War and Peace

[Paidiske]

You've basically just given the definition of an unjust war. It's really no way to oppose just war theory:

Hence Augustine says (Contra Faust. xxii, 74): "The passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the fever of revolt, the lust of power, and such like things, all these are rightly condemned in war." (Aquinas)​

And in which war are these things - the passion for inflicting harm, the thirst for vengeance, the lust of power - absent? I don't believe in "just war." It's an oxymoron.​

If a large family owns a farm and an armed group comes in to steal it from them the family can either defend itself and the land or concede, leave, and have no way to provide for their basic needs.

I have cousins who have faced pretty much this exact scenario. Their answer was to move country. Living constantly armed awaiting the next attack was no way to be, even if the attack never came.

This is part of what I mean when I say, our options are more expansive than "kill or be killed."

Or, if someone breaks the locks on your house when you are away, moves in, and changes the locks, I highly doubt that you would "be prepared to live as an exile." You would have recourse to the power of the State and would be content to have the State inflict violence on the perpetrators if they do not cooperate. If the criminals cannot be convinced or coerced to leave without physical violence then violence will be necessary. We are physical beings, after all. And if they have guns, then the violence will escalate. No one is just going to leave the criminals to themselves because they have guns, nor should they.

This is a separate issue to warfare, as such, but even so, let me note here my absolute opposition to the death penalty also. Even the State's power should have limits.

..but that God did not intend them in any way, because God too cannot use evil as a means?

This is starting to feel too speculative for me, personally. I don't know the mind of God on this matter and am content to leave it there.

Your objections to unjust wars above are responses to particular wars brought up by the OP, but here you give a more general syllogism: Seeking power and control over others is always an impermissible misuse of power; war is an (extreme) case of such seeking; therefore war is never permissible. Yet this syllogism is also unsound. War is not always a case of seeking power and control, or "domination." For example, self-defense has always been a part of the just cause of the jus ad bellum, as even affirmed by the United Nations.

The question of how one responds to an aggressor - as opposed to whether it is permissible to be the aggressor - is more complicated and often the victim has fewer options. That said, I would argue that self-defence to the point of killing ought to be a last resort.

Surveying the question of just war with the notion that all wars are unjust and all aggressors malicious...is not a convincing approach.

But when we look at the reality of war - when we consider the lives taken, the flesh maimed, the families broken, etc - how can we ever call such evil on a mass scale "just"? It cannot ever be just.

A basic difficulty of this sermon is that power can and has been wielded for good. There are wars that have come about precisely because people in power did not want to turn a blind eye to "those who don't have the resources to look after themselves." This is one way that God wielded his power in the OT, and one of the basic rationales for just war theory. For example, one of the reasons a nation can forfeit its international sovereignty is by violating the UN's Genocide Convention. If a modern-day Hitler popped up our treaties would require us to be prepared to go to war as a matter of duty and promise. Such would be a just war, and it would be waged for the exact reason you believe power exists in the first place.

I would argue that mass killing cannot ever be "for good." There are other ways to respond to oppression and injustice.

The notion that we should never exercise power in violation of another person's will is neither Christian, traditional, nor rational. There are people who do very evil things, and at times their will can and should be violated.

Ok, so we put the mass murderer in prison. Yes, this is a lesser-evil scenario. But in general, the principle holds that power exercised over others in violation of their will is wrong; and to do so to the point of death - on a massive scale - is, well, language fails me to articulate how completely wrong that is.

Where in the Bible do you believe warfare is condemned?

The commandment not to murder would be a basic starting point. Warfare is just basically mass murder.

In fact Paul seems to affirm the State's power of "wielding the sword."

Of justice, not of war!

And you'd have that same answer for everything, then? No Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46? No Hiroshima Peace Museum? No Khmer Rouge Tribunal? No trial for the likes of Mengistu Haile Mariam, or Martyrs Museum in Addis Ababa?

All of these are fine. What I was arguing was that pursuing war as a remedy for mass slaughter etc. was not open to us.

It seems more than a little anti-Christian, which is odd coming from a Christian clergyperson.

We are here discussing the permissibility of war from a Christian perspective, among Christians. I would oppose warfare just as fiercely in conversation with others, but the conversation would necessarily need to be different with them.

Ah, but the point is not to equate the two, but that to paint Christ as an entirely pacifistic character who would never raise a hand in anger is wrong. So saying things like "That's not following the example that Christ gave us" really depends on exactly what we're talking about. I think a righteous anger and a prerogative to protect the dispossessed and brutalized from further harm isn't out of the question.

Well, it's true that Christ got angry and acted on that anger. As far as I recall, though, he never killed anyone, and went to the cross to sacrifice his own life rather than seek violent power over others. That is our model.

He didn't lead an army as the Jews of His day were looking for their messiah to do, but neither has Christianity historically barred military service, the military saints again bearing witness.

In the very early church, catechumens were expected to leave the military before being eligible for baptism. Sadly, that requirement was later dropped.

I'm sorry, but wasn't Nazi Germany at least intending to be an empire, what with the invasions of Poland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc.? This isn't really comparable to how the Armenians basically stopped having an empire three centuries before becoming Christian, the Assyrians didn't even have anything they could call an empire since 609 BC, and Egypt's influence as a Christian power extended only so far as they were looked to by other independent Christian powers in Africa (in Ethiopia and Sudan), and was never a matter of military conquest of those places.

I don't think is a very good answer to my question, unless there's something I'm not understanding about Nazi Germany.

My point was that the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany was the church which defied Nazi ideology; it was the subversive element within the empire (akin to being the Armenians in Persia). And my point there was that even as the powerless, dispossessed and harassed minority within that society, its leaders did not paint having recourse to killing as a good and right answer to their situation.

The protestors at the Maspero TV building in Egypt were non-violent and the army ran them over with tanks and the police shot at them and a bunch of them died. The tax resistors at Beit Sahour in Palestine (80% Christian) were non-violent, and the Israeli army responded by arresting their leaders, raiding the houses of local families and seizing millions of dollars worth of personal property, cutting the town's telephone lines, and blocking food shipments, international aid, and human rights monitors from entering for nearly two months. Surprise, surprise, it didn't magically end the Israeli occupation, just like the peaceful demonstrators at Maspero didn't magically end the Egyptian state's persecution of the Coptic people. In both cases, it only gave the state another chance to do the same thing over and over again.

I'm not saying there aren't terrible, oppressive powers. I am only questioning war as an appropriate response to those powers.

Yes. We can do that in modern, pluralistic, secular, western liberal democracies. The dynamics of other societies, however, are not like they are in Australia, or New Zealand, or the United States. And they're not going to magically become that because you put down your rifle and start singing John Lennon's "Imagine" or whatever.

My family decided to move to Australia the day my mother was nursing in emergency, and ended up trying to save the life of a man who had sustained axe wounds to his belly during the apartheid riots.

But you know what? Apartheid didn't fall because of war. Yet it fell.

I'm not advocating silly hippy responses. I'm saying that warfare is just evil. It's a stupid senseless sacrifice of life - often in the millions - with uncertain outcomes, at best. There are other ways to confront the oppressors of this world.

Paidiske. You’re ideas seem to be premised on a liberal pacifist Idea...

I'd say "radical pacifist," rather than "liberal pacifist."

which to me cannot be reconciled with much of Christian history.

It's true that most Christians through history haven't been radical pacifists, although I think that strand has always been there.

If I am to take your Idea seriously that killing, under any circumstance is absolutely wrong, then the Idea of the State has no value. Paul accepted that the state has the authority of the sword to use and Paul knew that the punishment of execution was something regularly done to criminals. Basically, if I were to follow this logic then all modern nation states are illegitimate entities, since they have behind them the ultimate use of force if someone disobeys their laws.

That's an interesting implication. I'd say it certainly places some boundaries on the legitimate exercise of power by the state. As noted above, I am utterly opposed to the death penalty, and grateful to live in a country which has not imposed it since the 1960s.

This is a proposition which seems counter to what we are told to accept in the New Testament. That there is an authority that is right for governments to have.

There is, but I would say even that authority has - or ought to have - boundaries.

What you aren’t engaging with is the macro level results of Christian conquest in the past. You haven’t spoken on the Idea of how a Muslim Spain would have been better instead of a Christian Spain...

Because I think it's irrelevant to the question. A Muslim Spain might have been worse than a Christian Spain, and it still would not justify warfare. "We made the world a better place by killing ten million people!" is not a claim anyone can make without blushing, surely?

When it comes to seeking power over others, that’s simply the function of government. That power exists, is irrespective of our feelings towards it. Why should Christians be barred from it? Where in the New Testament are we told Kings and men of power and influence cannot wield authority? Nowhere, as far as I can tell. The New Testament simply doesn’t bring up the topic because it was not in the purvue of the writers of that time. Hence when Christianity came to dominate Rome, Christians had to ask themselves what it means to be part of a now dominant religion. They didn’t reject on mass their responsibility to govern. Why should they? Should power have been handed to the Julian the Apostates of the world?

An explicitly Christian government - or a Christian in government - must, however, recognise that their power must only ever be exercised for the good of all. Pre-Christian Rome brutalised those under its control, but for Christians that could (or should) never have been seen as valid use of power. But there have been plenty of Christian tyrants.

You speak of the conquest of Spain as being lines on a map. But those lines represents lives lived as well as lost. If the lines of the map were allowed to remain in Islamic hands there would have been a conversion of the people to Islam. It would have been a nation without the Gospel, it would have been a nation completely deprived of Christian spirit. So when you point out ten million lives lost, you’re ignoring the gains in Christian lives that those lost lives provided. What would have been the end result of your Idea if it was implemented? Less Christians, perhaps even the most serious ones facing death and persecution at the hands of Muslims.

We can't ever know. What I do know is that one great weakness of consequentialist ethics is that, in general, humans are terrible at predicting the outcomes of our decisions.

Perhaps our disagreement here is that you view any cost of warfare as illegitimate despite the gains that have come from it.

Basically, yes, that's it in a nutshell. I'd post some pictures to illustrate my point, but they'd violate CF's rules about graphic and disturbing content. I'm sure you can google "war injuries" or "battlefield mass graves" or the like, if you wish, though.

We have no right to do that to people on a mass scale. To do so is an utterly profound evil.

We might use a more Anglican example. Alfred the Great resisted Viking invasion, was he wrong to risk the lives of his people and fight back? Under your logic yes, since we cannot kill for any reason. What would have been the result of Alfred giving up? A Norse Pagan occupied England, the death of monastic learning and the domination of Britain by Norse Scandinavians. Would you have preferred that outcome?

Well, again, we don't know, do we? Today, the formally Norse lands are all basically Lutheran. They gradually converted to Christianity in the centuries after Alfred the Great. Perhaps if they had occupied a Christian Wessex, that conversion process might have happened more quickly.

My answers don't change just because your questions touch on a different part of the world.

Blood was paid and it doesn’t seem like it wasn’t worth the cost.

I don't think you get to make that call.

but if your logic is followed the Armenians would have had to wilfully surrender to the Turks to be slaughtered en-masse.

That is the only option? We cannot, for example, provide a home for them elsewhere? Apparently there are about 3 million Armenians in Armenia. That's not really so many that we couldn't come up with creative solutions.

Of course, the world has shown frighteningly little will to come up with creative solutions for refugees in general...

Not all Christians are called to live saintly lives where we cannot resist evil.

We cannot resist evil by perpetrating evil. Resist evil, of course! We are all called to do that. But we fail to do so if we think "resist evil" means "kill the other."

