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We all know of religion that in the time past and in our present time is so debased that it has become an instrument of violence. I think that a true Christian has to be in opposition to the times. The church has been too timid! It is now up to the laymen to act!
I’m going to used the following story as a preface to our discussion on faith and violence.
I’ve heard the following story used in different ways to emphasize a variety of points. It comes from the
Hassidic Rabbi Baal-Shem-Tov (The Master of the Good Name 1698-1760).
Two men were traveling through a forest. One was drunk, the other was sober. As they went, they were beset by robbers, beaten, robbed of all they had, even their clothing. When they emerged, people asked them if they got through the woods without trouble. The drunken man said: "Everything was fine: nothing went wrong: we had no trouble at all!" They said: "How does it happen that you are naked and covered with blood?" He did not have an answer. The sober man said: "Do not believe him: he is drunk. It was a disaster. Robbers beat us without mercy and took everything we had. Be warned by what happened to us, and look out for yourselves."
For some "faithful” and for unbelievers too” faith" seems to be a kind of drunkenness, an anaesthetic that keeps you from realizing and believing that anything can go wrong. Or perhaps you are confident that your Church’s theology is correct. Such faith can sometimes be immersed in a world of violence without objection. The violence is perfectly all right. It is quite normal unless of course it happens to be exercised by Muslims, Blacks, or, you fill in the blank_________. Then it must be put down instantly by superior force. The drunkenness of this kind of faith, whether in a religious message or merely in a political ideology, enables us to go through life without seeing that our own violence is a disaster and that the overwhelming force by which we seek to assert ourselves and our own self-interest may well be our ruin. Is faith a narcotic dream in a world of heavily-armed robbers, or is it an awakening? Is faith a convenient nightmare in which we are attacked and obliged to destroy our attackers? What if we awaken to discover that we are the robbers, and our destruction comes from the root of hate in ourselves?
Remember hearing of a commandment "Thou shalt not kill"? We live in an age today when man, as a individual and as a nation, is not only more frustrated, more crowded, more subject to psychotic and hostile delusion than ever, but also has at his disposition an arsenal of weapons that could make global suicide a possibility. I pray that the nuclear powers restrain impulses to reduce one another to radioactive dust. I am very uneasy about the escalating Asian wars.
All these "small" wars go on with unabated cruelty. I saw a statistic the other day that stated more bombs have been exploded in the present Middle East war than were dropped in the whole of World War II. I suspect that is because of the use of missiles.
Our own affluent nation has become (I don’t think any will deny) intrinsically violent. Have you picked up a paper lately that did not report a murder, mugging, rape, robbery, corruption, or other sort of crime? The problem of violence is not just a problem of a few rioters and rebels, but the problem of a whole social structure which is outwardly ordered and respectable, and inwardly ridden by psychopathic obsessions and delusions and injustices.
Try not to misunderstand, I recognize that it is perfectly true that violence must at times be restrained by force; but a convenient mythology which simply legalizes the use of force by big criminals against little criminals whose small-scale criminality is largely caused by the large-scale injustice under which they live only perpetuates the disorder. A famous saying of Saint Augustine states: "What are kingdoms without justice but large bands of robbers?"
The problem of violence today must be traced to its root; not the small-time murderers but the massively organized bands of murderers whose operations are global. The moral theology of war with many of our major Christian denominations seems to concern itself chiefly with specious discussions of how far the monarch or the sovereign state can justly make use of force.
In the Third World we find not huge armed establishments but petty dictatorships (representing a rich minority) opposed by small, volunteer guerrilla bands fighting for "the poor." The big powers (particularly the U.S. it seems) tend to intervene in these struggles. However, as we’ve observed time and again, they continue to kill one another; with or without our help. But our involvement always provides opportunities to develop new experimental weapons which are sometimes incredibly savage and cruel; and sad to say are used mostly against helpless noncombatants. I also find it very sad to say, churchmen continue to issue blessings upon the military and upon the versatile applications of science to the art of killing. For many like myself the use of this kind of force does not become moral just because the government and the mass media have declared the cause to be patriotic. The cliché "my country right or wrong" does not provide a satisfactory theological answer to the moral problems raised by the intervention of American power in all parts of the World. Our rapid intervention in all these wars in this nuclear era is foolish to say the least and inviting disaster.
