to and removed? Hitler, Mussolini, Milosevic ring a bell?
What you don't seem to understand is that terrorism will increase despite the US response to it. Muslim fanaticists will reign terror whether we don't respond ("the US is weak") or we do respond ("see, the US is our enemy").
Re-read your history (and your Bible), and realize that Christ also dealt with evil (e.g., turning the tables at the Temple Mount). He did not always walk away and turn the other cheek. That's a very pie-in-the-sky, unrealistic worldview.
And this is what the end-result is of that thinking. To quote the article:
When his biographer, Louis Fischer, asked him in June 1946 if, in light of the Holocaust, he regretted the words he had addressed to Germany's Jews, Gandhi said: "Hitler killed five million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher's knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs."
Fischer asked: "You mean that the Jews should have committed collective suicide?" Gandhi answered: "Yes, that would have been heroism."
I'm going to leave some space here before I do any sort of explanation or conversing for my part. It is clear that Neil (my brother) and I have some pretty different understandings on war and how the Kingdom is realized/resurrected/midwifed in our world.
Just to have some other conversation partners, here are a couple friends who have made some observations around this same report. I hope they don't mind me referencing them.
Damien's Throughts
Will's Thoughts
First let me say that I know that at least 1/2 of what I think to be real and true and correct probably isn't. I am a broken human being, attempting to come to grips with my world.
That being said, while I understand that we hold very different understandings of how the world works and how God works in our world, it amazes me that people seeking to follow the same Master can see things so differently. But I guess it's not unlike 2 people seeing the same movie and getting completely different things out of it.
There is great joy in diversity, but sorrow in lack of unity...particularly on something as pertinent in our time as war. And I really think that you are off-base, Neil. True, the turning over the tables in the Temple was such a significant event. And I agree with you that Jesus didn't come to just say nice things to people and tell people to "just get along". This type of non-interactive "live and let live" approach is seldom helpful.
However, as a follower of the Man who did just what Gandhi recommended to the Jews of the 20th century, I don't understand your own disconnect. Was his not a voluntary laying down of his life? Are we not to follow the example of the Master? And did he not lay down his life to show the extent of how this Way was to be lived?
Why would we think that it would be any different for us? I think that many in our world have bought a lie that Jesus' teachings make sense in certain things, but not in all things...that somehow this Kingdom Ethic only applies to certain spiritual things. I just don't see this as consistent with Scripture.
How did Jesus tell us that this Kingdom of Goodness (and therefore ALL GOOD THINGS) would advance? As a mustard seed being crushed into the earth, as yeast into bread, by selling everything we have to hold that which is most precious. By a laying down of life, not a taking of life.
Perhaps we will simply have to agree to disagree...but I must say that there is a bit of disappointment in saying that.
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