"For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

 

[dzheremi]

That is the only option? We cannot, for example, provide a home for them elsewhere?

Why don't you ask the Armenians of Syria about that? But be sure to ask them quickly, as the effect of the civil war/attempted Islamic takeover of that country has been a precipitous drop in their population, from a pre-war height of perhaps 100,000 to maybe as few as 15,000 (source; Russian-language article entitled "15,000 Armenians remain in Syria").

That's the problem in all this: the vast majority of Syrian Armenians are the descendents of those who arrived in that country as refugees from the genocides in Turkey only about a century ago. So for most of their lives, for at least a few generations, Syria was a safe haven for the Armenians...that is, until the same bloody-minded sectarianism that had forced them out of their original homes in what is now Turkey erupted in Syria and is now forcing them out of their adoptive country there.

The problem with moving people from place to place like this under these circumstances is that eventually they run out of safe havens because you're too naive and idealistic to deal with the reality of what is causing them to be refugees in the first place. Islam is the great immovable object in this situation, and non-violent resistance to it gets you nothing but dhimmi status (and that's if you're lucky and/or subservient). Do we have to wait until the Armenians, Syriacs, Copts, etc. have literally nowhere left to go before anyone does anything about any of this? Also, maybe this doesn't really mean much to you over there in Australia or South Africa, but plenty of people in the world want to stay in their home countries, and don't want to live as refugees in some place. Is this not their right, because doing so could involve fighting? How else do you think people of your background ever got established in South Africa or Australia to begin with? That was colonization and murder, so it's obvious why you would be sensitive about this topic, but then why do you condemn others to lifetimes as refugees and eventually literally having no homeland anymore? (It's not like if the Armenians give up Artsakh or Armenia proper it will lay fallow; the Turks will move in and take it, as they believe it and indeed all the earth to be theirs by right; their phony baloney prophet said so)

Apparently there are about 3 million Armenians in Armenia. That's not really so many that we couldn't come up with creative solutions.

Here's a creative solution: DISESTABLISH TURKEY AND AZERBAIJAN NOW.

If we're going to have to adhere to a strict program of non-violence under all circumstances in your conception of how the world should be, then anything else just gives the ones who do all the bad things that you are against free reign to do them with impunity because you don't want to fight back. Fine. Stay out of it then, but don't tell those who are willing to do so that they can continue to live on the land that they've always lived on (before the genocides of 1915, before the forced exile of 1606, etc.) that they're in the wrong based on some a priori principle that your own people certainly didn't follow in your homeland.

Or should you be forcibly uprooted from Australia or South Africa and forced to move somewhere else so that those who would kill you without so much as a second thought will be allowed to take your property and your land forever?

I'm sorry to have to make this so personal, but I don't see any other way to get the point across as effectively. "Creative solutions"...sheesh...I'm pretty sure the Turks already tried a 'creative solution' to the Armenian question about a century ago. It didn't go well for the Armenians, but the Turks seem to like what it brought them. Just don't ask them about it...it's not the kind of success they like to have to admit to.

Of course, the world has shown frighteningly little will to come up with creative solutions for refugees in general...

Yeah...almost like the best solution is to prevent situations where people have to be refugees in the first place by providing decisive victories against the forces seeking to eviscerate the status quo ante bellum in order to remake the country/region in their own (religious/ethnic/political/whatever) image. Go figure.

We cannot resist evil by perpetrating evil.

I don't see how anything you've posted in this thread gives us any way to resist evil other than just letting it do whatever it wants.

But we fail to do so if we think "resist evil" means "kill the other."

And if the other seeks to do evil? Again, we should let them run roughshod over the entire world?

"For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

The rulers and authorities are, like it or not, flesh and blood people. I don't think this is an appropriate context in which to invoke this passage. It is specifically talking about spiritual warfare, so of course that is something different than what we are talking about here.

 

[Citizen of the Kingdom]

Shouldn’t this thread be in current affairs of the world?

 

[Paidiske]

eventually they run out of safe havens because you're too naive and idealistic to deal with the reality of what is causing them to be refugees in the first place.

I'm not saying that at all. There are various options open to the global community that aren't slaughtering millions.

plenty of people in the world want to stay in their home countries, and don't want to live as refugees in some place. Is this not their right, because doing so could involve fighting?

I do not think that a Christian can claim a right to kill in order to stay in a particular place.

literally having no homeland anymore?

Home is where you make it. The idea that any person (or group of people) ought to be allowed to kill to claim or stay on a particular bit of land doesn't strike me as anything with any Christian basis to it. Rather we are encouraged not to get attached to particular bits of land, and to recognise that our relationship to such places is temporary and provisional.

Or should you be forcibly uprooted from Australia or South Africa and forced to move somewhere else so that those who would kill you without so much as a second thought will be allowed to take your property and your land forever?

If my choice is kill or move, that's a no brainer. Move.

I'm sorry to have to make this so personal, but I don't see any other way to get the point across as effectively.

I'm not offended, but I still don't think your point is effective. You're arguing for someone's right to a particular bit of land, and I'm arguing for someone's right to literally exist. I still think one of those is much more important than the other.

I don't see how anything you've posted in this thread gives us any way to resist evil other than just letting it do whatever it wants.

Good grief! Do you really think war is the only option? Political pressure, economic sanctions, non-violent resistance, etc etc have all been very effective in different times and places. I'm not suggesting we just ignore the problems, I'm suggesting that - to put it bluntly - bombing the life out of communities ain't the answer!

The rulers and authorities are, like it or not, flesh and blood people. I don't think this is an appropriate context in which to invoke this passage. It is specifically talking about spiritual warfare, so of course that is something different than what we are talking about here.

No, it's talking about exactly this. It's pointing out that the flesh and blood people are not the underlying reality; that all warfare is spiritual in nature, and that - for example - killing our enemy can never be the answer.

 

[Citizen of the Kingdom]

I'm not saying that at all. There are various options open to the global community that aren't slaughtering millions.



I do not think that a Christian can claim a right to kill in order to stay in a particular place.



Home is where you make it. The idea that any person (or group of people) ought to be allowed to kill to claim or stay on a particular bit of land doesn't strike me as anything with any Christian basis to it. Rather we are encouraged not to get attached to particular bits of land, and to recognise that our relationship to such places is temporary and provisional.



If my choice is kill or move, that's a no brainer. Move.



I'm not offended, but I still don't think your point is effective. You're arguing for someone's right to a particular bit of land, and I'm arguing for someone's right to literally exist. I still think one of those is much more important than the other.



Good grief! Do you really think war is the only option? Political pressure, economic sanctions, non-violent resistance, etc etc have all been very effective in different times and places. I'm not suggesting we just ignore the problems, I'm suggesting that - to put it bluntly - bombing the life out of communities ain't the answer!



No, it's talking about exactly this. It's pointing out that the flesh and blood people are not the underlying reality; that all warfare is spiritual in nature, and that - for example - killing our enemy can never be the answer.

Home is where you make it. The idea that any person (or group of people) ought to be allowed to kill to claim or stay on a particular bit of land doesn't strike me as anything with any Christian basis to it. Rather we are encouraged not to get attached to particular bits of land, and to recognise that our relationship to such places is temporary and provisional.

That’s the social aspect.

 

[zippy2006]

I have cousins who have faced pretty much this exact scenario. Their answer was to move country. Living constantly armed awaiting the next attack was no way to be, even if the attack never came.

How about living constantly awaiting the next person to arbitrarily push you off your land? There are some places where it isn't possible to simply move on.

This is a separate issue to warfare, as such...

No, it's just a microcosm of the war issue and a basic corollary for any pacifist. If you think entire nations should up and leave when an aggressor comes along, but you are not willing to leave your house when an aggressor takes it--instead using the State's violence to take back your property--then you are being inconsistent.

This is starting to feel too speculative for me, personally. I don't know the mind of God on this matter and am content to leave it there.

So you're not sure if God is a pacifist but you are convinced that it is the morally superior position? That's an odd take, but I agree that it is difficult to square Christianity with pacifism.

The question of how one responds to an aggressor - as opposed to whether it is permissible to be the aggressor - is more complicated and often the victim has fewer options. That said, I would argue that self-defence to the point of killing ought to be a last resort.

If you think that war is permissible as a last resort in cases of self-defense then you believe in just war theory, you just have a modified version. Indeed, just war theory has always held that war is a last resort, but it acknowledges more cases than self-defense.

Can I ask where your position comes from? Have you studied this issue in any detail? Did your seminary propose pacifism? Your position doesn't seem very rigorous to me. From what you've said I am led to believe that you don't have a great idea of what just war theory even is...

But when we look at the reality of war - when we consider the lives taken, the flesh maimed, the families broken, etc - how can we ever call such evil on a mass scale "just"? It cannot ever be just.

Define "justice." Pope Francis doesn't think capital punishment or life imprisonment is just. I think what lies at the heart of such wrongheaded ideas is a poor understanding of justice. Justice is a kind of balancing. For example, you might say that harm is unjust (whether it be physical harm, imprisonment, death, etc.). It's not. Harm is bad, painful, undesirable, but not inherently unjust. Cruelty and injustice are two different things.

I would argue that mass killing cannot ever be "for good." There are other ways to respond to oppression and injustice.

How? I already asked how you would respond to Hitler or Rwanda, but you never answered. I think privileged westerners who have never experienced things like mass genocide tend to live in a fairy-tale world where "there is always another way." Not always, as it turns out. I would actually say that anyone who thinks it was wrong to go to war with Hitler is morally tone-deaf.

Ok, so we put the mass murderer in prison. Yes, this is a lesser-evil scenario. But in general, the principle holds that power exercised over others in violation of their will is wrong; and to do so to the point of death - on a massive scale - is, well, language fails me to articulate how completely wrong that is.

Actually we shoot and kill the mass murderer when they cannot be detained. That's more or less what just war theory is.

The commandment not to murder would be a basic starting point. Warfare is just basically mass murder.

No it's not. Are you just going to carry on with your strawmen? "Every killing is murder and every war is mass murder." Actually the Holocaust was mass murder, and war is precisely what stopped it. If you read the OT you will see that the prohibition on murder was not a prohibition on capital punishment or defense-killing. The same distinction on an international level is escaping you.

Of justice, not of war!

So the State can wield the sword in the face of individual injustice but not international injustice? You need to make some arguments, here.

 

[Paidiske]

So you're not sure if God is a pacifist but you are convinced that it is the morally superior position?

God calls us to live in peace. God calls us not to kill. God calls us to respect the inherent worth and dignity of each and every human being. War is the exact opposite of all of those things.

Now, how we understand God's giving and ending of life is different. God is God; we are not. But we are to live as we've been called to live.

If you think that war is permissible as a last resort in cases of self-defense then you believe in just war theory, you just have a modified version.

I don't believe war is permissible, ever. Self-defence may be permissible, but war goes far beyond self-defence.

Can I ask where your position comes from? Have you studied this issue in any detail? Did your seminary propose pacifism? Your position doesn't seem very rigorous to me. From what you've said I am led to believe that you don't have a great idea of what just war theory even is...

My position comes from radical commitment to my understanding of the gospel. My seminary would have had classes which debated pacifism, but it is not generally a required position of Anglicans. But, for example, some of the students (including me) were members of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, and their ideas circulated in our discussions.

Just war theory - Augustine, Aquinas, philosophy, etc etc - I've never found it even slightly convincing.

