Reaping What We Sow

"Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." — Luke 6:38

During my formative years we were proud to be citizens of the nation that had conquered Germany, ending the slaughter of innocent people and saving the world from a fascist state notable for imperialism abroad and deadly secret police in the homeland. Movies like The Great Escape, TV shows like Combat and Twelve O'Clock High, and the miniseries Holocaust reminded us constantly of the evils of the Nazis. We were also reminded of Nazi Germany as we read George Orwell's masterful Nineteen Eighty-Four. We knew that what it described was possible because we already had the telecommunications technology, though it wasn't being used by the government to spy on us. But whenever anyone in authority used power for evil purposes, we would respond as on cue, "Hey, man, is this 1984?"

(Those really in the know knew that the Soviet Union was almost a literal fulfillment of Orwell's "prophecy," but most of the media and education establishment were socialists of one stripe or another, so it wasn't polite to point that out. I was totally fooled myself, even though I read a few books by Christians who had been persecuted by the Communists.)

Add Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth into the mix, and we considered ourselves on our guard against the rise of any totalitarian police state in the good old USA.

Unfortunately, Wile E. Coyote had already run past the edge of the cliff. He just hadn't looked down yet.

In 1953, the CIA overthrew Iran's prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalized Iran's oil industry, and replaced him with Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had fled for his life for fear of the supporters of nationalization. One reinstalled, the Shah was friendly to US interests, so for twenty-six years, the US overlooked his autocracy, specifically the use of his secret police force, SAVAK, to arrest, detain, torture, and kill his opponents.¹

Consider for a moment what a secret police force is. By secret is meant that no one knows the identity of the agents; no one can say, "My neighbor is a member of the secret police," because no one, not even their spouses, knows who they are.

Targets are chosen in secret, so no one knows who the next target is. And as time goes on, targets can be chosen at the whim not only of the chief of state, but also by those in the secret police apparatus. At first targets might be only those who pose a threat to the regime, but eventually they include those against whom those sufficiently powerful have personal vendettas.

In a police state, once a victim has been detained, he has no recourse to courts (not that having such would do him any good), and his friends and family have no way of knowing what has happened to him, where he is, or when or if he will be released. To top it off, the longer he is detained and the more he learns about the system that has detained him, the less likely he is to be released, because he now knows the secrets of the system, which depends most of all on secrecy.

During those days I was never taught to question the legitimacy of supporting the Shah, not even by my fellow evangelicals. It was only when an article in Sojourners, a left-wing magazine whose view of Scripture I soon found suspect, described the situation that I even knew it existed, so secret were the Shah's secret police. I had heard much about the persecution of Christians in Communist countries, but, child of the media that I was, I had never realized that the taxes I sent to Uncle Sam went to preserving governments we would never tolerate in the US.

Make that past tense. We would never have tolerated them in the days between the Holocaust and 1984, but the evangelical church is celebrating the creation of one in our day.

The presidency of George W. Bush was supported by no one more than the evangelical community. I remember receiving e-mail forwards celebrating that man's godliness. Now there was reason to be glad his Democratic opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry, were not president, but there's a difference between being grateful for the absence of a greater evil and celebrating a positive good, and these were celebrations, not expressions of relief.

During the Bush presidency, one of his functionaries, John Yoo, became notorious in constitutionalist circles because of his work to establish the legitimacy (i.e., lawfulness) of what he termed "the unitary executive": he believed that because the nation was at war (the War on Terror), the president needed to be essentially a king, with powers to declare war, and to detain, torture, and execute "enemies of the nation" at will.

That the next president might be a Democrat fazed evangelical Bush supporters not at all, and indeed they cheered when Obama expanded the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan. They cheered louder when he killed Osama bin Laden instead of capturing him and plying him for information about the terrorists who supposedly threaten our existence, and they cheered even louder when he killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, without establishing his guilt of any crime.

So in the US we now are ruled by an autocrat with life-or-death powers over US citizens, just like the Shah of Iran.

Except the Shah didn't have a practically unlimited budget. He was the autocrat of a third-rate country, and though he had resources enough to gain international notoriety for his oppression of his enemies, he was nowhere near omnipotent, as his dethronement proves.

Uncle Sam, in contrast, is nearly omnipotent, the embodiment of the Yuletide hymn, "He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He knows if you've been bad or good, . . . ."

Our electronic communications are now all monitored. Soon we will have spy drones in the sky able to track all our movements. Every motor vehicle will be required to carry a GPS that will allow the authorities to track position, speed, and seatbelt usage. As people lose their jobs and homes, revenue from conventional taxes and even from "sin taxes" on such things as tobacco and alcohol will fall, to be replaced by "taxation by citation": if "sinners" are fair game but unable to provide the desired revenue, certainly "lawbreakers"—e.g., speeders and those who don't buckle their seat belts—can expect to be forced to shoulder the load to relieve the tax burden on the law abiding.

The doctrine of American Exceptionalism teaches that the US is the one nation in the world that can be trusted with a totalitarian government; the US government would never become like Nazi Germany, the Shah's Iran, or the Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four. But the Bible says that all have sinned, all have fallen short of the glory of God, all have hearts that are deceitful above all things and desperately wicked beyond comprehension. There is every biblical reason to believe that the tyranny of Nazi Germany and the Shah's regime awaits us, as does their ignominious end.

Worse, the disdain we used to heap on German Christians for going along with Hitler will be aimed at us by those who watch us fall. And don't think there won't be many who will work with holy—perhaps even "Christian"—zeal to help us fall the way our "greatest generation" helped Nazi Germany fall about the ears of the Evangelicals who helped build it.

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¹ Nothing in this post should be construed as support for Mosaddegh. Suffice it to say he was a politician, and I have every reason to believe that as such he extorted money and other concessions from productive people and used them for the benefit of those connected to him. My focus is the system that we assented to and supported with our tax money.

Yet Another Reason Government Can Never Be Moral

If government were a moral institution, there would be a moral way to fund it. Government establishes and maintains itself by taxes—an agency funded by voluntary donations would not be government—so for it to exist, it needs to tax, and to exist morally it need to tax morally. We would expect, then, that a moral system of taxation would exist, and further that this system would either be described in the Bible or be easily discerned from nature.

Alas for even the best-intentioned statists, such a system is not to be found. Income taxes, import duties, sales taxes, and inheritance taxes all cannot avoid being immoral, and this is true even if we grant the premise that taxation, the extortion of money under threat of greater violence, is moral to begin with.

Let's begin with the flat income tax, probably the most popular form of taxation among conservatives, who think, and rightly so, that it is fairer than the current graduated income tax with its complicated assessment and deduction system. While a flat tax with no deductions would involve less preparation work than today's abomination, and it would not discourage people from advancing into higher tax brackets, it would still not be fair or just. Here's why.

