What's Holy About War?

[Sagan]

What's Holy About War?

THE LAST WORD
by John Bloom (AKA Joe Bob Briggs)
Issue #184, Nov./Dec. 2002

When men in war councils start invoking the name of God thrice daily, every
corpuscle of my cigar-wracked body groans like an infidel on the
inquisitor's rack.

I have nothing against the Almighty. I think the Big Guy knows what he's
doing. But I'm not sure he's inclined to delegate this much work to men who
have been checked out on M-16s.

To begin with, if you want to invoke His name without getting into MAJOR
theological, not to mention political, trouble, then you should probably
refer to Him as "The God of Abraham." I know it will tick off a few
Buddhists and Zoroastrians here and there, but at least it includes all the
known zealots who are currently hacking one another's limbs off. The other
night I saw a minister of the gospel on MSNBC who was asked whether she
thought Osama bin Laden believed in God, and her answer was, "It's not the
God I know. It's not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."

Well, uh, no it's definitely NOT the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It's
the God of Abraham, Ishmael and Muhammad. But at least this woman had the
good sense to identify that particular dividing point in our spiritual
heritage. If she'd stopped at Abraham - the one we ALL agree on - then maybe
she would have been making a point about bin Laden's heresy. Saddling him
with two spiritual forebears he never claimed in the first place is the
equivalent of a Satanist condemning a Presbyterian in the name of Madalyn
Murray O'Hair's ghost. She seemed to be making HIS point, not hers.

I'm surprised that, with all the high-powered spiritual advisors trouping
through the White House these days, one of them hasn't said, "Uh, George,
you know, we do have this one problem. The whole ISHMAEL thing. Their
religion sort of, uh, branched off from ours when Abraham got a girl
pregnant."

But, in fact, the opposite has occurred. Franklin Graham, evangelical heir
apparent to his father Billy's brand of white-bread Christianity, did his
best to get the anti-Islam ball into play. He pronounced Islam "a very evil
and wicked religion" - and was promptly ostracized for the remark. But
wasn't he simply paraphrasing the Old Testament curse that the sons of
Ishmael would always behave like "wild asses," destined to be eternally at
war? Perhaps he should have said, Islam is a religion of wild asses," if for
no other reason than to preserve his defense in the original Hebrew.

Then there's this whole "soul" business. President Bush has said that Osama
bin Laden is "a man without a soul." If he was taking "soul" from the
Pauline epistles - and we know that Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson has
been intentionally using religious language - then he was quoting the Greek
word psuche. He was saying that bin Laden's psuche was missing. Without
going into the endless commentaries about the difference between soul and
spirit - both words derived from "breath of life" - suffice it to say that
the psuche is the lesser of the two. It's simply what makes bin Laden, bin
Laden. Nothing more. It can be a good soul, a bad soul, a busy soul, an
indifferent soul, a twisted soul, and yes, possibly an evil soul, but it's
just the essence of personality, something that emanates from this earth. If
you wanna nail the guy spiritually, you should say he lacks pneuma, or
spirit, which descends from heaven, is eternal, and is the sort of animating
breath of life that is incapable of blowing up office buildings.

Personally I would prefer that we simply dispense with the Godhead in our
official speech altogether, or at least leave it to the Congressional
chaplain, who's generally hired for his ability to invoke the deity without
being too specific about his attributes, origins, nature, or relevance to
anything that might turn out to be embarrassing in the future.
Unfortunately, the poor man's finely honed skills are being wasted as one
religious leader after another stirs the theological stew-pot.

>From Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition: "[God] had a
knowledge nobody else had. He knew George Bush had the ability to lead in
this compelling way."

We'll call this one the Divine Right of Presidents. (Presumably God also
anointed the Florida Secretary of State.)

>From Tim Goeglein, a Bush aide: "I think President Bush is God's man at this
hour, and I say this with a great sense of humility." (It's not clear
whether he's humbled by the President, by God, or by his own message from a
burning bush.)

>From Marvin Olasky, the editor of World magazine, who named Attorney General
Ashcroft "Daniel of the Year": "Just as the biblical Daniel faced an
established idol-worshipping religion in Babylon, so our Dans must not back
down in the face of deadly persecution abroad or the scorn and harassment
that comes domestically from the academic and media high priests of our
established religion, secular humanism."

So much for the Congressional chaplain; we might as well send the man home.
Because if one of our leaders is a genuine prophet, then he has no choice.
He MUST speak in God's name. I guess we could take some comfort in the fact
that if he speaks anything false, we're also obliged by God to kill him.

In my unspeakably Babtist hometown, there are children who are indoctrinated
by being forced to wear T-shirts that proudly state "What would Jesus do?"
(This can result in unforeseen parental dilemmas. Some six-year-olds will
take it as license to feed the family's veal cutlets to the neighborhood
drunk.) But since President Bush happens to come from this selfsame
fundamentalist Christian Texas world that I know so well, why shouldn't we
simply cut through all the theological wind-surfing and resort instead to
this childlike question? The President is, after all, a Christian. He does,
after all, routinely participate in prayer circles in the Oval Office. If we
truly want God in the White House, and the Congress, and the Pentagon, why
don't we simply ask the question, what would Christ have done?

Well, we know two things Jesus did NOT believe in: offense and defense. So
you can neither attack nor defend and remain Christian. The J-Man not only
preached non-violence; he preached absolute non-resistance to the violence
of others. He preached not only forgiveness of the original affront, but
forgiveness seven times seven times when the affront is repeated. He
preached simplicity, poverty, and the willingness to suffer. He compared
himself and all who believed in him to lambs, led to the slaughter.

It will be objected, by the Pentagon chaplain, that his words were not to be
taken literally. It will be objected, by the Congressional chaplain, that so
long as our minds are pure and undefiled by hatred that we must fight to
preserve the lives of others. It will be objected, by the Supreme Court
chaplain, that such a simple reading of the New Testament would abolish all
laws and render us helpless.

I didn't say it was practical. I said it's what the man said. That's why I
would recommend leaving God out of it for the time being. They didn't call
him the Prince of Peace for nothing.