Define "justice." Pope Francis doesn't think capital punishment or life imprisonment is just. I think what lies at the heart of such wrongheaded ideas is a poor understanding of justice. Justice is a kind of balancing. For example, you might say that harm is unjust (whether it be physical harm, imprisonment, death, etc.). It's not. Harm is bad, painful, undesirable, but not inherently unjust. Cruelty and injustice are two different things.

I would define justice as the use of power for the furthering of human flourishing. Therefore the death penalty I would also oppose. Life imprisonment... there would be cases where to release someone would never be safe.

I would not argue that cruelty - harm or hurt beyond what is absolutely necessary - can ever be just.

How? I already asked how you would respond to Hitler or Rwanda, but you never answered.

Because I was not there, and I am not an accomplished enough student of the history of those events to propose interventions which may have been beneficial earlier. I might note that WWII is considered to have been seeded by the unjust settlement of WWI, and that actions taken with an eye to furthering long term peace and justice at the end of that war may have averted WWII altogether.

I would actually say that anyone who thinks it was wrong to go to war with Hitler is morally tone-deaf.

There was probably a point, with Hitler, where other alternatives had closed. But if we are to take a pacifist approach seriously, then we need to look at what was happening in Europe long before that point.

"Every killing is murder and every war is mass murder."

Not every killing is murder, but every war is mass murder.

So the State can wield the sword in the face of individual injustice but not international injustice? You need to make some arguments, here.

I am not suggesting that states should be passive or inactive on an international level. I'm arguing that mass killing is not the answer.

 

[dzheremi]

I'm not saying that at all. There are various options open to the global community that aren't slaughtering millions.

I agree that there are, but I don't agree that this means that these "various options" are always open to everyone everywhere. The peaceful ones are a luxury for a lot of the world where talk of 'creative solutions' doesn't spread as quickly as guns and knives. That in itself is a problem, and thoroughly against our religion (which precisely why you don't see Coptic people stockpiling weapons in their churches or whatever; that is a common enough paranoid rumor in Islamist circles, but it has never actually been the case in reality), but so long as we live in places where we cannot assume that everyone shares our religion's urging toward peace (and indeed, the majority religion of the forced-to-be-Muslim world calls on its believers to not be "weak and crying for peace when you should be uppermost" -- Qur'an 47:35), self-defense cannot be categorically forbidden.

I do not think that a Christian can claim a right to kill in order to stay in a particular place.

Then why can they not claim a right to self-defense against those who do claim a right to kill them in order to take their place?

Home is where you make it.

Then why does anyone care to do anything for any refugee? Shouldn't the Rohingya just make their new home those boats they were shoved into? Shouldn't the Palestinians be fine with living in refugee camps for generations, barred from returning to their home villages? Or shouldn't the Somalis just be happy in refugee camps in Kenya? Or whoever the next group will be? After all, home is where you make it, right?

The idea that any person (or group of people) ought to be allowed to kill to claim or stay on a particular bit of land doesn't strike me as anything with any Christian basis to it.

I guess...if you totally ignore various parts of the Old Testament from which we get the idea of a promised land, not allowing outsiders to corrupt God's chosen people, etc., etc. Last time I checked, these were still in Christian Bibles, even as we read the OT in the light of the NT, where the idea of a "chosen people" is broadened and "holy land" comes to refer to more places than just one specific strip of the Middle East (expanding to basically everywhere Jesus or the apostles went).

This is how we get the concept of holy places in Christianity, which is something I would expect Christians to care about and uphold. I don't want to Axum become a new Mecca, or Mt. Athos be home to a bunch of non-believers, or Holy Etchmiadzin become another summer home for the Turkish neo-Sultan or whatever. These places are holy to Christians, not because we somehow value land more than other people's lives, but because we love our own faith more than our lives.

In Egypt, at the funeral for the martyrs of New Year's bombing in 2011, the crowd held up crosses and chanted "With our souls and our blood, we will defend the cross!" Sounds vaguely 'warlike', I suppose, as they're talking about shedding blood (crucially, their own blood -- not someone else's). And over a cross! Well, you can plant a cross anywhere, so if I had a mentality such as the one you are showing in your posts, I might wonder why they should care about 'defending the cross' in Alexandria, Egypt...except I know that this is the very place that our holy apostle St. Mark first traveled to and established the Church, and so it is holy to us (even with only something like 6% Christians today). We still have our cathedral there a millennia or so after the patriarchate was moved to Cairo, as the Greeks also have theirs. So I ask you: is it wrong that this is our attitude? Or is the fact that this is our attitude towards those who want to kill us and erase us from the country for good actually a very powerful testimony to the steadfastness of our faith in an environment of hostility beyond anything that your or I face in the West?

Rather we are encouraged not to get attached to particular bits of land, and to recognise that our relationship to such places is temporary and provisional.

Our relationship to everything and everyone but God is temporal. Every scriptural reading in the Coptic Orthodox liturgy is concluded with the reminder "Do not love the world nor the things that are in the world, for the world is passing away, but the word of the Lord endures forever." We take that seriously, just as we also take seriously the survival of our religion. Didn't Christ our God send His glorious and honored disciples out into the world with the instruction that they be as wise as serpents as well as to be as to be as gentle as doves? So I don't believe our Lord commanded us to foolhardy applications of a priori principles, as though not loving the world means that we can't care about it.

If my choice is kill or move, that's a no brainer. Move.

That's assuming you have such a choice.

I'm not offended, but I still don't think your point is effective. You're arguing for someone's right to a particular bit of land, and I'm arguing for someone's right to literally exist. I still think one of those is much more important than the other.

If everyone has the right to live wherever they want to and it's just up to the person losing everything to move, then why I can't take your house? Really. I'd rather live in Australia right now than continue to live in America (less Coronavirus, no Trump, etc.), so come on. Give me your house. Get out. I want to live there now. You wouldn't want to behave as though you have a right to a particular piece of land, would you?

...What's that? I can't just take your house? Well that's odd! Here I thought we were Christians, and you'd just let me take your house! Hrmph. Some Christian principle this is.

Good grief! Do you really think war is the only option?

No. I think self-defense sometimes is. If a violent criminal shows up at my house I'm not going to tell them "Hey, Mr. Violent Criminal, you're not being very Christian right now!" or whatever.

Similarly, if an enraged mob shows up in a village and threatens to burn people's houses and businesses and kick people out of the village so that they may take it over, I think the villagers themselves have an implicit right to grab whatever they can to chase the violent mob out.

Neither of these things are war, conquest, colonization, or any of that other stuff.

Political pressure, economic sanctions, non-violent resistance, etc etc have all been very effective in different times and places.

Again, tell that to the surviving family members of the people at the Maspero demonstrations, whose relatives got their heads crushed in by police vehicles, or to the non-violent tax resistors of Beit Sahour who were robbed of their livelihoods and left to starve in isolation from the outside world. Your invocation of these ideas ignores the reality that they have preconditions that are not met in all conflicts.

I'm not suggesting we just ignore the problems

That's true. You're suggesting that everyone just move away, because that's what you would do or that's what your family member did.

Excuse me, 6-10 million Coptic people, 3-4 million Syriac people, 30-40 million Kurdish people, 14 million Uyghurs, etc., etc., but can you please just move? Yeah, just pack up all your stuff and take your families and move....I don't know to where, just move.

Totally reasonable.

I'm suggesting that - to put it bluntly - bombing the life out of communities ain't the answer!

Is ISIS a community? Because I'm for bombing the life out of ISIS, and so are the nations that actually have to deal with them. Otherwise, I agree with you, and that's why what I've been arguing for this whole time is self-defense for communities that need it. You don't seem to want to recognize this distinction, for some reason.

No, it's talking about exactly this. It's pointing out that the flesh and blood people are not the underlying reality; that all warfare is spiritual in nature, and that - for example - killing our enemy can never be the answer.

I agree that all warfare is spiritual in nature, but that doesn't mean that it necessarily manifests itself in physical conflict. So there can be a distinction made here as well, in that the monks who fight against the demons don't do so with weapons, but the Lebanese Army soldier fighting against terrorists (flesh and blood people) in recent strongholds like Tripoli do so with weapons. The soldier has his own spiritual warfare to wage on this account, but that doesn't mean that the two types are collapsible into one. If we could just shoot demons, we presumably wouldn't have developed or continued monasticism.

 

[Paidiske]

I agree that there are, but I don't agree that this means that these "various options" are always open to everyone everywhere. The peaceful ones are a luxury for a lot of the world where talk of 'creative solutions' doesn't spread as quickly as guns and knives. That in itself is a problem, and thoroughly against our religion (which precisely why you don't see Coptic people stockpiling weapons in their churches or whatever; that is a common enough paranoid rumor in Islamist circles, but it has never actually been the case in reality), but so long as we live in places where we cannot assume that everyone shares our religion's urging toward peace ... self-defense cannot be categorically forbidden.

And I do not believe even I have categorically forbidden self-defence. What I am trying to argue for, however, is a framework where we acknowledge warfare for the appalling evil that it is, and muster all our resources to overcome it.

Then why can they not claim a right to self-defense against those who do claim a right to kill them in order to take their place?

You asked whether a Christian had a right to kill rather than become a refugee. I do not believe so.

Then why does anyone care to do anything for any refugee? Shouldn't the Rohingya just make their new home those boats they were shoved into? Shouldn't the Palestinians be fine with living in refugee camps for generations, barred from returning to their home villages? Or shouldn't the Somalis just be happy in refugee camps in Kenya? Or whoever the next group will be? After all, home is where you make it, right?

My point is not that we should be content to let refugees suffer in squalor and abject poverty, but that seeking refuge is preferable to killing. Certainly we could do a very great deal to improve the lot of refugees.

I guess...if you totally ignore various parts of the Old Testament from which we get the idea of a promised land, not allowing outsiders to corrupt God's chosen people, etc., etc. Last time I checked, these were still in Christian Bibles, even as we read the OT in the light of the NT, where the idea of a "chosen people" is broadened and "holy land" comes to refer to more places than just one specific strip of the Middle East (expanding to basically everywhere Jesus or the apostles went).

But Christians are not given a promised land. Christians are not told to separate themselves, socially and politically, from non-Christians. The idea that Scripture gives Christians any mandate to claim and defend a piece of land as a holy prerogative is one I find totally lacking in any foundation.

This is how we get the concept of holy places in Christianity, which is something I would expect Christians to care about and uphold. I don't want to Axum become a new Mecca, or Mt. Athos be home to a bunch of non-believers, or Holy Etchmiadzin become another summer home for the Turkish neo-Sultan or whatever. These places are holy to Christians, not because we somehow value land more than other people's lives, but because we love our own faith more than our lives.

I don't think a "holy place" is anywhere near as holy as one actual living breathing human being. Our faith does not depend on who controls Axum or Mt. Athos or whatever. Of course I'd be sad to see them no longer as centres of Christian worship, but not nearly as sad as I'd be if the corpses of children are the price of keeping them as such.

In Egypt, at the funeral for the martyrs of New Year's bombing in 2011, the crowd held up crosses and chanted "With our souls and our blood, we will defend the cross!" Sounds vaguely 'warlike', I suppose, as they're talking about shedding blood (crucially, their own blood -- not someone else's). And over a cross! Well, you can plant a cross anywhere, so if I had a mentality such as the one you are showing in your posts, I might wonder why they should care about 'defending the cross' in Alexandria, Egypt...except I know that this is the very place that our holy apostle St. Mark first traveled to and established the Church, and so it is holy to us (even with only something like 6% Christians today). We still have our cathedral there a millennia or so after the patriarchate was moved to Cairo, as the Greeks also have theirs. So I ask you: is it wrong that this is our attitude? Or is the fact that this is our attitude towards those who want to kill us and erase us from the country for good actually a very powerful testimony to the steadfastness of our faith in an environment of hostility beyond anything that your or I face in the West?