Ben and Mal work at the same job and receive the same hourly wage, and outside of work they like to play with their kids (they each have two) and go to movies. The salient difference is that while Mal works a forty-hour week, Ben works a sixty, all at the same hourly rate. So Ben's yearly earnings are half again what Mal's are. To the degree that income is the measure of richness, Ben is half again as rich as Mal.

If they both spend X percent of their income on food and shelter, and Y percent on their transportation, and put Z precent into savings, that leaves them both with W percent for discretionary spending. On that basis, we can assume that Ben's car, house, diet, and clothes are half again as good as Mal's, and his bank account is half again as large.

This is because neither is penalized by the grocer, the theater owner, or the clothier for their work habits.

When Ben goes to the store, he pays a shekel for a bag of potatoes and another for a bag of tomatoes. When he takes his family to the theater, he pays a shekel per seat. When he buys a shirt, he pays a shekel. Mal also pays a shekel for a bag of potatoes, a bag of tomatoes, a seat at the theater, and a shirt.

But look what happens at tax time: Ben's flat income tax is half again Mal's, though they both pay T percent.

Why is this unjust? They both net their hourly rate minus T percent per hour. Surely that's an improvment over a graduated tax, which would make Ben's hourly earnings less than Mal's if his increased earnings put him into a higher tax bracket. And doesn't the Bible's tax, the tithe, work exactly the same way?

These are valid arguments, but let's take a step back.

Ben has already spent more time at work than Mal. This not only means that Mal has twenty more hours a week to go to movies and play with his kids, it also means that Ben has, assuming both of them are engaged in worthwhile endeavors, already contributed half again as much to the well-being of his neighbors as Mal has. So if you're going to argue that Ben should "contribute more" or "give back" to society simply because he has more money, I would have to ask how much more he needs to give: he has already given half again as much time, as well as the goods or services he has rendered. To make him pay half again as much for his "stay out of jail permit" makes no more sense than charging him half again as much for a shirt. (And, of course, he could always refuse to buy the shirt; he doesn't have the same option with his tax bill.)

As for the tithe principle, God can ask for the tithe because, first, all property is his to begin with: "The earth and everything in it are the Lord's" (Ps 24:1). The tithe is what he requires from his subjects as acknowledgment of his sovereignty: "A tithe of everything from the land, whether grain from the soil or fruit from the trees, belongs to the LORD; it is holy to the LORD" (Lev 27:30).

Unlike government, for which taxes are its lifeblood, God has no need of the tithe: "If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?" (Ps 50:12-13). He can claim a "flat tax" because the wealth came from him in the first place. So even a flat tax is an assertion of sovereignty; note the flat tax mentioned in this malediction against the Israelite apotates who preferred godless monarchy to godly anarchy: "[The king you are asking for] will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day" (1 Sam 8:15-18). They wanted someone other than God to assert sovereignty over them, and the king's tithe would be a symbol that they had gotten their wish.

Unless you also believe that the government is the ultimate source and owner of all wealth, you need something besides the tithe to base your claim on.

So what about per capita taxes and sales taxes?

One of the arguments for a graduated income tax is that per capita taxes are regressive, forcing the Mals of the world to part with a greater percentage of their incomes than the Bens, and the less Mal earns at his job the harder the per capita tax hits him. For that reason I would have to agree that per capita taxes are unfair: they impact the poor more than the rich. That leaves sales taxes and import duties, but as you've probably already realized, both are simply an income tax in disguise, paid by the merchant rather than by the employee, and the same moral problem remains: the more goods and services the merchant provides, the more he is penalized at tax time.

"God's work done God's way will never lack God's support," the old missionary saw goes. If we can trust the Holy Spirit to guide his people, we can say with confidence "The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid": he will move his people to contribute voluntarily to a community that meets our need for protection from enemies near and far, and that provides for the needy in a just and fair way. We don't need a tax-fed system to "shepherd"—that is, coerce—us.

If you're looking around and thinking that's crazy, there's no way God would take the Christians you can see and build such a community, I would suggest that that's because either there is no Holy Spirit or those you are looking at aren't listening to him. Maybe they're too busy trying to protect, defend, and enlarge an inherently immoral system.

Ron versus the Rest

Why this anarchist thinks a vote for Ron Paul, no anarchist he, is a vote for positive good and not a vote for the lesser of two evils:

	Barack Obama	Hillary Clinton	Newt Gingrich	Mitt Romney	Rick Santorum	Ron Paul
Is the Constitution such an arcane document that only an elite cadre can be trusted to interpret it?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Is the Constitution obsolete?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Is the US government entitled to summarily kill or incarcerate anyone it deems a threat to its purposes?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Does the need for safety from terrorists trump the "unalienable rights" spoken of by the Declaration of Independence, or constitutional rights?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Are US citizens somehow "exceptional," better than people from other countries?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot put in your body?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot do in your bedroom?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot do in your bathroom?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine how your children are educated?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot post or read on the Internet?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what you can and cannot pass on to your survivors when you die?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine whether abortion is legal or illegal in a given state?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine whom you hire or work for, or the terms of such employment?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should the federal government determine what businesses will survive and which will fold?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Does what you receive in exchange for your labor belong first to the government and then, only after it takes what it wants, to you?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Can the US military be trusted always to do what is right?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Should Americans be virtually strip searched and have their genitals touched at airports or anywhere the federal government deems it necessary to do so?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Does the Islamic world hate us for our virtue and freedoms?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Is the nature of things such that some people have to become poorer for others to become richer?	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No

Eighty percent of the people in this country say we're headed the wrong way. I say we're headed to go off a cliff that gets higher every day. Five of the six candidates with a shot at the presidency in November want to adjust the speed at which we are headed for the cliff. One wants us to change direction entirely.

That's a big difference.

So Ron Paul Is a Racist: So What?

The Establishment propaganda mill is all a-twitter with accusations that Ron Paul is a racist. Having all my life considered racism a serious sin, a self-righteous Yankee considering it the province of benighted Southerners, I'm not eager to cast my lot with a racist, even if that particular Texan was born in Pittsburgh. Also, as an anarchist, I'm not totally satisfied with Ron Paul's small-government libertarianism. So why isn't this charge of racism, even if true, not enough to get me to tell the Ron Paul REVOLution to go to hell?

Racism is an integral part of fallen human nature.

The original sin was the desire to be "like God," the center of the universe. May I suggest that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," every one of us is the center of his own universe, and we all tend to regard those who are more like us, or who conform to our standards, as more worthy than those who don't? Racism is but one form of prejudice, and prejudice poisons us all.

Let me show you how it plays out in my life.

My morning commute to Philadelphia is less onerous on those days when a certain black lady allows me to walk with her from the train to her workplace. On occasion she'll say something like, "I coulda did that myself." Not the textbook English I was raised to speak, that, and a sure sign of inferiority, right?

