Pictured is Lord Murugan, a Hindu god of war, standing at the entrance to Batu Caves in Malaysia. Abbey and I visited the Batu Caves on our trip to Malaysia
People who use Religion to promote War are participating in Evil
A human beings first reaction to war should be horror and repulsion. War is a sign of a lack of intelligence – it is madness.
Any religion that promotes war is not worth the paper its scriptures is written on. Religion is the pursuit of God – any god that promotes war is a false god. Good religion promotes the pursuit of goodness, of peace, of life flourishing for all humanity.
Soldiering is not an honorable occupation – it is for the dogs of war, those who God cannot stop from warring – Judges 7. We have set our world on the precipice of destruction with unethical weapons of mass destruction.
I was chatting in a local coffee shop on Mactan Island with a young Norwegian man who lived in the city of Bacolod on Negros Island. His web designer skills enabled him to live anywhere with internet access, and he chose, in his words, the ‘simple life’ in the Philippines. He is one of those souls seeking to broaden their experience beyond the boundaries of their own country and culture. Like most persons from the European region of the world, he was multi-lingual and spoke excellent English. He also enjoyed exercising his new-found and basic skills at communicating in Hiligaynon, the language of Negros.
We were discussing nonviolence and I shared with him a few stories of my own journey, stories taken from my years in the USMC. He asked me why I joined the Marines. My response, “Because I was a stupid kid” put a smile on his face and he let out a burst of laughter. We had been enjoying an intellectually driven conversation that was not revealing of stupidity.
When I first arrived in Okinawa, the Vietnam war was ending in rushed evacuations, within the year we would deploy to the Philippines. I was happy we were not fighting anyone and was determined to finish my time in the military in order to use the G.I. bill to pay for a college education.
However, when I was in the Marines, my youthful ignorance quickly gave way to the shock of the vastness of the power of the U.S. military. It was 1976 and I was in a small village in Pampanga. I had met a man named Joseph Laxamana who worked in the local sugar cane factory and at night sold Puca shell necklaces to U.S. soldiers on the bar lined streets outside the Subic Bay Naval facility. Joseph and his wife had five children, their Bahay Kubo (bamboo home) was the size of a small bedroom in a California tract house.
Joseph and I were discussing enlarging his home when a couple of U.S. fighter jets flew low, loud, and directly over our heads. It was at this moment, as I stood with this kind, hardworking young family man that the thought of another nation being entrenched on American soil and flying fighter jets alarmingly low over our homes would be intolerably alarming.
The contrasting power of aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and a military base with American housing, malls, movie theaters, go-cart tracks, and churches, along with the entrenched sex industry flourishing outside the base was striking, like the fighter jets that flew over our heads. I had yet to learn of the history of the U.S. in the Philippines, a history that predated the re-imaging of U.S. presence brought on by World War II.
Prior to meeting Joseph, I had already been deeply troubled by the disparity of wealth and poverty that separated the U.S. base from the adjoining city. Now, seeing that people like Joseph, living humbly in small bamboo homes (Nipa huts), without the luxuries of modern life, were subjected to this intrusion of U.S. military presence left me thinking that we were not the good guys.
Platonic philosophy with its concept of the warrior class is the ideology that drives U.S. military education. Patriotism, along with economic incentives, is the engine that generates masses of young souls to participate in the military-industrial complex where the rich become richer and the status of the poor is become fodder for the machinations of an Empire.
War is not a moral enterprise; the causes of war are indicative of moral failure. War is not a sign of intelligence, but of power. Power is an addictive pride that infects both leaders and the masses. Power is birthed in the masses through ethnocentric-nationalist-ideologies; this false sense of power replaces a psychologically healthy identity with a compromised identity that gravitates toward mimetic behavior sparked by symbols.
Because by its nature, war is immoral, a healthy person with a functioning moral conscience should react to war with horror and be repulsed. Ignorance of the power and function of symbols to create a group-think atmosphere that halts critical thinking, leads to the absence of intelligent discussion, and often silences courageous individualism. Ultimately, war is a purely self-destructive activity that displays human madness. I suggest that this madness is clearly seen in the Exodus story when after all the plagues and the death of the firstborn, Pharaoh leads his army into the red sea.
Yet, history has offered little hope that war will be no more. This has led people to isolate hopeful passages of scripture as eschatological and relegated these descriptions for the behavior of God’s people as impractical if not absurd or unimaginable. However, Christianity is not impotent to change the world, but it does require people who follow Jesus; the prince of peace.
War is madness, it is humanity’s self-destruction, it is indicative of a lack of intelligence.
Isaiah 2:4 is not merely prophetic hope, it is imperative for Christian practice. This is so because the reign of God in Christ has already begun since the time of John the Baptist.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
(Isaiah 2:4)
Surely, the fact that nuclear missiles exist is evidence of a madness that views war as inevitable, requiring the ultimate threat of annihilating humanity, and destroying the ground as preferable to an intelligent compromise.
Religious Writings and Violence
The renunciation of violence is imperative to our survival. The structuring of human societies free from the constraining powers of greed and globalism will require a shift of consciousness from fear to trust in God, a trust that the development of human beings is in effect the salvation of humanity in the present, (as we await the resurrection). True religion, free from defilement, produces non-violent societies where endless appropriation of wealth is untenable as a political argument to support the concept of democracy.
The most dangerous 'cult' across the earth is the military, (whose worship of Ares is in western culture supported by the religion of Plato) throughout history the military has demonstrated the power to turn the young people of a nation state against its own citizens, against their family and friends. The ranks of the U.S. military are filled with officers schooled in Platonic thought whose god is Ares. Without a draft our soldiers see their role as a profession; their allegiance to their profession as a type of holy calling is a grand deception inconsistent with Christian faith.
The failure of a church that refuses to enter into the political sphere of society and speak against the Idol of militarism finds solace behind smoke and mirrors. We are to teach our children love of humanity and to pursue peace through the precepts of God's reign in Christ. Instead we have taught them to worship at the Idols of nationalism, militarism and materialism. We have turned our children into 'holy' sacrifices at the altar of nationalism. The retreat from engaging the political to sacramental activity did not stop the horrors of World War II. The most courageous among us is not the soldier but the one who lives out the faith of Jesus Christ with a message of hope and power able to save the world.
We have failed our children and another generation is immersed in the precepts of warfare. We have taken the message of God and aligned it with impotency, reduced it to a hope only viable for the dead. We have refused the challenge of Jesus to manifest the reign of God. We have maintained people who are more the product of social manufacturing by principalities and powers in economics and media than individuated believers whose faith can resist the reign of the anti-christs.