If we are talking about the willingness to face martyrdom, then it is not wrong. If we are talking about something more than that, I think we're in murkier territory.

If everyone has the right to live wherever they want to and it's just up to the person losing everything to move, then why I can't take your house? Really. I'd rather live in Australia right now than continue to live in America (less Coronavirus, no Trump, etc.), so come on. Give me your house. Get out. I want to live there now. You wouldn't want to behave as though you have a right to a particular piece of land, would you?

...What's that? I can't just take your house? Well that's odd! Here I thought we were Christians, and you'd just let me take your house! Hrmph. Some Christian principle this is.

If this was, in earnest, a choice between you taking my house, and me killing you, you might be pleased to know, dzheremi, that I would not choose to kill you.

No. I think self-defense sometimes is. If a violent criminal shows up at my house I'm not going to tell them "Hey, Mr. Violent Criminal, you're not being very Christian right now!" or whatever.

Similarly, if an enraged mob shows up in a village and threatens to burn people's houses and businesses and kick people out of the village so that they may take it over, I think the villagers themselves have an implicit right to grab whatever they can to chase the violent mob out.

Neither of these things are war, conquest, colonization, or any of that other stuff.

But when it becomes war, then it is still justifiable?

Again, tell that to the surviving family members of the people at the Maspero demonstrations, whose relatives got their heads crushed in by police vehicles, or to the non-violent tax resistors of Beit Sahour who were robbed of their livelihoods and left to starve in isolation from the outside world. Your invocation of these ideas ignores the reality that they have preconditions that are not met in all conflicts.

The irony here is that I am arguing that what was done to those people is wrong. I am not saying it is right for some people and not others. It is wrong always, everywhere, for everyone.

That's true. You're suggesting that everyone just move away, because that's what you would do or that's what your family member did.

Excuse me, 6-10 million Coptic people, 3-4 million Syriac people, 30-40 million Kurdish people, 14 million Uyghurs, etc., etc., but can you please just move? Yeah, just pack up all your stuff and take your families and move....I don't know to where, just move.

Totally reasonable.

I'm suggesting that seeking refuge is better than killing. I am also suggesting that all of these problems are global problems which need global solutions. The Copts, Syriacs and Kurds can't fix all of this by themselves, so where is the rest of the global community which should be standing with them?

Is ISIS a community? Because I'm for bombing the life out of ISIS,

Here we part ways.

Otherwise, I agree with you, and that's why what I've been arguing for this whole time is self-defense for communities that need it. You don't seem to want to recognize this distinction, for some reason.

Because "war" and "self-defence" are not the same thing. If someone is faced with a situation where it's shoot or be shot, I'm not going to condemn them as a murderer for shooting. But warfare - sustained intentional campaigns of mass killing - are a whole other thing.

So there can be a distinction made here as well, in that the monks who fight against the demons don't do so with weapons, but the Lebanese Army soldier fighting against terrorists (flesh and blood people) in recent strongholds like Tripoli do so with weapons.

But the soldiers killing real people are perpetuating evil, where the monks are not.

 

[dzheremi]

And I do not believe even I have categorically forbidden self-defence.

I don't see how your absolute prohibition against reacting against an aggressor doesn't do that.

What I am trying to argue for, however, is a framework where we acknowledge warfare for the appalling evil that it is, and muster all our resources to overcome it.

I agree it should be avoided at all costs due to the loss of life and general destruction involved, but I do not agree that it is intrinsically evil. Indeed, in Exodus 15 the Lord is described metaphorically as "a man of war", and we are told approvingly of how He has cast the forces of Pharaoh into the sea. I'm going to guess that probably the chariot riders and other members of Pharaoh's forces died as a result of this deliberate act on the part of the Lord, and I don't think it would be at all appropriate to posit that this was somehow wrong on the part of God. What's more, I'm going to sing to the Lord with praise about that very act together with the rest of my Church as part of the second canticle of the Midnight Praises:

Unless you are a Marcionite, this is your God too, the one God there is, and He absolutely deserves praise for this as for all of His mighty acts.

I don't see how, given all of this, we can say that war is evil because it results in people being killed. You could respond, of course, "Well, that's God; I'm talking about human leaders and their fallible decision-making", and I'd be fine with that. I'm more about trying to establish principles that are actually consistent with our faith than about creating some situation wherein we end up subjecting God to our 21st century sensibilities and thereby make an idol out of ourselves and our morality. (Not saying that you're doing that by having the stance that you have; I only mean that this is why I'm not willing to take a hardline pacifist stance even though that seems 'nicer' or 'more loving' or what have you, for whatever that's worth to the world in general.)

You asked whether a Christian had a right to kill rather than become a refugee. I do not believe so.

Where? I don't recall asking that.

My point is not that we should be content to let refugees suffer in squalor and abject poverty, but that seeking refuge is preferable to killing. Certainly we could do a very great deal to improve the lot of refugees.

But your attitude is "Home is wherever you make it", as though it is six of one and half dozen of another, so that all the indigenous Middle Eastern or North African (or wherever) minorities can just start over in a new place and it's fine because they're alive and they didn't have to commit violence. I'm not saying that they should have to commit violence (certainly life is better for everyone when no one is committing violence, for any reason), only that this attitude of yours is not really true. Christians in a Middle Eastern context, for instance, have often been seen as a source of peace and unity and a moderating influence in a turbulent area, and not just by Christians themselves. Just look at what this Iraqi TV presenters have to say about what ISIS did by driving Christians out of the country:

You don't seem to understand it, but having Christians leave their home countries en masse fundamentally warps these societies. It changes them in ways that make them more violent and less tolerant. I had an internet acquaintance years ago from Egypt (not a Copt; an Arab Greek) on another website who once mentioned that when he was in Egypt back in the 1980s the Muslims used to say that you knew you were in a good neighborhood if it had Christians in it, because Christians could be trusted to be fair, and helpful, and to not 'keep score' in the way that their fellow Muslims did (i.e. "I helped you with this five months ago, so now you owe me" or whatever). Not to toot our own horn, but to hear him tell it 'we' made better neighbors than their own coreligionists did. Well, my Arab-Greek friend said he knew things were changing when you stopped hearing that and started hearing other voices that were all about how the Christians needed to leave because this is a Muslim country and all this nonsense (like the Salafis say in some of their rallies, "The Copts are our guests" -- now somehow the people who are native to the land are the 'guests' of the invaders).

Should we wait until things are like this everywhere, because hey, they can always pick up and move! Home is where you make it!

And when the Salafis are holding similar rallies in Australia and saying "the non-Muslims are our guests", where will you move? And when they show up there because nobody is bothering to actually confront them and kick them out/jail them/hand them their behinds in physical confrontation (doesn't have to be a war; could just as easily be a repeat of when some jihadists losers thought they'd kill cartoonists in Texas like they had in France, though obviously I don't want every neighborhood in the world to turn into Beirut '82...all the more reason to set firm standards of what is not acceptable well before that, and to enforce it with state-sanctioned violence if absolutely necessary), then what? Will you just keep giving up and moving and giving up and moving and giving up and moving because violence is intrinsically evil?

And you can't say it would never happen. The Charlie Hebdo attack happened in early January of 2015 and the attack in Garland, Texas happened only about four months later, both inspired by the supposed Islamic prohibition on depictions of Muhammad. You're not the only one who views national borders as mere lines on a map.

But Christians are not given a promised land. Christians are not told to separate themselves, socially and politically, from non-Christians. The idea that Scripture gives Christians any mandate to claim and defend a piece of land as a holy prerogative is one I find totally lacking in any foundation.

Did I claim that scripture gave us any of these holy places? That's not how this works. Except for Jerusalem and possibly Egypt and Ethiopia (just ask them...), none of the places we consider now to be holy in our religion are called as such in scripture. That doesn't mean we don't have them. Apparently you feel differently as an Anglican, but I do feel a sense of pride in knowing, for instance, that the Russians and the Ethiopians both rejected Saudi pleas for mosques in our respective holy places (can't remember where they wanted one that they would ask the Russian Orthodox patriarch about it, but it was in the days of HH Patriarch Alexei and was mentioned in one of Fr. Andrew S. Damick's podcasts on AFR), pointing out that there's no way on God's green earth that the Saudis or any other Muslim nation would allow us to build a church in their precious Mecca, so they can take their mosque money and shove it.

I don't think a "holy place" is anywhere near as holy as one actual living breathing human being. Our faith does not depend on who controls Axum or Mt. Athos or whatever.

Ugh...did I say our faith depended on it? No. It obviously doesn't depend on such things, but that doesn't mean that we do not care about them. Our holy places are holy precisely because of the living, breathing human beings who have sanctified them, worshiping the true God and being indwelt and illumined by the Holy Spirit.

Of course I'd be sad to see them no longer as centres of Christian worship, but not nearly as sad as I'd be if the corpses of children are the price of keeping them as such.

And yet you don't seem to feel that way about the corpses of Armenian children killed by the Turks, because the Armenians had the gall to actually fight back at least during the two most recent conflicts. I wonder why that is? Apparently, children only matter if their parents allow them to be killed (because fighting back would be wrong, somehow), and yet their being killed is what makes everything such an injustice in the first place...doesn't make a lot of sense to me...

If this was, in earnest, a choice between you taking my house, and me killing you, you might be pleased to know, dzheremi, that I would not choose to kill you.

The point is not how you would react (obviously I'm not going to take your home; Australia is terrifying and very far away), but whether or not you actually believe that it really makes no difference who lives where, because home is wherever you are or whatever. I think that's a dangerous attitude, frankly, because it only makes sense in the abstract, but we human beings don't live in the abstract. We live in the actual world.

But when it becomes war, then it is still justifiable?

With the caveat that I don't believe in 'just war theory' (in the sense of there being some checklist or set of conditions that will render a war 'just'; I believe we're always in murky territory, as you put it, when we decide to go to war), I believe it can be. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII -- one as a field medic and the other as a fighter pilot. I believe that it was right for us to fight the Nazis and the Fascists due to the clear threat that they were to the world in general, and the groups that they targeted like Jews, Romani, disabled people, homosexuals, etc. in particular. I believe that it is right to fight the fascists of our own day, too, like the religious fascists of ISIS. They try to snuff out Christianity in Iraq (and Yazidism, and Shi'ism, etc.), they deserve to get snuffed out as an organization, and destroyed and demoralized to such a degree that they're never able to regroup and whatever allure they had to the Muslim youth of the world is exposed as cheap propaganda propping up a sick and unworkable ideology, not some grand dream of a restored 'caliphate' (which is another thing it was right to fight and destroy; the Ottoman Empire was not called "the sick man of Europe" for no reason).

The irony here is that I am arguing that what was done to those people is wrong. I am not saying it is right for some people and not others. It is wrong always, everywhere, for everyone.