Well, no: textbook English or not, when the conversational ball gets dropped, she is almost always the one who gets it rolling again by punching one of my buttons. And her workplace is a prestigious hospital where she's a nurse practitioner, entrusted with life-or-death matters, something I can't lay claim to. Ain't nothin' to look down on there.

Or take the Filipina who works in the cubicle next to me, who can brighten my day by asking for help with work-related matters or by recommending a song she likes. Those communiqués often come in writing, complete with the kinds of errors I see in my editing work. Poor thing, it's not her fault she's Filipina: she must not be able to get that Asian brain around the complexities of English. But again, the rest of the story is that she is still editing our clients' manuscripts while I rightly got yanked out of the editorial department long ago. (And, lest you miss the irony, Asians score higher than honkies on every "intelligence test" ever devised.)

So if you're perceptive, you've seen that not only do I have to consciously fight racial prejudice, I'm also regionalist, sexist, education-ist, and language-ist. And if you were to see those two ladies, you'd also call me appearance-ist: they are both quite attractive, and you might well ask me about them the question I asked in an earlier post: would their favor mean so much to me if they were dumpy white guys?

The isms that I'm subject to are common to all of us to some degree; it's part of the sinful human nature Jesus died to save us from. So if Ron Paul is a racist, he's simply human.

Some forms of racism are more virulent than others.

I haven't delved deeply into Ron Paul's racist screed, but the line that sticks in my memory is a comment about black muggers: "They do run fast, don't they?"

That was obviously not the most intelligent statement uttered by a human being, but let's see. Most of the people on the USA Olympic track team, the National Football League, and the National Basketball Association seem to be black. Does running play a part in these activities? Is this disproportionate representation attributable only to training, or could there have been some natural resource inherent in these people on which to build?

(And lest I be accused of accusing blacks of deficient mental capabilities, let me repeat Thomas Sowell's observation that football, basketball, and jazz, areas dominated by blacks, require the ability to enact split-second decisions, unlike classical music and chess, traditionally "white" activities, which allow for slower thought processes.)

How virulent is Dr. Paul's racism? Let's answer that by comparing it with that of someone no one in the public eye accuses of racism: Barack Obama.

Mr. Obama presides over a nation in which most illegal drug-related activity is carried out by whites, yet most prisoners incarcerated for drug-related "crimes" are black. Not only are blacks more often incarcerated, their sentences tend to be longer. If that isn't virulent racism, I don't know what is. Mr. Obama has had three years to change the situation but hasn't. And none of the "non-racist" Republican presidential candidates has even mentioned the problem.

But for thirty years the "racist" Ron Paul has been calling for an end to the War on Drugs and for the release of those imprisoned for drug-related violations, including, presumably, those fast-running blacks.

Verbal assault like Dr. Paul's comment is not nothing, but given a choice between being verbally slighted by the power brokers and being stuck in a cage for years, I'll take the former, and I assume most black convicts would too.

We already live in a nation known for racism.

"American exceptionalism," an idea I hadn't heard of until a year or so ago, is essentially Hitler's master race concept couched in nationalist, not racist, terms. It is the province primarily of the right—Rick Santorum actually dropped the term in a recent debate—but when Madeline Albright spoke in the 1990s of the US as "the indispensable nation," she was a leftist saying essentially the same thing: the US is the best country in the world, and its citizens are therefore entitled to do things the rest of the world's inferior citizens aren't, like invading other countries, changing their governments, killing innocent people, driving them from their homes, and whatever else they need to do to protect and advance their interests.

I have heard both Dennis Prager (an "American exceptionalist") and an ordained Presbyterian elder say in as many words that Uncle Sam's killing of innocents overseas is justified because he is there to make life better for the local population as a whole. He targets only the bad guys, and therefore he can be excused when he kills the innocent, even though he knows innocent people will die as a result of his actions. ("Hey, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.") This about a nation both these men rightly disparage when it comes to the abortion holocaust and pornography.

How a nation that is so sexually immoral and so violent that much of the population thinks no one but the government should own guns lest there be mass bloodshed can consider itself ordained of God to police the world and kill innocent people with impunity is simply beyond me.

The US's most beloved presidents have been racists. One more won't hurt.

Everyone knows that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Washington even signed a law that made hiding fugitive slaves a federal offense. They may have been good, kind masters—my black friend, somewhat to my surprise, once volunteered that her family had been given an inheritance by just such people—but the zeal they showed for the liberty of whites somehow did not apply to blacks. At least not their blacks. At least not until after they died.

Ah, but what about Lincoln, the Great Emancipator? Remember Dion's paean in the 1960s? "He freed a lot of people, but it seems good they die young." If anyone is beloved by both left and right, it's Lincoln.

Well, Lincoln was a racist. I have shamelessly copied and pasted the following quotes from here.

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races — that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.” — Abraham Lincoln (Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858; The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, pp. 145–146.)

From Lincoln's First Inaugural Address:

"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

Compare those to the words of the "racist" Ron Paul:

Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called "diversity" actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist.

If this be racism, make the most of it.

Can Orthodoxy Be Dead?

Our Sunday school class has been going through Ezekiel's prophecy of the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar, a horrific time in the history of God's people brought about by their apostasy and idolatry. As shocking as the apostasy and idolatry were, the true horror was that the people of Jerusalem were content with the status quo: "The prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way" (Jer 5:31).

Leading up to the fall of Jerusalem, the people made no pretense of worshiping YHWH, instead openly worshiping Baal (Jer 2:8) and the Queen of Heaven (Jer 7:18). So of course, God's glory left the temple and headed east (Ez 9-10), by implication to the community of exiles in Babylon. Then "the guards of the city" went through Jerusalem, beginning at the sanctuary, and killed everyone who was not grieving over the apostasy in the city.

The problem in Jerusalem was open apostasy: no one named the name of YHWH, and those who did were persecuted. My question, though, is this: is it possible to hold to all the proper theological propositions and still be apostate?

I live at a time in US history in which over 80% of those polled think our nation is "going the wrong way." By any measure, it is financially bankrupt: the official national debt is higher than could ever be repaid, the currency is losing value by the day, and as businesses fail the unemployment rate is high and still rising. "Whatever is true, ... noble, ... right, ... pure, ... lovely, ... admirable ... excellent ... praiseworthy" is scorned; the only virtue is "pushing the envelope," the only right our government recognizes is the "right" to kill the unborn.

Yet the US evangelical church waves this nation's flag proudly.

"We" are also so afraid of "our" enemies that "we" strip-search wheelchair-bound nonagenarians lest they carry weapons of mass destruction onto airplanes, to say nothing of caging sellers of raw milk and growers of industrial hemp, and killing innocent people overseas by the hundreds of thousands, all with the hearty approval of the evangelical church.

Actually, "hearty apporval" is an understatement. Dr. Michael Milton, the new chancellor and CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, has gone so far as to call the decision to reduce military force overseas immoral.

