If God Is Pro-War – He Lied

I have a question to ask you. I would then like you to ask it of others, particularly of Christians:

How many innocent people would you be willing to kill – purely to defend yourself?

For example, let’s say you are well armed and an armed robber is shooting at you – but the robber is holding a hostage directly in front of him.

Or, suppose someone is shooting at you from within a crowd. Maybe some in the crowd don’t like you. Let’s push it even further and say that most of them hate you, and sympathize with the attacker. To shoot back, you would be aiming at the attacker, but you know you would also hit others.

I repeat:

How many of them would you be willing to kill, even absolutely and purely in self-defense?

I asked this question of someone fairly high up in military intelligence recently. I had to press the point as he beat around the bush for a while. His (eventual) response? "I’m not sure I know the answer to that question." Well, at least he was thinking about it.

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That Other War

Reagan-era drug war rhetoric is still with us, and so is the accompanying collateral damage.

In a 1982 speech, President Ronald Reagan declared illicit drugs a threat to America’s national security, putting a too-literal gloss on the phrase “war on drugs.” Reagan went on to liken America’s drug war determination to the obstinacy of the French army at the World War I Battle of Verdun, quoting a French soldier who implored, “There are no impossible situations. There are only people who think they’re impossible.” It was a telling analogy, though in a way Reagan probably didn’t intend. Verdun was a bloody, brutal battle of attrition. A quarter million soldiers lost their lives; another 700,000 were wounded in the months-long battle for a tract of land that offered little practical advantage to either army. In the years since the war, Verdun has come to symbolize the futility of war—the way politicians and generals are willing to write off the mass loss of human life as mere collateral damage in pursuit of some symbolic but ultimately empty goal.

Three drug war deaths in recent headlines show that the Verdun mentality continues to thrive in America’s century-old effort to protect its citizens from themselves. Today, actual war weaponry, armor, and tactics are as much a part of the war on drugs as Reagan’s rhetoric implied back when the drug war was young. And law enforcement officials shrug off the deaths of innocents as if they were the same sort of collateral damage you’d find on a battlefield.

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