Darthben’s Weblog

I’ve been thinking a lot about violence, war and peace a lot lately, and blogging and talking about it. It has been helpful to think through some things. Here is where I think I’m at right now.

The Ultimate goal-

To me when talking about war and violence and whether it is good or bad, I think we need to establish what our ultimate goal is-and I think that our ultimate goal should be reconciliation. I think this is a central part of the gospel-that through the gospel all peoples can be reconciled, and that following Christ means not just loving our friends and eliminating our enemies-but even loving our enemies. So I think a key question that needs to be asked is: Does violence result in reconciliation? It may be possible, but I don’t think that violence is made for that purpose. I’ll get to this more in a second.

Violence:

It’s been difficult to form what I think about this, but I think right now I would say that volence is never good-whether or not it is a necesary evil at times is something that I don’t know if I’ll be able to resolve. However, it is not good, and should be avoided as much as possible. One problem with our culture is that we seem to see violence as the ultimate and best solution-we’d rather dominate others than be taken advantage of. This is perfectly understandable from a worldly perspective-however I think that part of Christ’s message is considering other betters than yourself, being willing to sacrifice-and Paul talks about being willing to be taken advantage of rather than hindering the Gospel by only being concerned about ourselves.

Domination:

This is becoming a more important word for me with this issue. I said earlier that I don’t think violence leads to reconciliation-and part of the reason is that most of the time violence is a vehicle for domination. Domination destroys unity, it destroys the prospect of reconciliation. Instead it alienates people from each other-the powerful from the powerless, the rich from the poor. And I think that wherever violence may be necessary, it must not be used as a means to dominate. I would not have such a problem with the war in Iraq, or with our foreign policy, or the American gov in general if it did not seem that our gov is using its power to dominate.