Now if anyone is as orthodox as the day is long, it's RTS Charlotte. When I audited classes there in 1996, they allowed me to ask questions in class and grading my homework, examinations, and term papers, generosity auditors are usually not given. Nothing I saw while there would testify against their desire to be true to the Bible and sensitive to the Holy Spirit.

I have the same impression of World magazine. And my local church.

In contrast, I look in the mirror and see someone whose commitment to Christ is tepid. While those I disagree with over the war and "compassionate conservatism" seem to be fervent in their desire to know and carry out God's will, I find myself making excuses for my self-indulgence. To be honest, I not only find myself wondering if God loves me, I find myself wondering if there is a God at all and even not caring whether there is or not.

Now I want the gospel to be true—without it life has no meaning. But my wanting something to be true doesn't make it true, and, more immediately, it doesn't make it apply to me. So I write the following in the context of Paul's admonition, "If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall" (1 Cor 10:12): I find myself fleeing my own idols (v 14) too slowly.

But given what has come out over the years about the lies the US government has told to its subjects¹ and, more importantly, the love the US evangelical community has lavished on those lies (see 2 Thess 2:11), I think the question needs to be asked: can idolatry prosper in the soil of even fervent theological orthodoxy?

I find one answer in the second chapter of the Revelation.

The church at Ephesus worked beyond weariness to do good deeds, persevered through hardship, could not tolerate wickedness, and pursued theological orthodoxy. Yet despite all that, they had forsaken their first love. They could hate what God hated—the practices of the Nicolaitans, whoever they were—but they didn't love what God loved (Rev 2:1-6). (Sounds like me, except without the hard work and perseverance.)

My question to Dr. Milton and the rest of the visible evangelical community is this: If you had to choose between being a US citizen (which today, as Congress is passing a law that allows the government to cage anyone they please indefinitely without trial, means someone who goes along with everything the government considers necessary) and being a Christian, which would you choose? If a ratio of dead innocents overseas to those killed on 9/11 of somewhere between a hundred and a thousand to one isn't enough, how many would be enough for you to say that you need to choose between evangelizing them and blowing them to hell? How do you know that that point is not too late to change the situation? Or does it just not matter?

My local church gives three times as much money in taxes for the war effort alone as it does to missions, and given the number of seminary professors and former missionaries in the congregation, I would expect this ratio to be on the low side for evangelical churches as a whole. Its prayers for missions and the military reflect this ratio: the former are sporadic and general, the latter consistent and specific. Is God more than three times as concerned that we worship in freedom (i.e., comfort) as he is that the Islamic world hear the gospel?

For that matter, was it really God who sent Christian soldiers to help found the Republic of Iran, in which Islam is the state religion, and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan? In both nations, confessing Christians have paid a horrible price for their "enduring freedom," much greater than the price paid by US evangelicals, which of course the latter take as a call for even more killing, so that "we don't have to fight them over here."

How about fighting Islam over here?

The most fertile ground for Islam in the United States, save perhaps for the wombs of resident Muslim women, is the prison system, the evils of which I have decried here and here. Most of those incarcerated are innocent of any activity that was considered a crime even by Christians a hundred years ago, when the church was more influential than it is today.² Yet what prominent evangelical leaders are willing to come out and say, e.g., "The Bible nowhere gives me jurisdiction over what you grow in your garden, provided it stays in your garden, nor what you consume in the privacy of your own home, nor what you voluntarily exchange with your neighbors; therefore, in the name of Jesus, while I urge my fellow citizens to exercise the utmost caution and restraint in their use of potential intoxicants, I call on the US government to end the War on Drugs and free all those convicted solely of possession and sale of substances"?

If they are worried about the spread of Islam, why do they not take a look at the prisons? Is the ratio of Christian converts to Muslim converts "good enough for government work"? Or do we just love the US government, including its barbaric prison system, more than we love God?

Just as the glory of the Lord departed from the temple of Jerusalem because of the people's open apostasy and allowed them to be slaughtered by the Iraqis of their day, it would seem the Lord removed the lampstand of the church of Ephesus despite its hard work and perseverance and turned the people over to Islam (and, even scarier, the church of Philadelphia shared the Ephesians' fate).

In the past I have taken breaks from writing this blog and reading my favorite writers when I felt I needed to make sure my focus was on Christ and his kingdom and not on attacking the libertine state. Would it be unreasonable to ask the evangelical church in the US to take a month sometime to take Uncle Sam's flag out of the sanctuary and off the flag pole, take off the flag lapel pins, and pray exclusively for Christ's kingdom and its emissaries (including military members and chaplains, but only as they are ambassadors of the gospel)?

Germany was once the hotbed of the Reformation. Before my time, its strong central government was the hope of many Protestants³ for recovery from terrible oppression by the victors of a war they were convinced had been forced on them. When Germany went to war, it was to regain what it said was land unjustly taken from it and later to fight Communism. Today Germany is the economic engine of Europe, but it is not known for a vibrant church.

Is our future the carpet bombings and fire bombings and atomic blasts we have inflicted on others, followed by an age in which the Christian church is an irrelevency, ignored and tolerated at best? Do we avoid such a future best by being "patriotic Americans" exporting democracy by bomb blast, or by single-hearted devotion to Christ and his kingdom?

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1. For starters, see this review of one book and mention of others that praise Franklin Roosevelt for lying the US into World War II.

2. I find it ironic that when it comes to killing and caging innocent people, conservative Republicans side against me with the Progressive Democrats Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

3. "The [Protestant] churches did not reject National Socialism on principle. The idea of a strong authority and a close bond between throne and altar, of the kind that existed in the empire between 1871 and 1918, was in keeping with Protestant tradition. Many ... [Protestants] had reservations about the democratic Weimar Republic and sympathized with political forces – such as the German National People's Party – that idealized the past." Wikipedia entry for the Confessing Church. A bulletin insert put out by Christian History magazine (alas no longer available on line), went even further, saying that evangelical churches put swastikas and pictures of Hitler on their pulpits and the Gestapo supported Christian missions.

On Enlisting

Rex, a friend of a friend, is thinking of joining the Army. He's not just thinking about it—he's taking concrete steps, including being part of a high school-level ROTC program. I asked him through our connection if he'd be willing to allow me to urge him to reconsider his decision to enlist. He said yes, but the conversation hasn't taken place yet and probably won't. What follows is my guess at how it might have gone after the initial pleasantries.

Me: Why do you want to join the Army?

Rex: I want to serve my country.

Me: How is joining the Army a better way to serve your country than, say, doing what Steve Jobs did and offering a product or service that makes people's lives better?

Rex: Our country is at war, and I want to be part of defeating our enemies. Otherwise people won't be able to enjoy the things that Steve Jobs makes.

Me: Do you think there are no iPhones or iPads in Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan?

Rex: There might be a few.

Me: Are there only a few because those you consider our enemies forbid people to own them, or is it just that the people can't afford them?