Yeah, but you're not willing to even say that something should be done about it if it involves actually having to enter into conflict. Your appeal to 'creative solutions' doesn't do anything. 'Creative solutions' didn't stop Hitler from invading Russia. The Russian Army and people did, at great cost. 'Creative solutions' didn't stop the Italian fascists from taking over Ethiopia two times -- the Ethiopians did, no differently than they stopped the complete evisceration of Christian Ethiopia by the proto-Somali warlord Ahmed Gragn from the Sultanate of Adal in the 16th century with the help of the Portuguese. Sorry, but sometimes if you want to prevent really horrific stuff from happening, the people who are doing or trying to do that really horrific stuff have to die. The Ethiopians could not have worked out some kind of arrangement with the Adal Sultanate that they could control Ethiopia on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but Ethiopia could control itself on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays or whatever a 'creative solution' to that conflict would be. That's not reality. The world is not a friendly, cuddly western-esque place that loves the values of sharing, and compromise, and pluralism, and all this stuff. Some places are, thank God, and it sounds like both you and I are lucky to live in two such places, but that's not the norm across the entire world, and it certainly wasn't the norm historically, even in the west until relatively recently.

I just don't find your approach to any of this realistic, and before you go there, no, I'm not saying that war is the only answer. I'm saying that self-defense enacted with violence has to be in there somewhere, because sometimes only violence actually stops whatever the threat is. Some people or organizations need to be stopped and cannot be reasoned with. It's sad, but that's the reality of our fallen world. It's not all rainbows and puppies, as I'm sure you know coming from SA with its own troubled history.

We should all abhor violence and we shouldn't be quick to resort to it, but there are some legitimate uses of force and even violence. There just are.

I'm suggesting that seeking refuge is better than killing. I am also suggesting that all of these problems are global problems which need global solutions. The Copts, Syriacs and Kurds can't fix all of this by themselves, so where is the rest of the global community which should be standing with them?

I've been asking that for years, and much more importantly the native Middle Eastern and North African Christians have been asking that for centuries. So far, it seems like the world's commitment to them and their safety is very fungible, to put it mildly.

I think HG Abp. Nicodemus Daoud Sharraf of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Mosul puts it well (if understandably very bluntly) in the following television interview. Please listen to what he has to say before responding to my post or writing more questions like the above:

These are a peaceful people and they pay for being a peaceful people precisely because the world by and large doesn't care.

As HG says, they need law or else they can't live anywhere. And that law is only secured with force. Christians were only able to return to Mosul after the military forced ISIS out in July of 2017.

Here we part ways.

Clearly.

Because "war" and "self-defence" are not the same thing. If someone is faced with a situation where it's shoot or be shot, I'm not going to condemn them as a murderer for shooting. But warfare - sustained intentional campaigns of mass killing - are a whole other thing.

What is war but a lot of people being put in situations where it is shoot or be shot? Obviously that's not all that war is, but all my friends and family who have been in actual wars say that that's what combat is. You kill the other guy or he kills you. It really is that simple (though that doesn't mean it isn't morally ambiguous, of course).

But the soldiers killing real people are perpetuating evil, where the monks are not.

I don't think you can say that soldiers who are killing people are perpetuating evil by the fact that that's what they're doing. That's definitely an overgeneralization.

 

[Paidiske]

I don't see how your absolute prohibition against reacting against an aggressor doesn't do that.

I am not offering an absolute prohibition against reacting against an aggressor. I am arguing that warfare is intrinsically evil.

You could respond, of course, "Well, that's God; I'm talking about human leaders and their fallible decision-making", and I'd be fine with that.

That would more or less be my response.

Where? I don't recall asking that.

I'm losing track of the quotes here, but I believe your exact question was, "plenty of people in the world want to stay in their home countries, and don't want to live as refugees in some place. Is this not their right, because doing so could involve fighting?"

But your attitude is "Home is wherever you make it", as though it is six of one and half dozen of another, so that all the indigenous Middle Eastern or North African (or wherever) minorities can just start over in a new place and it's fine because they're alive and they didn't have to commit violence. I'm not saying that they should have to commit violence (certainly life is better for everyone when no one is committing violence, for any reason), only that this attitude of yours is not really true.

Well, obviously mass migration and starting over have all sorts of costs and problems associated with them. I'm not saying it's "fine." I'm saying it's better than killing, though.

You don't seem to understand it, but having Christians leave their home countries en masse fundamentally warps these societies. It changes them in ways that make them more violent and less tolerant. I had an internet acquaintance years ago from Egypt (not a Copt; an Arab Greek) on another website who once mentioned that when he was in Egypt back in the 1980s the Muslims used to say that you knew you were in a good neighborhood if it had Christians in it, because Christians could be trusted to be fair, and helpful, and to not 'keep score' in the way that their fellow Muslims did (i.e. "I helped you with this five months ago, so now you owe me" or whatever). Not to toot our own horn, but to hear him tell it 'we' made better neighbors than their own coreligionists did. Well, my Arab-Greek friend said he knew things were changing when you stopped hearing that and started hearing other voices that were all about how the Christians needed to leave because this is a Muslim country and all this nonsense (like the Salafis say in some of their rallies, "The Copts are our guests" -- now somehow the people who are native to the land are the 'guests' of the invaders).

If we're at the point of "leave or kill (or be killed)" then we're probably dealing with already very warped societies, no? But I'd say once we're ready to kill our neighbours, we're probably past the point of being this moderating influence.

And when the Salafis are holding similar rallies in Australia and saying "the non-Muslims are our guests", where will you move? And when they show up there because nobody is bothering to actually confront them and kick them out/jail them/hand them their behinds in physical confrontation (doesn't have to be a war; could just as easily be a repeat of when some jihadists losers thought they'd kill cartoonists in Texas like they had in France, though obviously I don't want every neighborhood in the world to turn into Beirut '82...all the more reason to set firm standards of what is not acceptable well before that, and to enforce it with state-sanctioned violence if absolutely necessary), then what? Will you just keep giving up and moving and giving up and moving and giving up and moving because violence is intrinsically evil?

We are perhaps getting outside the boundaries of my argument. I did not say that all violence is intrinsically evil. The topic of this thread is that warfare is intrinsically evil. Violent police response - for example, to terrorists with hostages or the like - can sometimes be proportional and called for. But that is not war.

Did I claim that scripture gave us any of these holy places? That's not how this works. Except for Jerusalem and possibly Egypt and Ethiopia (just ask them...), none of the places we consider now to be holy in our religion are called as such in scripture.

My point was not that Scripture doesn't name these particular spaces as holy. My point was that Scripture does not give us a basis for claiming particular sites as "holy" and seeking to defend them as such at the cost of people's lives.

Apparently you feel differently as an Anglican, but I do feel a sense of pride in knowing, for instance, that the Russians and the Ethiopians both rejected Saudi pleas for mosques in our respective holy places (can't remember where they wanted one that they would ask the Russian Orthodox patriarch about it, but it was in the days of HH Patriarch Alexei and was mentioned in one of Fr. Andrew S. Damick's podcasts on AFR), pointing out that there's no way on God's green earth that the Saudis or any other Muslim nation would allow us to build a church in their precious Mecca, so they can take their mosque money and shove it.

I would have hoped that we would be open to allowing space and hospitality for prayer for everyone. I would not find denying that to others to be a source of pride.

And yet you don't seem to feel that way about the corpses of Armenian children killed by the Turks, because the Armenians had the gall to actually fight back at least during the two most recent conflicts. I wonder why that is? Apparently, children only matter if their parents allow them to be killed (because fighting back would be wrong, somehow), and yet their being killed is what makes everything such an injustice in the first place...doesn't make a lot of sense to me...

If we oppose killing, we have to oppose it for everyone. Not just for "them" and those we wish to other, but we have to hold ourselves to the same standard too.

That any children were killed is a travesty, an appalling evil. It does not justify us acting the same way in turn!

The point is not how you would react (obviously I'm not going to take your home; Australia is terrifying and very far away), but whether or not you actually believe that it really makes no difference who lives where, because home is wherever you are or whatever. I think that's a dangerous attitude, frankly, because it only makes sense in the abstract, but we human beings don't live in the abstract. We live in the actual world.

Australia's not so terrifying, really. Just stay away from the snakes and the spiders and the crocodiles, and, oh, definitely the koalas...

Yes, on one level I really believe it makes no difference who lives where. Obviously, it's not quite that simple and ties of family and friendship and community and language and culture all matter. But they don't matter so much as one single human life. Not one.

Yeah, but you're not willing to even say that something should be done about it if it involves actually having to enter into conflict.

Because generally speaking, I don't believe anyone ever "has to" enter into conflict. One may find oneself in conflict another has started, and look for the least-worst response (that's your self-defence or even utilitarian type argument). But to choose to start that conflict? When we're talking about mass killing? Nope.

Sorry, but sometimes if you want to prevent really horrific stuff from happening, the people who are doing or trying to do that really horrific stuff have to die.

Maybe. Maybe there are times when it is that extreme. Maybe, for example, a case could be made for assassinating Hitler. But in World War II, 75 million people died. The civilian casualties were more than twice the military casualties. I do not buy the argument that that was necessary, that there was no better way.

I just don't find your approach to any of this realistic,

I can understand that. But I also find the approach of folks who are too quick to justify the absolute atrocity that is war, to say that it can be good, or even necessary, to be morally troublesome.

I enjoy computer games where I build an empire and then try to conquer another empire (I'm mostly bad at them, but I enjoy them). But real war is not little pixels whose death is abstract. It is real human lives, each one a bearer of the divine image, ended or maimed or scarred or destroyed in so many ways, by the millions. And if we take our eyes off those real, precious, sacred human beings - for each of whom Christ willingly died - to make it an argument about land, or history, or ideology, or whatever... that strikes me as so dangerous. So very very dangerous. Because that is an act of dehumanisation which strikes at our very humanity.

I'm saying that self-defense enacted with violence has to be in there somewhere, because sometimes only violence actually stops whatever the threat is.

I am potentially open to this argument, to a degree; I have not been making arguments against self-defence in extremis. I have been arguing against war as a deliberately chosen path.

What is war but a lot of people being put in situations where it is shoot or be shot? Obviously that's not all that war is, but all my friends and family who have been in actual wars say that that's what combat is. You kill the other guy or he kills you. It really is that simple (though that doesn't mean it isn't morally ambiguous, of course).

A lot of stuff happens before you get to that point, though. Someone has decided to start that war. Soldiers have enlisted (or been conscripted) and trained. Logistics have been put in place. Arms dealers have made their fortunes (often from both sides) and laughed at the resulting destruction. And most of the deaths aren't even the soldiers on either side, but the civilians who get caught up in it.

War is the deliberate, intentional pursuit of mass killing with the aim of imposing the will of one group on another group. It goes way beyond self defence.

I don't think you can say that soldiers who are killing people are perpetuating evil by the fact that that's what they're doing.

They're killing, and that's evil, so, yeah... I'm willing to stand by that.

 

[dzheremi]

I'm losing track of the quotes here, but I believe your exact question was, "plenty of people in the world want to stay in their home countries, and don't want to live as refugees in some place. Is this not their right, because doing so could involve fighting?"

Yeah, this is not saying "Is it okay to murder people so that I don't have to move" or whatever you said. This is saying "Why is it wrong that people be allowed to say that if aggressors come to their home or village, they are going to fight to repel them?" I don't see what is wrong with that. They're facing an imminent threat. Should every such threat be allowed to come to fruition? There have been instances in the United States where planned shootings by sick individuals at churches, schools, convention centers, etc. have been stopped entirely or in their very early stages because people were willing to kill the perpetrators. The example from Garland, Texas that I mentioned in my previous post is one such instance of that. It wasn't wrong to kill the perpetrators who were definitely planning to kill as many people as possible, but only succeeded in wounding one person before they themselves were killed.