We are not declaring in any way in this writing that the use of force is never considered necessary. That is not what is being stated. Understandable there are situations which the only way to effectively protect human life and rights is by forcible resistance against unjust encroachment. We find no fault then when the Church remains silent or admits then that force is necessary. The problem arises not when theology admits that force may be necessary, but when it does so in a way that implicitly favors the claims of the powerful and self-seeking establishment against the common good of mankind or against the rights of the oppressed.
We tend to judge violence in terms of the individual, the messy, the physically disturbing, and the personally frightening. In other words, the violence we want to see restrained is the violence of the hood waiting for us in the parking lot, crowd gatherings that get out of hand, etc. etc. That is reasonable, but it tends to influence us too much. It makes us think that the problem of violence is limited to this very small scale, and it makes us unable to appreciate the far greater problem of the more abstract, more global, more organized presence of violence on a massive and corporate level. The real problem is not so much the individual with a revolver but death and even genocide as big business. The white-collar violence of today is the systematically organized bureaucratic and technological destruction of man. But this big business of death is all the more innocent and effective because it involves a long chain of individuals, each of whom can feel themselves absolved from responsibility, and each of whom can perhaps salve his conscience by contributing with a more meticulous efficiency to his part in the massive operation. We know, for instance, that Adolph Eichmann and others like him felt no guilt for their share in the extermination of the Jews. This feeling of justification was due partly to their absolute obedience to higher authority and partly to the care and efficiency which went into the details of their work. This was done almost entirely on paper. Since they dealt with numbers, not with people, and since their job was one of abstract bureaucratic organization, apparently they could easily forget the reality of what they were doing. The same is true to an even greater extent in modern warfare in which the real moral problems are not to be located in rare instances of hand-to-hand combat, but in the remote planning and organization of technological destruction. The real crimes of modern war are committed not at the front (if any) but in war offices and ministries of defense in which no one ever has to see any blood. Modern technological mass murder is not directly visible, like individual murder. It is abstract, corporate, businesslike, cool, free of guilt feelings and therefore a thousand times more deadly and effective than the eruption of violence out of individual hate.
It is this polite, massively organized white-collar murder machine that threatens the world with destruction; not the violence of a few desperate teen-agers, Convenient Store robbers etc. It seems in my view, our church theology fails to see this and seems to principally stay focused more on the individual violence. We’re horrified at the muggings and killings where a mess is made on our own doorstep, but we can bless the antiseptic violence of corporately organized governmental murder because it is respectable, clean, patriotic and above all profitable.
“Love" is unfortunately a much misused word; almost not much different than a salutation greeting. It trips off the Christian tongue so easily that one gets the impression it means others ought to love us regardless of our motives. A theology of love cannot afford to preach edifying generalities about charity, while identifying "peace" with mere established power and legalized violence against the oppressed. A theology of love cannot be allowed merely to serve the interests of the rich and powerful, justifying their wars, their violence and their bombs, while exhorting the poor and underprivileged to practice patience, meekness, long-suffering and to solve their problems nonviolently. The theology of love must seek to deal realistically with the evil and injustice in the world, and not merely to compromise with them. Such a theology will have to take note of the ambiguous realities of politics, without embracing the specious myth of a "realism" that merely justifies force in the service of established power.
The Church should not exist merely to appease the already too untroubled conscience of the powerful and the established. A true theology of love may conceivably turn out to be a theology of revolution; a resistance to participate in the evil that reduces a brother to homicidal desperation.
Enough for now................Your comments are welcomed...........