Rex: Probably a bit of both.

Me: I agree with you. I'd say that the people in power in those places consider it their duty to run others' lives. They have no qualms about taking others' property or telling them what they can and cannot do in the privacy of their own homes. So they steal the money that people might otherwise use to buy iPads, and if the people buy iPads or other Internet devices anyway, they tell them what sites they can and cannot visit. Am I right that you don't want to live in that kind of society?

Rex: Yes.

Me: So that's at least part of why you want to join the Army—so you can do what you want with your life and not have to have others telling you what to do.

Rex: That's part of it. More than that I want to protect innocent people from being killed by terrorists. I don't want bad things done to innocent people.

Me: You want to be a good neighbor by protecting innocent people.

Rex: Yes.

Me: And you're willing to put your own life on the line to do that.

Rex: Yes.

Me: Why do we have to worry about terrorists? What's in it for them? Given a choice between marrying your girlfriend and getting blown up, either as a suicide bomber or a casualty in war, wouldn't you choose to marry your girlfriend?

Rex: Well, duh, I'd rather marry my girlfriend.

Me: So why would—

Rex: Because there aren't enough girls over there. Some men have four wives, and that means some men will never get married. And they've been propagandized, told lies that it's all our fault, or Israel's fault, or our fault because it's Israel's fault, and since there's no hope that they can have a better life, they just blow themselves up to kill as many of us as they can to get revenge on us.

Me: So there's no reasoning with them. The only thing we can do is blow them up.

Rex: Not everyone. Just the terrorists.

Me: How do you make sure it's only the terrorists who get killed?

Rex: You can't. There's always going to be collateral damage.

Me: How much collateral damage is acceptable? If you're given a command to fire a mortar, and you know there will be collateral damage, how do you determine whether fulfilling the objective is worth the amount of collateral damage you'll be inflicting?

Rex: It's not up to me to decide.

Me: You just follow orders.

Rex: Right.

Me: And if you find out afterward that you or your commanding officer underestimated the extent of the collateral damage, how do you decide whether obeying was the right thing to do?

Rex: I don't set the policies. I just carry them out.

Me: So you wouldn't let it bother your conscience.

Rex: That's right.

Me: So the only moral obligation you have is to carry out your orders to the letter. The actual suffering you inflict on innocent people is none of your concern.

Rex: I trust my commanders to order me to do what's right.

Me: Do you believe that any human being is perfect?

Rex: No.

Me: So it's possible that your commanders are fallible. They can make mistakes.

Rex: Everyone is entitled to an honest mistake.

Me: What would you do if you thought your commander was making an honest mistake that would needlessly cost the lives of innocent people?

Rex: I'd—

Me: And you couldn't convince him to change his mind.

Rex: I'd obey him.

Me: I understand that. If you disobey, they'd court martial you, even if it turned out you were right, right?

Rex: Right.

Me: And you'd be in doubly deep doo-doo if you turned out to be wrong.

Rex: Right.

Me: So you'd cover your ass by obeying him.

Rex: Right. But I don't think that would ever happen.

Me: You trust the military.

Rex: Right.

Me: All the way up to the top.

Rex: Right.

Me: Including the commander-in-chief.

Rex: Right.

Me: Did you vote for him?

Rex: Um, hello, I'm not old enough to vote.

Me: OK, did you want the current president to win?

Rex: No.

Me: Why not?

Rex: Because—

Me: You're not racist, are you?

Rex: No, of course not. I didn't like his policies.

Me: Which ones?

Rex: Well,—

Me: Scratch the question. Do you like his policies now?

Rex: He's OK.

Me: So really it didn't matter that the guy you didn't want to win won.

Rex: Right.

Me: And you like him enough that you're willing to have him be your commander-in-chief.

Rex: Right.

Me: Did you have doubts about his honesty during the campaign?

Rex: Some. I also thought he was incompetent.

Me: But he's more competent and honest than you thought.

Rex: Right. Besides, I won't take my commission until after the next election, so he probably won't be in office.

Me: And the guy who replaces him will be better.

Rex: I hope so.

Me: The same electorate as last time will elect someone better next time.

Rex: They've seen what a —

Me: This is your commander-in-chief you're talking about.

Rex: They'll do better next time.

Me: You might be right, but it's pretty much the same people voting, and I thought they thought they were doing better last time. Tell me: What would it take to convince you that your superiors were giving you orders that you would regret obeying?

Rex: I don't know. I would have to think it through at the time.

Me: What criteria would you use to decide?

Rex: Well, if it didn't feel right—

Me: Hasn't the army been teaching you to ignore your feelings?

Rex: OK, fine, I'd think it through.

Me: Would you have time to think it through?

Rex: If I did, I'd think it through. If I didn't, I'd obey. What's wrong with that?

Me: May I suggest that if you're on the battlefield you won't have time to develop the criteria you need to think it through, then think it through? That you need to think it through now, before you enlist?

Rex: Well, I've thought enough, and I'm convinced that joining the army is the right thing to do.

Me: You're convinced that you're fighting on the right side.

Rex: Yes.

Me: Uncle Sam is the good guy.

Rex: Yes.

Me: What do you think of the bailouts?

Rex: The banks were too big to fail. If the government hadn't intervened, too many people would have lost their jobs.

Me: People are still losing their jobs, right?

Rex: Right.

Me: So did the bailouts work?

Rex: They worked well enough.

Me: How many more jobs have to be lost before you would say that they didn't work well enough?

Rex: I don't know.

Me: But you still trust the president you didn't want to see win enough to go to, say, Uganda or Tanzania or Iran to kill women and children because he orders you to.

Rex: Like I said, I don't think he'll be in office when I'm commissioned.

Me: So you trust the same electorate that elected him to elect a better commander-in-chief next time.

Rex: Aren't you listening? It's not the same electorate. They'll know better next time.

Me: Will you still enlist if he gets re-elected?

Rex: Yes.

Me: He's not the best there could be, but he's good enough.

Rex: Yes.

Me: So it doesn't matter who's in the White House. If he tells you to go to Tanzania or Iran to kill women and children, you'll go.

Rex: I won't be going to kill women and children. I'll be going to fight terrorism.

Me: What reason is there to believe that innocent women and children won't be killed by the action you'll be part of?

Rex: Hey, stuff happens in war. The terrorists target innocent people. We don't target them.

Me: But you know they'll die.

Rex: Stuff happens.

Me: If the Chinese decided some guy was a threat to them and killed him while he was in the US, and your girlfriend were killed in the blast, and they knew when they fired that she would be killed, would you say, "That's OK; they didn't target her; stuff happens"?

Rex: No. They shouldn't be killing people on American soil.

Me: But if our government considers someone a threat, it's OK for US troops to kill him, even if he's in another country, and even if they know they will kill innocent people in the process.

Rex: Here's the difference: The Chinese government is bad. Our government is good.