I believe this is the sort of thing you had in mind when talking about "shoot or be shot" situations, right? I'm merely meaning to extend that to other threats of violence that a reasonable person could take a defensive stance against (e.g., the sorts of mobs that cause things like the El Kosheh massacre in Egypt or the murder of secularists in places like Bangladesh, which appears to have a nasty habit of hacking bloggers to death).

If we're at the point of "leave or kill (or be killed)" then we're probably dealing with already very warped societies, no? But I'd say once we're ready to kill our neighbours, we're probably past the point of being this moderating influence.

I don't know if you're intending to do this, but you're treating all of my examples as though they're the opposite of what they actually are. I'm pointing to all of these situations in which it is good if Christians or other minorities are allowed to defend themselves (in war-torn Iraq, Syria, Artsakh, etc.), and you're turning them around and saying "once we're ready to kill our neighbors, we're probably past the point of being this moderating influence", as though they're examples of Christians gearing up to massacre their neighbors. It's the other way around. Hatred against us is preached in mosques, and then the faithful go out and enact that hatred. We don't preach hatred against anyone in our churches. As HG Abp. Nicodemus Daoud Sharraf put it, we don't have any weapons but the pen. The crazy Islamists in Egypt have never found even so much as a knife in any of our churches and monasteries after they enter them to ransack or otherwise destroy them, despite that being consistently believed by our self-selected enemies. So who's really about killing? Not the Christians. Please stop doing this, as there isn't any equivalence to be had between protection units formed in the wake of dispossession and massacres like the Beth Nahrain Women's Protection Force or the Khabour Guard and the enemies of such organizations that are only looking to kill and exile everyone they can in their effort to forcibly reshape the territory they think of as theirs.

We are perhaps getting outside the boundaries of my argument. I did not say that all violence is intrinsically evil. The topic of this thread is that warfare is intrinsically evil. Violent police response - for example, to terrorists with hostages or the like - can sometimes be proportional and called for. But that is not war.

So where is the line? Is it a matter of scale or organization or what? What exactly would have been the 'proportional' response to the Islamic conquests of the Middle East and North Africa? What was the 'proportional' response to the same in Spain? What is the 'proportional' response to modern examples like the ongoing attempted takeover of Iraq and Syria by Islamist groups?

I would have hoped that we would be open to allowing space and hospitality for prayer for everyone. I would not find denying that to others to be a source of pride.

You and I are obviously very different people. I love you, but I can't understand this at all and viscerally recoil at such talk.

To me it is very black and white: if something is a church, then it is specifically consecrated for the worship of the one true God -- the Holy Trinity -- while everything else is about something else. Churches are not for Muslims or Buddhists or any of these other people to pray in, either out of a misguided sense of 'hospitality' or for any other reason. They're not places to have "prayer for everyone". No. Worship the Holy Trinity or get out. Worshiping or allowing the worship of anything else in a church is blasphemy. It profanes the church itself.

So of course I am proud of the stance that my brothers and sisters in the Ethiopian Orthodox and Russian Orthodox churches have taken. Any Church which would compromise on the basics of the Christian faith does not deserve to call itself Orthodox.

If we oppose killing, we have to oppose it for everyone.

And I would submit that we can oppose killing while also recognizing that sometimes it has to happen. I'm a lot happier living in a world where Hitler didn't take over all of Europe, or the WWII-era Japanese didn't take over much of Asia and possibly even parts of the United States. We can debate all day whether or not that means any particular action needed to happen to secure victory (e.g., debates over the morality of dropping nuclear bombs on Japan, which is an understandably very difficult topic), but on the level of "Should we have gone to war at all?", I'm very comfortable answering yes, we should have, and I'm glad we did.

That any children were killed is a travesty, an appalling evil. It does not justify us acting the same way in turn!

I never said it did, I'm just saying I don't really understand your stance. It seemed as though you were using dead kids as the ultimate example of why war is bad, but the recognition that some may fight back to prevent there being even more dead kids (say, should a genocide like that of the Armenians be allowed to continue unabated) is just not a part of your equation whatsoever. This is why I came away with the impression that you were preaching some kind of opposition to all violence, just by the way.

Australia's not so terrifying, really. Just stay away from the snakes and the spiders and the crocodiles, and, oh, definitely the koalas...

I heard a video of a koala the other day, and man...I don't know what I was expecting them to sound like, but it wasn't that! Boy...it's a good thing they look cute!

Yes, on one level I really believe it makes no difference who lives where. Obviously, it's not quite that simple and ties of family and friendship and community and language and culture all matter. But they don't matter so much as one single human life. Not one.

I'm going to have to disagree with you there. I think if you take away enough from a person, they don't have anything left and there's essentially no point to living anywhere, period. As the good archbishop of Mosul put it in his interview, the dhimmi is a slave, and so we would rather die than be dhimmis. God created us free and we will stay that way. That is of course one archbishop's opinion, but as the archbishop of Mosul at the time when Mosul was forcibly emptied of its Christians, I think I'm going to trust him on this. His faith is, after all, my own faith, so I can only hope to one day match his resolve and the resolve of his people, even as they were made refugees in Kurdistan and elsewhere.

Because generally speaking, I don't believe anyone ever "has to" enter into conflict. One may find oneself in conflict another has started, and look for the least-worst response (that's your self-defence or even utilitarian type argument). But to choose to start that conflict? When we're talking about mass killing? Nope.

Again, that's not what any of my examples have been about. We are clearly talking about different things.

Maybe. Maybe there are times when it is that extreme. Maybe, for example, a case could be made for assassinating Hitler. But in World War II, 75 million people died. The civilian casualties were more than twice the military casualties. I do not buy the argument that that was necessary, that there was no better way.

So if fewer people had died, suddenly it would've been okay? War is intrinsically evil unless it's on a small enough scale? Forgive me, but I don't think that this kind of logic aligns with the the word "intrinsically" that you used at the beginning of this reply.

I can understand that. But I also find the approach of folks who are too quick to justify the absolute atrocity that is war, to say that it can be good, or even necessary, to be morally troublesome.

That's fair. I have also made a point of saying that war is morally troublesome. Any time you are faced with the possibility of ending a human life, it should naturally provoke within you some questions about the morality or justifications for doing so. Even completely outside of war. I felt that way recently when I had to sign a Do Not Resuscitate order concerning a family member, even though I called the relevant immediate family members and made sure that we were all on the same page, and that this was in keeping with the dying family member's wishes. It was still very hard. I still had that twinge of uncertainty, since I was not by that time able to ask the person directly what they wanted. I had to move forward based on statements they had made in the past. It felt terrible, but I did it because it fell to me to do it. I'm sure many soldiers could say the same about some things they've done in the context of war.

I am potentially open to this argument, to a degree; I have not been making arguments against self-defence in extremis. I have been arguing against war as a deliberately chosen path.

Okay, I think you and I are in agreement, then, at least on this point. I have been posting examples of self-defense of indigenous minorities, or state defense of the same. I realize that not all conflicts are cut and dry in this regard (e.g., the Armenians of Artsakh and the Azeris accuse each other of breaking the ceasefire), but nevertheless I come down where I do because I believe that this is where the truth is, and that believing that to be so compels me to take certain stances toward the question of war and violence that I might not otherwise take if the facts were proven to be different.

A lot of stuff happens before you get to that point, though.

Sure, but we don't live in the best of all possible worlds, and you generally don't get a 'do over' once things have reached a certain point.

They're killing, and that's evil, so, yeah... I'm willing to stand by that.

I'm confused, because you've said elsewhere in this same reply things like this: "Violent police response - for example, to terrorists with hostages or the like - can sometimes be proportional and called for." Am I to understand that this police violence can never be legitimate if it includes killing? There's never a legitimate case in which someone is killed? (NB: Being from America, I am well aware of the many instances when police violence up to and including killing is not legitimate, or is at least heavily questionable, so obviously I am not referring to those cases.)

 

[Paidiske]

Yeah, this is not saying "Is it okay to murder people so that I don't have to move" or whatever you said. This is saying "Why is it wrong that people be allowed to say that if aggressors come to their home or village, they are going to fight to repel them?"

The argument I'm trying to make is this: a Christian ought to flee before killing.

I don't know if you're intending to do this, but you're treating all of my examples as though they're the opposite of what they actually are. I'm pointing to all of these situations in which it is good if Christians or other minorities are allowed to defend themselves (in war-torn Iraq, Syria, Artsakh, etc.), and you're turning them around and saying "once we're ready to kill our neighbors, we're probably past the point of being this moderating influence", as though they're examples of Christians gearing up to massacre their neighbors.

This entire thread is about whether or not warfare is acceptable. I'm reading your posts in light of that; you seem to be arguing that it's okay to engage in war if you're victimised enough. If you're not trying to argue that, then your points are off topic in this thread.

So where is the line? Is it a matter of scale or organization or what?

The line is to avoid killing if at all possible, and to kill the absolute minimum number of people if unavoidable.

You and I are obviously very different people. I love you, but I can't understand this at all and viscerally recoil at such talk.

To me it is very black and white: if something is a church, then it is specifically consecrated for the worship of the one true God -- the Holy Trinity -- while everything else is about something else. Churches are not for Muslims or Buddhists or any of these other people to pray in, either out of a misguided sense of 'hospitality' or for any other reason. They're not places to have "prayer for everyone". No. Worship the Holy Trinity or get out. Worshiping or allowing the worship of anything else in a church is blasphemy. It profanes the church itself.

I thought you were talking about allowing the building of a mosque in/on some Christian holy site, not allowing Islamic prayers in a church.

Even so, while I wouldn't allow formal Islamic services in a church, I've certainly worked in churches open to the public where Muslims and Buddhists and all sorts would come in and pray quietly, and I have absolutely zero problem with that.

And I would submit that we can oppose killing while also recognizing that sometimes it has to happen.

Yes, I can agree there. An ectopic pregnancy has to be ended. Someone threatening to kill a hundred hostages being shot may be the least-worst option. But warfare - the wholesale mass killing of people - I'm not so ready to admit its inevitability or necessity.

I never said it did, I'm just saying I don't really understand your stance. It seemed as though you were using dead kids as the ultimate example of why war is bad, but the recognition that some may fight back to prevent there being even more dead kids (say, should a genocide like that of the Armenians be allowed to continue unabated) is just not a part of your equation whatsoever. This is why I came away with the impression that you were preaching some kind of opposition to all violence, just by the way.

This may possibly be a result of the thought-confetti nature of my argument. I am not saying there is never ever a place for any violence. This thread started specifically about the question of war, and that came about as part of an argument about a high view of human beings being a necessary part of Christianity. I cannot reconcile unnecessary killing with the gospel.

I heard a video of a koala the other day, and man...I don't know what I was expecting them to sound like, but it wasn't that! Boy...it's a good thing they look cute!

And they're mean.

I'm going to have to disagree with you there. I think if you take away enough from a person, they don't have anything left and there's essentially no point to living anywhere, period.

Hmm. That seems rather close to despair, to me. Which may be an understandable result of being a victim of oppression/atrocity, but ought we not want to inspire hope in despair, rather than affirming a despairing worldview?

So if fewer people had died, suddenly it would've been okay? War is intrinsically evil unless it's on a small enough scale? Forgive me, but I don't think that this kind of logic aligns with the the word "intrinsically" that you used at the beginning of this reply.

No, and that's not what I meant. But I simply cannot accept that WWII, as it played out, was either necessary or the least worst way things could possibly have gone.