We all know of religion that in the time past and in our present time is so debased that it has become an instrument of violence. I think that a true Christian has to be in opposition to the times. The church has been too timid! It is now up to the laymen to act!
I’m going to used the following story as a preface to our discussion on faith and violence.
I’ve heard the following story used in different ways to emphasize a variety of points. It comes from the
Hassidic Rabbi Baal-Shem-Tov (The Master of the Good Name 1698-1760).
Two men were traveling through a forest. One was drunk, the other was sober. As they went, they were beset by robbers, beaten, robbed of all they had, even their clothing. When they emerged, people asked them if they got through the woods without trouble. The drunken man said: "Everything was fine: nothing went wrong: we had no trouble at all!" They said: "How does it happen that you are naked and covered with blood?" He did not have an answer. The sober man said: "Do not believe him: he is drunk. It was a disaster. Robbers beat us without mercy and took everything we had. Be warned by what happened to us, and look out for yourselves."
For some "faithful” and for unbelievers too” faith" seems to be a kind of drunkenness, an anaesthetic that keeps you from realizing and believing that anything can go wrong. Or perhaps you are confident that your Church’s theology is correct. Such faith can sometimes be immersed in a world of violence without objection. The violence is perfectly all right. It is quite normal unless of course it happens to be exercised by Muslims, Blacks, or, you fill in the blank_________. Then it must be put down instantly by superior force. The drunkenness of this kind of faith, whether in a religious message or merely in a political ideology, enables us to go through life without seeing that our own violence is a disaster and that the overwhelming force by which we seek to assert ourselves and our own self-interest may well be our ruin. Is faith a narcotic dream in a world of heavily-armed robbers, or is it an awakening? Is faith a convenient nightmare in which we are attacked and obliged to destroy our attackers? What if we awaken to discover that we are the robbers, and our destruction comes from the root of hate in ourselves?
Remember hearing of a commandment "Thou shalt not kill"? We live in an age today when man, as a individual and as a nation, is not only more frustrated, more crowded, more subject to psychotic and hostile delusion than ever, but also has at his disposition an arsenal of weapons that could make global suicide a possibility. I pray that the nuclear powers restrain impulses to reduce one another to radioactive dust. I am very uneasy about the escalating Asian wars.
All these "small" wars go on with unabated cruelty. I saw a statistic the other day that stated more bombs have been exploded in the present Middle East war than were dropped in the whole of World War II. I suspect that is because of the use of missiles.
Our own affluent nation has become (I don’t think any will deny) intrinsically violent. Have you picked up a paper lately that did not report a murder, mugging, rape, robbery, corruption, or other sort of crime? The problem of violence is not just a problem of a few rioters and rebels, but the problem of a whole social structure which is outwardly ordered and respectable, and inwardly ridden by psychopathic obsessions and delusions and injustices.
Try not to misunderstand, I recognize that it is perfectly true that violence must at times be restrained by force; but a convenient mythology which simply legalizes the use of force by big criminals against little criminals whose small-scale criminality is largely caused by the large-scale injustice under which they live only perpetuates the disorder. A famous saying of Saint Augustine states: "What are kingdoms without justice but large bands of robbers?"
The problem of violence today must be traced to its root; not the small-time murderers but the massively organized bands of murderers whose operations are global. The moral theology of war with many of our major Christian denominations seems to concern itself chiefly with specious discussions of how far the monarch or the sovereign state can justly make use of force.
In the Third World we find not huge armed establishments but petty dictatorships (representing a rich minority) opposed by small, volunteer guerrilla bands fighting for "the poor." The big powers (particularly the U.S. it seems) tend to intervene in these struggles. However, as we’ve observed time and again, they continue to kill one another; with or without our help. But our involvement always provides opportunities to develop new experimental weapons which are sometimes incredibly savage and cruel; and sad to say are used mostly against helpless noncombatants. I also find it very sad to say, churchmen continue to issue blessings upon the military and upon the versatile applications of science to the art of killing. For many like myself the use of this kind of force does not become moral just because the government and the mass media have declared the cause to be patriotic. The cliché "my country right or wrong" does not provide a satisfactory theological answer to the moral problems raised by the intervention of American power in all parts of the World. Our rapid intervention in all these wars in this nuclear era is foolish to say the least and inviting disaster.