Me: Do you believe that selling raw milk is evil?

Rex: No.

Me: Our government does. They are sending agents these days to jail people who sell raw milk.

Rex: Well, no government is perfect.

Me: What would the government have to do before you would be convinced that it is not good?

Rex: It would have to do bad things to innocent people.

Me: Jailing people for selling raw milk doesn't fit that definition?

Rex: No.

Me: How about arresting people for being Christian?

Rex: Maybe.

Me: Your girlfriend is very active in her church, so she might be one to go to jail if they start arresting Christians, and all you can say is "Maybe"?

Rex: Well, if she went to jail, that would convince me.

Me: Braveheart would be proud of you. Do you know what her church's stands on abortion and homosexuality are?

Rex: Yes.

Me: Do you know what our current president's stand—

Rex: He won't be president when I'm commissioned.

Me: And his replacement—

Rex: —will be better.

Me: And if he's re-elected,—

Rex: It won't matter. Look, I've had enough of this. Goodbye, sir.

Who Would Profit from Another Terrorist Attack?

US citizens are being rendered destitute by the War on Terror, directly through the increase in debt and the consequent increase in taxes needed to pay the interest on that debt, and indirectly through "quantitative easing," the debasement of the currency that makes the accumulation of capital impossible. More importantly, our liberties are being revoked by agencies that consuder us guilty of terrorism until we are able to prove our innocence by passing searches that violate standards of decency considered sacrosanct all over the world until a decade ago.

When asked why they tolerate being so abused by their own government, most USians patiently explain that they are willing to give their great-grandchildren's inheritance to those who would literally strip them of their dignity so that no terrorist will attack them. Asked "Why would anyone want to attack you?" they wil rattle off the conventional wisdom—they hate us because we are good, they hate us because we're evil, they want Islam to take over the world, they want to screw beautiful virgins forever, etc.

But there is still another question to be asked: What would the jihadists gain from another attack? Or even better, who would benefit from another attack?

Before getting to the serious stuff, let's dispose of the virgins-in-paradise argument. I'm a guy, and I know how guys think. The old expression "A bird in hand is better than two in the bush" didn't come from nowhere. Not many guys who've got a chance at getting and keeping women in this life are going to give that prospect up for the words in a book.

How do I know? How hard is it for even the most devout Christian to "lend to anyone who asks without asking for return"? How many of us really forgive unconditionally? How many of us really "do not fear for [the LORD] is [our] God"? Or look at the divorce rate among Christians: do we really bear with each other's faults? We can sing as loudly as we want about leaning on the everlasting arms and standing on the promises of God, but actually doing it doesn't come easily. Unless the Holy Spirit is really a Muslim and has more power than the Christian version, suicide bombers are going to be few and far between enough that we've got other things to worry about.

Now polygamy in the Muslim world does present the real problem that there are simply not enough females to go around, which means that there is a significant bachelor herd for whom death might be preferable to life without a mate. I know of no possible solution to that problem but preemptively killing all Muslim males unlikely to marry, and I don't think God would honor that. But I would also like to suggest that killing women and (female) children as "collateral damage" is just as certainly no solution.

However, the question is moot: recruiting terrorists by appealing to the virgin argument has been spectacularly unsuccessful. The FBI has run half a dozen or more domestic sting operations designed to—well, designed primarily to keep USians afraid of terrorism, but ostensibly to catch those with terrorist leanings—and while the prospect of screwing virgins forever doesn't seem to get much traction, that being the reward for all Muslim men, anger against the killing of innocent people overseas does. If the best way to encourage the supply of potential terrorists is to keep killing innocent people in the Ummah, one would think that the best way to prevent terrorism would be to stop killing people overseas; but that alternative is, alas, off the table.

So, if a terrorist martyr doesn't increase his supply of virgins, what would he gain by a suicide mass murder?

To start the answer, what did the 9/11 suicide murderers accomplish? If they could look back at the fruit of their labors over the last decade, what benefits would they say they accrued to their cause?

Is the Ummah a better place because of the 9/11 attacks? Jihadists killed three thousand USians, true—if you believe the official version, which I don't, but let's go with it here—but a hundred times as many innocent Muslims have since died, more than that have been maimed, and millions have been displaced. One could argue that this is a short-term sacrifice that might pay off for Islamism in the long term, as evidenced by the bankruptcy now taking down every government in the West, but unless you're going to write off as totally irrational the community that gave us the number zero, algebra, the compass, the mattress, coffee, and the linguistic terms our seminary students to this day use to learn Hebrew grammar, you've got to predict that influential Muslims will seriously consider whether the same goal could be achieved with less spilling of innocent blood. By that measure, another attack would do the cause of jihad no good, and so one would expect the jihadists to try to destroy the US in some other way.

So if the cause of jihad would not benefit from another terror attack, who would? Answer: No one would benefit from another attack as much as the US government.

As Bob Dylan and Joe McDonald sang in the 1960s (to the disgust of the evangelical community, as I remember), there is plenty of good money to be made by the masters of war for supplying the army with the tools of the trade. In fact, in a twist worthy of Mel Brooks' producers, there is more money to be made from fighting wars than from winning them, a fact that cannot have escaped those intelligent enough to market guns and bombs, to say nothing of night-vision goggles, or for that matter the CEOs of fast-food companies that serve large military installations overseas. After World War II, government spending was cut 60%: soldiers and manufacturers alike could no longer rely on income the government had taxed away from people who had earned it; instead, they had to offer goods and services that private individuals would voluntarily part with their money to obtain, a significantly more difficult task. They learned their lesson well, and the mistake has not been repeated: the Vietnam war went on long after the government knew the effort was futile, US troops stayed in the Ummah after the cease-fire that ended Desert Storm, and, of course, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have promised their corporate sponsors that the war that presently stretches from Uganda to Afghanistan will not end in their lifetimes.

What of those called upon to fight, tired as they must be of being away from their families and the risk to life and limb?

To their credit, they are putting their money where their mouths are, giving more money to Ron Paul, who promises to get them out of the war zone forthwith, than to any other candidate, and twice as much as to all other Republican candidates combined.

But in the end, they are expendable. Why should the government waste money on combat pay for people might be killed, and whose deaths in great numbers could begin a backlash against the system? Far better to leave as many of them as possible at home or simply discharge them, have only enough boots on the ground to do what drones cannot do, and let the drones take the risks. Again, if a soldier dies, there are human consequences. If a drone is shot down, according to the Keynsian economics that guide the establishment, that is a good thing, because it brings about government spending that employs people to build a replacement. Drones in the end are cheaper than foot soldiers, and managing the needed production process can be extremely profitable for the corporations that manufacture them.

In short, the next terrorist attack will see an increase in drone warfare, with only as much increase in troop involvement needed to sell the program: fewer US military combat deaths, but an increase in money spent on whizbangs, a boon for the military-industrial complex.