I'm confused, because you've said elsewhere in this same reply things like this: "Violent police response - for example, to terrorists with hostages or the like - can sometimes be proportional and called for." Am I to understand that this police violence can never be legitimate if it includes killing? There's never a legitimate case in which someone is killed? (NB: Being from America, I am well aware of the many instances when police violence up to and including killing is not legitimate, or is at least heavily questionable, so obviously I am not referring to those cases.)

But you are now talking about a soldier, not a police officer. A soldier is not attempting to preserve lives (even if by taking a life); s/he is attempting to take the lives of the enemy.

But even the police killing is evil. It may be able to be argued as a necessary evil, but the minute we begin to excuse it as not evil, we open the door to being more and more lax about the taking of life.

 

[prodromos]

Just war theory - Augustine, Aquinas, philosophy, etc etc - I've never found it even slightly convincing.

I haven't read them, so can't comment.
I can say that I don't find your argument even slightly convincing, and it isn't a topic that I have any stake in or passion about apart from the fact that my wife's father and his family were forced to leave their home by the Turks with just the clothes on their backs.

 

[Paidiske]

My argument is based on the absolute value of human life. I really struggle to understand Christians who seem to hold a low view of human life.

 

[prodromos]

My argument is based on the absolute value of human life. I really struggle to understand Christians who seem to hold a low view of human life.

Then I suspect that you struggle with a gross mischaracterisation of the view those Christians have for human life.

 

[JohnDB]

The basic premise of the aggressor is that usually they always feel like they are or have lost something valuable to those under oppression.

The first gulf war is a great example of this.

Kuwait was (by our demand) holding oil and money belonging to Iraq. Iraq wanted their oil money to fund their fight and conquest of Iran over more oil territory that had long been in a dispute america had created and exacerbated over the past 50 years.

So Iraq went through Kuwait to take back and burn them for their thefts.

The whole world benefits from no one having a monopoly of oil. It flows and gets used. Anyone becoming an oil superpower would control the world economy.

So...we eventually went to Kuwaiti defense.
We had a moral obligation to do so.
Of course this only infuriated Sadaam Hussein even more from his perspective. We humiliated his leadership in Iraq. (Which wasn't as evil as the press made it sound)
It also gave Iran ideas about getting some payback and opportunities from their last 50 years of disputes. So, being unequally matched, Iran had to do something to look stronger than he was to his surrounding enemies like the Kurds (who are always trying to re-unite and become an oil superpower) and Iran.

Sadaam thought that if he lobbed a few scud missiles over at Israel that the confusion and political turmoil over that area would be enough to allow him to get away with everything he had going on. (Jordan talks tough but usually stays out of every fight. They don't have many rescources and are the primary reason the Palestinian state exists)

Now the ugly truth is that Sadaam actually protected his Christian communities. He promoted and funded scientific research for many things other than weapons...in fact very little for weapons. Schools and colleges were fully funded. They were becoming a fairly educated society until after the last gulf war.

So...you have five players. All behaving poorly. Each doing their part to anger, abuse, and steal from a single entity. And then act like the "aggressor" is the bad guy.

And then "lo and behold" a new group rises up in the vacuum of power now existing and tries to take over Syria and Jordan and Turkey and Iran. They want to set up some sort of morality that seems to be missing everywhere there. (As an excuse for the desire to have a stable life... until greed began to come about from some invitations)

Violence begets more violence.

In essence USA is the root cause of ISIL. Russia cleaned up that mess and didn't do it with any sort of restraint.

Killing is bad...no doubt about it. One visit to a WWII museum is all it takes to read the life stories on the walls to figure out that the surviving soldiers were harmed too. The hate they had to hold onto in order to just survive destroys them. It's not a question or even a dispute. It's a fact that holding onto that sort of hate destroys people.

 

[dzheremi]

The argument I'm trying to make is this: a Christian ought to flee before killing.

This entire thread is about whether or not warfare is acceptable. I'm reading your posts in light of that; you seem to be arguing that it's okay to engage in war if you're victimised enough. If you're not trying to argue that, then your points are off topic in this thread.

To combine the two of these, I'm saying that if Christians are in a war-torn area already (e.g., Iraq, Syria), where they cannot count on the presence of law (recall HG Nicodemus Daoud Sharraf's point, earlier), then it is not wrong that they should fight to defend themselves and their community by forming the sorts of protection units they've formed in places like Syria and Iraq. These are not offensive militias, they don't go looking for trouble, but they're certainly good to have for various things, like to guard refugees housed in Mar Mattai monastery on Mt. Alfaf (one of the places guarded by the Dwekh Nawsha security forces). Don't those who have already fled deserve protection?

The line is to avoid killing if at all possible, and to kill the absolute minimum number of people if unavoidable.

I can agree with this, but what I asked was where the line was between the type of violent action that you had agreed was sometimes necessary and justified (violent police response to prevent imminent killing) and the type of violent action you consider unjustified (participation in war). When do things cross a line from one to the other? Is it a matter of scale (X number of deaths), or of organization (individuals vs. small units of irregulars like a neighborhood watch sort of situation vs. regiments of soldiers) or of goal (defense vs. offense), or what? Simply saying "Don't kill" or "Kill as little as possible" doesn't answer that. I would hope we would all agree to statements such as those.

Keep in mind that you had earlier written (paraphrasing) that you understand that "shoot or be shot" situations sometimes lead to violence including killing, and that such killing couldn't be categorically condemned. This introduces some ambiguity into the question of killing in war, as combat in warfare is a lot of such situations occurring at once, so using your logic we cannot say that by virtue of participating in warfare, soldiers are by definition to be condemned if they've killed someone.

I thought you were talking about allowing the building of a mosque in/on some Christian holy site, not allowing Islamic prayers in a church.

Forgive me, I believe I misunderstood this part of your reply. I thought when you wrote that you had hoped that they'd welcome "space and hospitality for prayer for everyone", it was referring to the area churches, as mosques are not allowed there because the Saudis (the ones who were trying to finance the building of a mosque there when this question last came up a few years ago) don't allow Christians to build churches in their holy city, so why should we allow them to build mosques in ours? Axum doesn't exist for the proliferation of the religion of Satan, if I can be exceedingly frank about it, and the one-sided 'tolerance' of the Arab Gulf hypocrites (tolerate us when we want to force our religion on your country, but we never have to tolerate you or your religion to anything like an equal measure in our countries, or at all if we don't want to) is put on full display by the Ethiopians' and Russians' replies, so I say good on them. One-sided tolerance is no kind of tolerance at all, and I think the Ethiopians in particular have been more than tolerant of Islam more generally for the past 1,400 years, especially considering that they were the first ones to let it into their country and were repaid for their kindness by local Muslim powers attempting to destroy them and take over their empire only a few centuries later, via the previously-mentioned Sultanate of Adal.

Even so, while I wouldn't allow formal Islamic services in a church, I've certainly worked in churches open to the public where Muslims and Buddhists and all sorts would come in and pray quietly, and I have absolutely zero problem with that.

Buddhists seem to be by and large less of problem (so long as you're not a Rohingya in Burma, I suppose ), but it still remains the fact that churches are dedicated to the worship of the Christian God, not the gods of whatever other religions happen to be around. So I don't get it, but okay...it's your church, so you have to make those calls, I suppose. Such a thing is definitely not allowed in Orthodoxy, and that is my own standard, so I'm sticking with it.

Yes, I can agree there. An ectopic pregnancy has to be ended. Someone threatening to kill a hundred hostages being shot may be the least-worst option. But warfare - the wholesale mass killing of people - I'm not so ready to admit its inevitability or necessity.

Massacres likes those perpetuated on the Yazidis in our time or on the Assyrians in Simele, Iraq in 1933 are the wholesale mass killing of people, too...should those not be resisted, with force if necessary?

This may possibly be a result of the thought-confetti nature of my argument. I am not saying there is never ever a place for any violence. This thread started specifically about the question of war, and that came about as part of an argument about a high view of human beings being a necessary part of Christianity. I cannot reconcile unnecessary killing with the gospel.

Unnecessary killing, no, but then I didn't think that was part of the question. It seems to me that if you define war as unnecessary killing, then you much more easily get to your answers concerning topics such as this one, but I don't think that's the most honest exploration of the question. Only perhaps the cleanest.

Hmm. That seems rather close to despair, to me. Which may be an understandable result of being a victim of oppression/atrocity, but ought we not want to inspire hope in despair, rather than affirming a despairing worldview?

But I'm not affirming a despairing worldview. You're calling it that and then saying that I'm affirming it. What I'm actually saying is more or less an affirmation of what HG said in the Syriac Orthodox video I posted earlier: that it is better to die than to be a slave. When your enemy wants to not even kill you but instead to take away everything from you and change everything to suit themselves, it is better to die than to allow that to happen. This is the decision that all the holy martyrs who rejected living rather than commit apostasy also made, I'm only saying that the same can be made without blame by those who would rather fight than be extinguished by being forcibly converted to Islam or made to live as slaves to others and to pay doubly for the 'privilege' (via the non-Muslim tax). I would even agree with you that it is better in such situations to flee, but I am recognizing that not everyone feels they can do that with a clean conscience, and indeed many may not even have the option no matter how they feel about it.

No, and that's not what I meant. But I simply cannot accept that WWII, as it played out, was either necessary or the least worst way things could possibly have gone.

Of course it wasn't the least worst way, but we don't live in the least worst world to begin with, so I don't know what that's even supposed to mean. I think it's our duty to try to do whatever we can to try to make it the least worst world possible for our time, but of course everyone says that, and so the not-least-worst (ugh) world that we are currently living in is presumably the result of those who are able to making the decisions that they think will lead to such an improvement. What're you gonna do, really? There's no one, universally agreed upon ethic or standard by which we can say "things should definitely be this way and not some other way", and when we try to get rid of those like ISIS, who most clearly stand in the way of what the majority of people in the world otherwise agree on, we read from you and people of your mentality that this is wrong to do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well, which is it? Do you want to live in a world where barbarians are not allowed to hold everyone hostage by their commitment to killing enough people until their god is pleased with them and lets them into the holy brothel in the sky, or do you want to live in a world where no one ever does anything about such people because doing so requires that they be militarily confronted, since they won't just leave the world stage on their own because you've asked really nicely?

But you are now talking about a soldier, not a police officer. A soldier is not attempting to preserve lives (even if by taking a life); s/he is attempting to take the lives of the enemy.

But even the police killing is evil. It may be able to be argued as a necessary evil, but the minute we begin to excuse it as not evil, we open the door to being more and more lax about the taking of life.

I've never argued that killing is not evil, only that this is not the end of the story. Like when bin Laden was killed, I think I might've been the only person I know who wasn't dancing in the streets (metaphorically, although I saw videos of people literally doing so, as well), mostly because it's still a loss of life, and furthermore in his particular case a life that had so much more potential than most people in his part of the world have, yet all that potential was wasted on evil pursuits. So I recognized that, and was sad. Does that mean that I believe for a second that it was somehow not necessary that he be shuffled off this mortal coil? No! I believe an argument could be made that it is better to keep him alive rather than turn him into a 'martyr' for his cause, but this is counterbalanced by the fact that keeping such people alive allows them to further plot and arrange for more terrorist operations via various circuitous routes, as he had already proven himself able to do from a freaking cave in the middle of nowhere.

So, yeah...things are complicated, but sometimes you have to do things you wouldn't ordinarily do in particular situations. That's kind of what war is: if you go to war, you're already admitting that it's outside the bounds of normal methods of conflict resolution. We should always strive to adhere to those normal methods before going to war, but going to war should not be absolutely off the table in all cases...we had just better be darn sure that we really have exhausted all possible means of keeping the peace before we resort to it. In several recent escapades of this nature (Iraq, Afghanistan), I don't think the case was made to my personal satisfaction, though of course I'm a nobody who is in charge of nothing.