We are not declaring in any way in this writing that the use of force is never considered necessary. That is not what is being stated. Understandable there are situations which the only way to effectively protect human life and rights is by forcible resistance against unjust encroachment. We find no fault then when the Church remains silent or admits then that force is necessary. The problem arises not when theology admits that force may be necessary, but when it does so in a way that implicitly favors the claims of the powerful and self-seeking establishment against the common good of mankind or against the rights of the oppressed.
We tend to judge violence in terms of the individual, the messy, the physically disturbing, and the personally frightening. In other words, the violence we want to see restrained is the violence of the hood waiting for us in the parking lot, crowd gatherings that get out of hand, etc. etc. That is reasonable, but it tends to influence us too much. It makes us think that the problem of violence is limited to this very small scale, and it makes us unable to appreciate the far greater problem of the more abstract, more global, more organized presence of violence on a massive and corporate level. The real problem is not so much the individual with a revolver but death and even genocide as big business. The white-collar violence of today is the systematically organized bureaucratic and technological destruction of man. But this big business of death is all the more innocent and effective because it involves a long chain of individuals, each of whom can feel themselves absolved from responsibility, and each of whom can perhaps salve his conscience by contributing with a more meticulous efficiency to his part in the massive operation. We know, for instance, that Adolph Eichmann and others like him felt no guilt for their share in the extermination of the Jews. This feeling of justification was due partly to their absolute obedience to higher authority and partly to the care and efficiency which went into the details of their work. This was done almost entirely on paper. Since they dealt with numbers, not with people, and since their job was one of abstract bureaucratic organization, apparently they could easily forget the reality of what they were doing. The same is true to an even greater extent in modern warfare in which the real moral problems are not to be located in rare instances of hand-to-hand combat, but in the remote planning and organization of technological destruction. The real crimes of modern war are committed not at the front (if any) but in war offices and ministries of defense in which no one ever has to see any blood. Modern technological mass murder is not directly visible, like individual murder. It is abstract, corporate, businesslike, cool, free of guilt feelings and therefore a thousand times more deadly and effective than the eruption of violence out of individual hate.
It is this polite, massively organized white-collar murder machine that threatens the world with destruction; not the violence of a few desperate teen-agers, Convenient Store robbers etc. It seems in my view, our church theology fails to see this and seems to principally stay focused more on the individual violence. We’re horrified at the muggings and killings where a mess is made on our own doorstep, but we can bless the antiseptic violence of corporately organized governmental murder because it is respectable, clean, patriotic and above all profitable.
“Love" is unfortunately a much misused word; almost not much different than a salutation greeting. It trips off the Christian tongue so easily that one gets the impression it means others ought to love us regardless of our motives. A theology of love cannot afford to preach edifying generalities about charity, while identifying "peace" with mere established power and legalized violence against the oppressed. A theology of love cannot be allowed merely to serve the interests of the rich and powerful, justifying their wars, their violence and their bombs, while exhorting the poor and underprivileged to practice patience, meekness, long-suffering and to solve their problems nonviolently. The theology of love must seek to deal realistically with the evil and injustice in the world, and not merely to compromise with them. Such a theology will have to take note of the ambiguous realities of politics, without embracing the specious myth of a "realism" that merely justifies force in the service of established power.
The Church should not exist merely to appease the already too untroubled conscience of the powerful and the established. A true theology of love may conceivably turn out to be a theology of revolution; a resistance to participate in the evil that reduces a brother to homicidal desperation.
Enough for now................Your comments are welcomed...........
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