It will also be a boon for those who believe in strong central and even global government. Such an attack will be followed by calls for more checkpoints, chatdowns, patdowns, strip scanners, and drones flying overhead. All will reduce our privacy as they augment the bank accounts of the corporate elite and the power position of the New World Order.

The implication of this for Christian mission is obvious. Unless the New World Order is indeed God's way of fulfilling the Great Commission, it is the reaction to the attack, not the attack itself, that will make fulfilling the Great Commission more difficult. Since that reaction will simply be an extension of the reaction we already see to past attacks, isn't it time we asked if the reactions to 9/11 that the evangelical community has tolerated and even celebrated might be, far from our legitimate means of  self-defense, the Devil's way of obstructing the fulfillment of the Great Commission?

How Archy Handles Heinous Crime III: Default

This week the US power establishment revealed a new tool for dealing with heinous crimes that initially had me shaking my head but eventually asking why this should be a surprise to anyone.

Any small-government conservative or libertarian will tell you that government is necessary to protect people and property: protection of people and property is government's primary responsibility, and government, and only government, can do it. But now one polity has walked away from this responsibility, and there's every reason to believe that others will soon follow.

It seems that the city of Topeka, Kansas, no longer has enough money to prosecute perpetrators of domestic violence. So the city fathers have came up with a great idea for solving the problem: they repealed the statutes outlawing domestic violence. No solution, no problem!

The "good news" is that domestic violence is illegal in that county, so perps can still be prosecuted under county statutes. But the bad news there is that the county doesn't have the money to prosecute them either.

I'm not a good lateral thinker, so I can only come up with two ways domestic violence will be handled in Topeka, absent the resources to prosecute: either those accused will be put in jail and wait forever for trial, or they will simply be released. In the former case, simple accusation will be the equivalent of conviction; if you don't like someone, you can come up with a believable accusation of domestic violence, and he might never get out of jail, depending on what the powers that be deem expedient. In the latter case, even the most obviously guilty perps will be set free to continue their depredations. Either way, it's not anarchy, but it certainly is chaos.

The irony, of course, is that while the prosecutors and judges won't prosecute domestic violence cases, they will be plenty busy prosecuting those whose activities, according to the Bible, are nobody's business but their own: druggies (including purveyors of raw milk?), prostitutes and their customers, and owners of "assault weapons," to say nothing of people who exceed posted speed limits on empty roads and creep through empty intersections without stopping at stop signs. And the schools, libraries, parks, counseling centers, and other distributors of "entitlements" will continue apace.

As the currency is inflated (by our current archy), people's buying power diminishes, which means they patronize fewer businesses, which in turn hire fewer employees, who then patronize fewer businesses, and the cycle continues. All this results in reduced tax revenues, which means that government has to cut back on its "services." The government of Topeka is not facing the need to redefine essential government functions alone.

The fundamental question for any society is, "Who gets what at what expense to whom?" In a free society, the answer is, "You can have anything you want and can persuade someone to give you voluntarily." The answer in any political system is, "You get what those in power consider expedient to give you, and you give them whatever they consider expedient to extract"; that is, might makes right, or at least it makes policy, and justice is incidental.

So which services get cut, as with which services are provided, is always a product of political expediency. If more voters benefit from schools than from prosecuting a perpetrators of violence, law enforcement will be cut and the money will go to the schools.

As the economy continues its collapse, the Topeka syndrome will spread, and with it government at all level becoming increasingly chaotic, showing itself to be Bastiat's "fiction by which everyone seeks to live at everyone else's expense" keeping itself in power by buying votes through promises to dispense entitlements, and less an agency decent people look to for the maintenance of order.

How Archy Deals with Heinous Crimes II: Summary Execution

The recent killings of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki—I will use the government versions of both events here, since I want to hit Uncle Sam's best pitch and these narratives present him in the best possible light—show us that government by its very nature cannot act morally, should not be expected to, and has every incentive not to.

Having been overseas for twenty years until weeks before, I had only recently heard of Osama bin Laden on 9/11, but I had heard enough to be fully on board with the pastor of the church I attended the following Sunday when he said that if Osama bin Laden were to come to his office to hear about Jesus, he would wrestle him to the floor and call the authorities. (I think he said he would present the Gospel first and wrestle him to the floor afterwards no matter how Osama responded.) That is, "everyone knew" he was a "bad guy," and we all assumed that he was guilty of 9/11.

We didn't know, or at least I didn't, that he had been a CIA operative in the 1980s, though I should have, since there had been rumblings from feminists in the 1990s that the Taliban, who had been the "heroic mujahedin" we all got behind as they fought against the Soviets in the 1980s, were mistreating women, so I did "know" that the Taliban was up to no good. Taliban, Osama, let's kill them all, I thought. And we did.

That Osama and the Taliban were bad guys and in cahoots was front-page news. The back-page news was that after 9/11 the Taliban offered to hand Osama over to a neutral party for trial, but the Bush regime didn't agree to the deal. As I'll explain, a trial by a neutral party would have required a lot of work, but it could have saved countless lives ("We don't do body counts," at least not on gooks).

As I explain here and here, the archist view of a trial pits a defendant, someone either rich enough to afford a lawyer who can get him off whether he's innocent or not or someone who is stuck in jail and therefore unable to gather exculpatory evidence, against a state that pays the judge, the prosecutor, and the policemen whose testimony carries more weight than that of mere mundanes; the system has a vested interest in finding the defenddant guilty, certainly more than in rendering a just verdict based on truth as can best be established. If the Taliban are decent human beings, would they want to surrender a long-time comrade in arms to such a system? Surely their reluctance to do so is no proof that they are brutes.

The alternative would have been for the Taliban and the Bushies to sit down and draw up a list of people who could give both sides a fair hearing. Surely out of eight billion people on this planet there is someone who has a reputation for fairness, someone who would be strong enough to stand up to the bullying that both sides would engage in without becoming a bully in turn. Perhaps it would have been a Muslim leatherworker in Bosnia and his Orthodox wife. Or three Vietnamese Buddhist monks who had suffered under both the US puppet regime and the Communists. Or the Afghan woman whose picture was the most memorable National Geographic cover of all time? Or Vin Suprinowicz's Omani judge? How long would it have taken to find one person or a group of persons that both sides could trust?

This process would probably have taken months, but there's reason to believe that had justice, rather than victory, been the most important goal for even one side, the result would have been better than the senseless mayhem that came instead.

Am I the only one who thinks it's ironic that after all the billions of dollars that were spent invading Afghanistan, a financial hemorrhage that will not been stanched for the foreseeable future, it was a surgical operation costing a couple of million dollars at most that eventually took Osama out? If "we" had been willing to wait a while, this or a similar operation could have taken place without the billions of lost dollars, to say nothing of the thousands of deaths and millions of other casualties.