 

[zippy2006]

I don't believe war is permissible, ever. Self-defence may be permissible, but war goes far beyond self-defence.

When self defense occurs at a national level it is called war. It's that simple. When 50,000 troops invade your country and you mobilize 100,000 to defend it that's war. In such cases there is no self defense without war. You cannot believe in self-defense without also believing in defensive wars.

My position comes from radical commitment to my understanding of the gospel. My seminary would have had classes which debated pacifism, but it is not generally a required position of Anglicans. But, for example, some of the students (including me) were members of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, and their ideas circulated in our discussions.

Okay.

I would define justice as the use of power for the furthering of human flourishing.

So that's not what justice is. The dictionaries are not in competition on this one. Alleviating inhumane conditions can be a form of justice, but justice and human flourishing aren't the same thing. Maybe we're just stuck on an equivocation.

Because I was not there, and I am not an accomplished enough student of the history of those events to propose interventions which may have been beneficial earlier. I might note that WWII is considered to have been seeded by the unjust settlement of WWI, and that actions taken with an eye to furthering long term peace and justice at the end of that war may have averted WWII altogether.

But you keep beating around the bush and avoiding the basic questions. It doesn't really matter "what may have been beneficial earlier." We can talk about counterfactuals all day long. It would have been beneficial earlier for Adam not to eat the fruit, in which case we wouldn't have to worry about war at all. It would have been beneficial if Franz Ferdinand had never been assassinated and the world wars never occurred. But unless you have a time machine this sort of reasoning flows out of the fairy-tale world I referenced earlier.

A true pacifist would have to say that going to war with Hitler was wrong, whether in 1939 or 1944. Was it? Lots of people on the Allied side preferred neutrality far into the war.

There was probably a point, with Hitler, where other alternatives had closed. But if we are to take a pacifist approach seriously, then we need to look at what was happening in Europe long before that point.

If we are to take a pacifist approach seriously then we can't justify war when "other alternatives had closed." You can either be a pacifist or else you can admit that it was permissible (or even just) to go to war with Hitler. You have to pick one. You can't have both.

Not every killing is murder, but every war is mass murder.

How is that a logical position? All the killings done as a part of war are magically murder?

I am not suggesting that states should be passive or inactive on an international level. I'm arguing that mass killing is not the answer.

Because you live in a world where the 1941 Hitler never existed. You claim there is always another option, and when presented with an example where there was no other option you ignore it. There's a very thin line between that and Holocaust denial.

Because "war" and "self-defence" are not the same thing. If someone is faced with a situation where it's shoot or be shot, I'm not going to condemn them as a murderer for shooting. But warfare - sustained intentional campaigns of mass killing - are a whole other thing.

John Doe points a gun at me and I shoot him in self-defense. Hitler sends his Luftwaffe to Britain and they attack Hitler in self-defense. What's the difference?

This is what you seem to be saying. Suppose, analogously, Hitler is a serial killer in Australia. Your position is that when Hitler is engaged in an attempt to murder one of his victims, then that victim (and no one else) is permitted to defend themselves. When they are no longer in imminent danger they are no longer allowed to attack Hitler. No one may assume the role of the "aggressor" and attack Hitler directly. Only "self defense" is allowed. So Hitler sustains injuries here and there but recovers and regains his strength. Eventually he murders everyone in Australia who he dislikes. The Jews, the gays, and the handicapped are all dead and gone. No one is allowed to attack Hitler directly because Paidiske thinks this would be immoral. That is a very, very strange position. I don't find it "even slightly convincing."

My argument is based on the absolute value of human life. I really struggle to understand Christians who seem to hold a low view of human life.

Do you think you have a high view of human life? You would rather see Jews gassed by the millions and combatants mowed down by the tens of millions than lift a finger to forcibly oppose Hitler. That's not a high view of human life, and it's not a virtue. It's just the opposite. Those who are unwilling to defend life do not care about life.


I don't really care if people want to argue that 99% of wars are unjust, but to oppose just war theory in principle is just absurd. The mental gymnastics required are over the top.

(Also, you never answered my question about the folks who break into your house and change the locks. You have very deep inconsistencies between your view of individual morality and nation-based morality. You would mobilize the police to violently take back your land while at the same time claiming that nations or clans are not allowed this luxury. You would support aggressively attacking a serial killer on an individual level but at the same time claim that nations are not allowed the luxury of aggressively attacking a serial killer on a national level. For these reasons your position and pacifism lack consistency.)

 

[Ignatius the Kiwi]

It's true that most Christians through history haven't been radical pacifists, although I think that strand has always been there.

I can’t think of any Christian writer who abhorred the use of military arms in the way radical pacifists like yourself did. There have always been those in the Church who would not resort to violence and would gladly give up their lives instead of resisting, but they were the benefactors of a society that also protected their lives via the use of force.

If Christians were to have adopted pacifism, I would argue that it would have been inconsistent for them to live in any national entity or consider themselves citizens or people of it. Yet, for as long as there have been Christians we have recognized that origins of ourselves contributes a valuable part of our character, even as we are united in Christ.

That's an interesting implication. I'd say it certainly places some boundaries on the legitimate exercise of power by the state. As noted above, I am utterly opposed to the death penalty, and grateful to live in a country which has not imposed it since the 1960s.

If you accept the use of force and compulsion in one instance, why utterly reject in the other? The only people consistent on this point are Libertarians who argue that the use of force on others is always illegitimate, hence they argue taxation is theft and if I agreed with their premises I would be forced to accept them.

It’s just about the death penalty, it’s about the fact that every state entity in the world runs on the implicit assumption that if you break enough rules, they will kill you. They will ultimately, to maintain order, kill you if you break the law.

Because I think it's irrelevant to the question. A Muslim Spain might have been worse than a Christian Spain, and it still would not justify warfare. "We made the world a better place by killing ten million people!" is not a claim anyone can make without blushing, surely?

It’s not that I don’t regret the loss of life, but If I were to make an analysis and ask was it worth it. I would say it absolutely was. We also have to consider the types of people we’re talking about when we’re discussing war casualties or even the causes of war. So let’s accept that ten million number.

How many of the ten million were soldiers? A majority I would think since they would be doing the fighting. I do not feel as bad for them and I admire the tenacity of those men on the Christian side for willing to fight for a Christian Iberia. How many of those ten million were slaves? Perhaps women captured in raids and sold as sex slaves to powerful Islamic lords, forced to have their children and then be told that they must be raised as Muslims? (Should they have accepted that situation in humility and not fight back? Perhaps rather die than suffer such a fate?)

How many of those millions were villages of just average people? One can rightfully condemn putting whole villages to the slaughter. Take in mind this happened over the course of 700 years.

So yes, I would say the world was made a better place without an Islamic Spain. If you disagree and view that the risk was not worth that cost, tell me why pacifism would have made the world better. Because as far as I can see, if all Christians had followed your advice, Europe would be entirely Muslim today. If we do not have the right to attack an invader, Charles Martel should have given up southern France to the Muslims. Asia Minor should have been surrendered to the Arabs along with Constantinople and Bulkans centuries before it was surrendered to the Turks. The Russians should never have fought to get rid of their Mongol overlords.

In short, the world would be a radically different place and I’m not convinced it would be better.

An explicitly Christian government - or a Christian in government - must, however, recognise that their power must only ever be exercised for the good of all. Pre-Christian Rome brutalised those under its control, but for Christians that could (or should) never have been seen as valid use of power. But there have been plenty of Christian tyrants.

What is the good of all? What is the function of a state? It is to maintain order in society and defend its citizens. A Christian state cannot exist on your terms because they are forbidden from doing either, unless you would like to amend yourself and say there is an acceptable level of force and violence that can be used by the state. IN which case it seems you undercut your radical pacifism, in favour of an idea of less violence and killing. That’s a liberal position, not a pacifist one.

Basically, yes, that's it in a nutshell. I'd post some pictures to illustrate my point, but they'd violate CF's rules about graphic and disturbing content. I'm sure you can google "war injuries" or "battlefield mass graves" or the like, if you wish, though.

We have no right to do that to people on a mass scale. To do so is an utterly profound evil.

I’ve seen many videos like that. I would also agree we shouldn’t indiscriminately target civilians.

Well, again, we don't know, do we? Today, the formally Norse lands are all basically Lutheran. They gradually converted to Christianity in the centuries after Alfred the Great. Perhaps if they had occupied a Christian Wessex, that conversion process might have happened more quickly.

My answers don't change just because your questions touch on a different part of the world.

Perhaps. More like Norse Scandanavian would be strengthened and they would have a permanent base from which to raid France, Spain and Germany more effectively. You would have seen the Christian Lords not defend their subjects, not resist those invasions and instead surrender all wealth and prosperity to them. Not even just their wealth but their lives, especially the women captured in slavery and brought back to be the wives of Norse men.

Mind you, the process of converting the Scandanavians was a top down affair. It was the implicit use of force by the crown and the gradual christianization effort by both the Church and the crowns of Scandanavia to convert the Norse. Such efforts we are told by you are unacceptable and I haven’t seen you reconcile those foundations with your own.

Where you seem the err the most is in suggesting that there is always a peaceful solution to a problem. That avoiding war or conflict or bloodshed will always achieve the best results. The problem with the example of King Alfred is that he did exactly that. He paid the Dangald twice I believe and still had his Kingdom usurped for a time. There is no reason to believe that him not fighting back further would have resulted in a better outcome.

What did he do instead? He did his duty as a Monarch. He rallied support, fought a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Norsemen and forced Guthrum to be his Godson. Who knows if Guthrum ever came to sincerely believe in Christ but he forever knew afterwards that the God of the Christians is not someone to be trifled with. Alfred’s actions forced there to be one more Christian Kingdom in England, instead of none.

That is the only option? We cannot, for example, provide a home for them elsewhere? Apparently there are about 3 million Armenians in Armenia. That's not really so many that we couldn't come up with creative solutions.

Of course, the world has shown frighteningly little will to come up with creative solutions for refugees in general...

And what, bring them to the west? Where they will likely be assimilated into a culture of secularism within a few generations. Losing their sense of identity as Armenians, gradually losing their faith like the most other western countries? Coming to imbibe the poison which is our western way of being? You’ll forgive me if I think it better for the Armenians to retain their identity, to maintain their people and faith and continue living as Armenians rather than give up and settle for becoming Australians or New Zealanders or (god help us) Canadians.

What also is the consequence of there being no more Armenia? A stronger Turkey and Azerbaijan. Perhaps a union of those two states no longer separated by a buffer? Will that encourage peace? Will they respect Armenia as country and it’s heritage? Or will they destroy everything and claim the Armenians never lived there? Maybe Greece should give itself up to Turkey next, then we will have peace. In fact maybe all the Balkans should just surrender to Turkey’s will. Why not? We aren’t allowed to resist or fight back against an aggressor.

Your solution is really no solution at all. All it does is reward the evildoer.

We cannot resist evil by perpetrating evil. Resist evil, of course! We are all called to do that. But we fail to do so if we think "resist evil" means "kill the other."

"For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

Except it isn’t evil to kill people. Not necessarily, since you accept the morality of the state doing so in dire circumstances. Why are then nations forbidden utterly from killing others in defence? I think Zippy has offered the best argument here for why your brand of pacifism fails to address justice.

It is not evil to defend your friend. It is not evil to defend your family. It is not evil to defend your nation.