To all Veterans
Thank you, Veterans, for your service to the nation and to every one of us.
posted by G.Rap | 10:59 AM
Raplog
"I would we were all of one mind, and one mind good." --Cymbeline, V.iv.209-210. An English teacher's log. Slow down: Check it once in a while.
- On Proposition 8
- Igor
- Free Will and Determinism
- Très Fizz
- Intimations of Mortality
- Benefit of Hindsight
- Choosing Religion, Ethical Dilemmas, and Just War
- Link to Indoctrination U
- Support Our Troops
- Fact, Feeling, and Myth
Blog Links
Other Links
- Mary Holmes: Paintings and Ideas
- Charles Krauthammer
- Real Clear Politics
- Camera (Accuracy in Mid-East News)
- Memri (Mid-East Translations)
2 Comments:
"Judaism teaches that we, like everything in the universe, exist within the will of the Creator."
I have quoted you from your Judaism post. The quote contains a lot of truth, as many religions of the world state the same thing, except in different forms— essentially it describes a relationship between the finite and the infinite. Yet if Judaism states that "thou shall not kill" why would you support the troops, especially if their loyalty does not reside in the service of God's will but in the service of the nation's, which in its inherent being can succumb to the will of falsity?
If we are all God's children then it must be deduced that we are all one human family, and thus the tenets of the family must hold true to all human beings. Even if your brother and sister lie in the wrong would you kill them, or perhaps you would try to convince them to stay in the light, as defined by God? Yet, in fear of our lives and the existence of our ideologies we convince ourselves that our brothers and sisters are our enemies and deserve death! And to me this shows a lack of faith in God's will—the absolute truth!
Soldiers fight and die for an idea, so why can we not live, fight (with words), and also die for an idea consisting of love and compassion?
Given the false assumptions, erroneous conclusions, and bizarre implications in this comment, I hardly know where to begin my reply.
Yes, we all exist within God’s will and are all brothers and sisters under God. But God gives us free will, and that opens the possibility of evil as well as the obligation to oppose evil in the name of good.
Yes, we are all fallible and even our best intentions are tinged with imperfect motives. Nonetheless, Judaism does not teach radical pacifism in the name of universal love. It opposes a resignation from action that would allow evil to prevail.
The commandment is NOT “do not kill anything under any circumstances,” but “do not murder.” We are not commanded to refrain from killing murderers who are trying to massacre innocent people. On the contrary, we are obligated to resist them, justice being as fundamental a principle as love. Of course we are obligated to take care in doing so not to wrong the innocent or become murderers ourselves. But not to see the moral difference between murderers and those who are at war against them is to be morally obtuse.
The idea of being willing to die with love and compassion in our hearts for assassins who in madness are trying to wipe us out is itself madness. Judaism does not sanction such suicidal behavior, which is a form of sentimentality representing neither love nor justice. Of course we may and must argue about the validity of particular threats and of particular responses to them. But the sweeping implications of your comment would rule out all resistance to evil. The brotherhood of man is no justification for turning the other cheek while Hitler or Stalin or Arafat or Saddam or Osama bin Laden or Ahmadinejad engage in orgies of inhuman and blasphemous murder.
The Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Israelis in Gaza are not fighting for mere ideologies. They are fighting for the best form of justice under God that the world has yet discovered, namely the system of religious and personal liberty for all under the rule of just and equitable laws, the gift of Judaism and Christianity as conveyed to the modern world by the English-speaking democracies of the West.
This system is as vulnerable to corruption of motives from within as to attack from without. So you are right to demand its credentials. But the principle of the just war remains, as does the legal principle behind forcible arrest, trial, and punishment for individual crimes. It would be immoral and perverse to use an extreme mystical pietism to justify non-resistance to the psychopathic brutalities of the fanatical gangs of murderers against whom we are now and will be for the foreseeable future at war.
Post a Comment
<< Home