All this assumes that Osama was indeed guilty. What if he wasn't? Summary execution, the ethic of "shoot first and ask questions later," makes those questions irrelevant, doesn't it? Only agents of archy, who are almost universally granted impunity by their bosses, would consider this a good system.

Then there's the execution of Anwar al-Awlaki. At least one Muslim jihadist wonders if he was a CIA asset: “Al-Awlaki is not known for having participated in any ‘jihad’ whatsoever and this is what has to be highlighted. For he calls to it and hypes up his audiences with it, yet the question has to be asked: upon which battlefield has he fought?” That he was an incindiary speaker and an enemy of Uncle Sam seems to be well established. But wasn't anti-government speech precisely what the First Amendment is supposed to protect?

"Mission creep" is at work again. First it's OK to summarily kill someone in the act of killing another. Then it's OK to kill the guy certain people in the government say killed an innocent person. Then it's OK to kill the guy who was driving the getaway car. Then it's OK to kill the guy who bought the getaway car. Now it's OK to shoot the guy who convinced the third guy to buy the getaway car.

All this without trial.

We now have a KGB-style system in which anonymous government agents use evidence they share with no one to dispatch more anonymous agents to kill or imprison whomever they choose, all with impunity, all with no legislative or judicial supervision. All any of us needs to do is get on the hit list, and we're defenseless. Romans 13 says, "If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear," but remember that the author of those words had been stoned and scourged, and was eventually executed, by the very authorities he described.

Given archy, how could it be different? Jobs that involve the exercise of power with impunity will draw workers who enjoy exercising power with impunity. And self-preservation being a basic human characteristic, these workers once hired will be most interested in preserving their positions of power and privilege. Yesterday they were content with responding forcibly to those who either initiated force or whose threat to use force was credible. Now they are killing those whose words they find threatening.

(Yes, I realize the the legal definition of assault includes credible verbal threats. Verbal threats need to be taken seriously, but I would suggest that the way to take them seriously is to see if they are symptoms of a legitimate grievance, questions neither "law enforcement officers" nor government diplomats seem to be interested in asking.)

If you're happy with the way things are, archy is the way to bring about more of the same. If not, you need to question your basic assumptions, chief of which is the assumption that our interests are served by an elite that can initiate force with impunity.

This Is My Country

I'm part of a men's group that is going through an excellent video series, "Men's Fraternity: The Quest for Authentic Manhood." Years before I posted my lament that so few men are involved in church activities, Robert Lewis, a pastor in Arkansas, was running a program to help men plan to grow up. His point is that we need to understand what social forces have shaped us and our view of manhood, how the people and events in our lives have further shaped us, and who we really are, in what unique ways God has made us. Then we need to take what we've learned to plan our futures as best we can.

This is an excellent series, and I highly recommend it to any man, period. If nothing else, it's a good opportunity to get to know other men and talk about things other than sports and trivia. Nothing that follows should be taken as denigrating the value of the series, but Brother Robert unthinkingly gave approving voice to an attitude that is killing the church in our nation.

When describing "noble moments" that shaped him, Brother Robert told how every Veterans Day his father would place flags on the graves of fallen soldiers. He knew who all the veterans were, and (I think) he would place flags on their graves whether they died in combat or otherwise.

So far so good: those who are convinced that our nation owes its very existence to the sacrifices of our military personnel do well to honor the dead as a testimony to the living.

It was the next line (as best I can reconstruct it) that prompted this post: "I went to college during the height of the Vietnam War, and even though there was a lot of antiwar sentiment, because of my father's example, I still had a lot of love for my country."

Notice the presumptions: Those who love their country support its wars; those who oppose any war do not love their country. Though most evangelicals seem to believe these presumptions, their truth is open to question.

Let's begin with the Vietnam war itself. It began in the 1950s when Vietnamese nationalists rebelled against their French colonial rulers. The US refused to aid the Vietnamese, instead aiding the French until the French pulled out. The US then propped up a puppet government in the name of fighting communism.

In 1964 the US government reported that a US military vessel had been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. Using the precedents of the Maine and the Lusitania, vested interests were able to get Congress and the media behind an undeclared war that eventually killed almost sixty thousand US military personnel and a million Vietnamese.

Brother Robert was not alone in being convinced that the war was necessary to fight communism and that if Vietnam went communist, so would all of Southeast Asia, including Thailand and possibly India, all falling like dominoes. Again, this was not an unreasonable fear, but my point is that those who considered that fear unfounded could well have given evidence that they loved their country.

That communism is horrible is not open to question. But one might ask whether conscripting soldiers to fight in a "conflict"—the government never called it a war at the time—was the best way to fight communism. That so many Vietnamese were willing to die in the fight to drive the US out of Vietnam tells me that our government's efforts to make friends were not entirely successful. And while many of those in the antiwar movement did not come off as particularly noble or self-sacrificing people, one needs to judge the pro-war faction by the same standard. And in this case, they come up woefully short.

It turns out that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was not what the government told the people it was and that the Secretary of Defense "perpetuated the war long after he realized it was futile"—that is, the US government sent soldiers to kill and die after they knew the war could not be won: those US military personnel and Vietnamese who died from then on died for nothing. They were, quite simply, murdered by the US government. And after the US withdrew, only those countries the war had spread to, Cambodia and Laos, went communist.

So unless loving one's country includes cheering on a government that lies to its subjects and conscripts them to fight in futile wars, it is at least possible to love one's country while opposing its wars. Is this the love Jesus wants us to have for our neighbors?

What does it mean to love one's country?

Using Brother Robert's implied definition, one's love for one's country is best measured by one's agreement with government policy. By that definition I do not love my country.

But if my country is my family, my neighbors, and my church, then my love for my country can be measured by how well I serve those people. I love my country by being faithful to my wife and by raising my children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. I love my country to the degree I put in an honest day's work and show appreciation for for my boss's honest efforts to make his clients happy. I love my country by paying the rent on time and treating my landlord's house well. I love my country being courteous to the staff and other customers in my local supermarket. I love my country by volunteering on various committees at church. I even love my country by turning the other cheek to my enemies and faithfully representing Jesus to them.

I don't have any conscience about not loving my country by Brother Robert's defintion, but it does bother me that I have fallen short of my own standards.

What is one's country? Who are our countrymen?

Brother Robert seems to define a country as a political unit and countrymen as the people subject to one government: to criticize a man's government is therefore to criticize the man himself, a good way to get the likes of Merle Haggard into a fighting mood.

By that definition of a country our current president is my countryman. But if the Bible is true, my true country is the kingdom of God, and he is not my countryman. He is a neighbor I am to love until I am taken home, but until he surrenders to Jesus, he is not my countryman.

Maybe Brother Robert was really using my definition of country. Maybe when he saw the antiwar protests, he realized that the government was fully as evil in its way as the fornicating dopers were in theirs and felt homesick for the kingdom of Jesus. The rest of his message is so good it might be best to assume so.