Thursday, March 10, 2011

Are Wars Evil?

From the biblical perspective, if one says war is inherently evil that poses quite a few difficulties: one, of course, being the Old Testament wars that at times are God ordained; and there is also the fact that Jesus never rebukes the centurian for his being a soldier and even commends him for his faith. St. Augustine, no light-weight among Christian thinkers, also provides quite a good treatise on it from which the Church formulated "the Just War Theory". I would add that from a simple philosophical view there are times, given the condition of the world, that one must fight to defend another. The hard truth is that bullies bully. A boy must battle him both as a boy and as a country. It is one of those irrefutable laws of the streets that it is good and heroic for a boy to defend another. In our modern era we wring our hands and beg a bureacracy in to alleviate the bullying plague. However, our forefathers would have simply advised that a good punch in the nose would fix things. Yes, sometimes the punch in the nose is justified. Certainly the Jews in Dauchau must not have been disappointed that the American forces had in them to step into Normandy and punch someone in the nose. Sometimes it must just be done. But of course, as Christians, if we have to do it, it is best after any liberating that we have the spirit to provide a clean handkerchief for the bloody nose.

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