An Apology and Retraction

I owe a public apology to two Christian brothers and to those to whom I have conveyed false information about those two brothers.

As a result of at least two conversations I had with them over the winter, I wrote this post and others subsequent, accusing them of harboring the mentality that those who engage in ungodly activities while in uniform can claim moral justification by noting that they were “just following orders.” As I remember the conversations, I was aghast at what I had heard and asked for clarification. However, they told me today in as many words that they have never held that conviction, so I must have heard wrongly both initially and after asking for clarification.

I believe they are men of integrity, so I accept their word and take the blame for misunderstanding them. I’m not happy that I have to admit to gross error, but as unnerving as it is to find that facts I thought I had checked were wrong, I am glad that my disagreements with those brothers are less fundamental than my misconception had led me to believe.

Brothers, please forgive me. I will be more careful in the future.

When Was the Lord Consulted?

My men’s Bible study this week discussed the deception the Gibeonites foisted on the Israelites in Joshua 9. We noted that here Israel repeated the mistake they had made two chapters earlier, when they were defeated at Ai because of Achan’s sin: they acted without consulting the Lord.

The question came up: when do we have to consciously consult the Lord, and when can we act on principle, if not on autopilot? Surely we should pray about whom we marry and what church we attend, but do we pray over the color of socks we put on, or whether we buy chicken or turkey? If not all or nothing, how do we know where to draw the line?

We didn’t come up with an answer for where we draw the line, but we did agree that when it comes to matters of being yoked to others in covenant we should definitely pray, and of course the context of Joshua 9, war and political alliances, would indicate that we should pray when it comes to matters of war and politics. At that, of course, your intrepid reporter’s ears perked up. Matters of war and politics? Believers deceived into being yoked with unbelievers? Where have I heard that before?

How about during the Vietnam war?

Uncle Sam’s war against the Vietnamese was a total, indisputable failure: sixty thousand US soldiers and a million Vietnamese died for nothing. Uncle Sam told his subjects that the war was to protect our freedom, but, as I never tire of reminding whoever cannot get away from me before I say it, if the war was to protect our freedom, it would follow that our freedoms were lost when the war was lost. Yet the freedoms we have lost since that war was lost have been lost to those who sent US soldiers to Vietnam, not to the Vietnamese.

Christians in the US overwhelmingly supported the war precisely because they were convinced of its moral rightness. They believed Uncle Sam. Was Uncle Sam worthy of their trust?

Henry Kissinger, friend of every president from Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama

My question: if Joshua was defeated twice because he didn’t consult the Lord, once by force and once by deceit, is it reasonable to ask if perhaps US Christians were defeated in the Vietnam conflict, once by the Vietnamese combatants and once by Uncle Sam’s deceit, because they never consulted the Lord before marching proudly off to battle? Put another way, when did US evangelicals consult the Lord before joining the US military and going off to Vietnam? I remember no such public consultation.

During the Vietnam War days we used to look back at the Nazis and pride ourselves that we weren’t like them. We wouldn’t get fooled like German Christians into serving a beast like Hitler. No, sir. But we should have been more humble. It wasn’t just the unthinking masses who were taken in. Even Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoeller, men considered saints by many evangelicals today, originally supported Hitler. And today’s US evangelicals are putting themselves under the command of a man they voted against specifically because they consider him morally deficient. By what right do they look down on German Christians now?

The question needs to be asked: when did German Christians consult the Lord before throwing in their lot with Hitler? I’ve never heard of such a consultation taking place. And in the same way, US evangelicals followed the liberal Democrat Lyndon Johnson to war in Vietnam without consulting the Lord.

In 1920 conservative evangelical Christians followed the liberal Democrat Woodrow Wilson into alcohol prohibition. Did they consult the Lord before doing so? How did he respond? Or did they make the decision on autopilot like Joshua at the first battle of Ai? Was the rise of organized crime, smuggling, and bootlegging, which would have been impossible apart from prohibition, evidence of God’s blessing on prohibitionism? Or is it more likely that these things are, like the death of the thirty-six at Ai, evidence that prohibitionists had acted apart from the will of God?

Conservative evangelicals later got on the prohibitionist bandwagon again, this time with the liberal Democrat Franklin Roosevelt regarding prohibition of cannibinoids and opioids, even joining him in eschewing the Constitution, which had been amended to bring in alcohol prohibition but was now ignored to prohibit the threat du jour. Is the rise of deadly Mexican drug cartels during the prohibition years and their having to find other livelihoods in the face of pot legalization in the US a sign of God’s blessing on the War on Drugs, or evidence that prohibitionists were acting presumptuously all along? Again, when did US evangelicals consult God on the matter? How did he respond?

My main question, of course, is ultimately to today’s US evangelicals who have pledged their fealty to Barack Obama’s military and his various domestic armed bodies. Convinced that Osama bin Laden carried out 9/11 in cahoots with Saddam, a tyrant despised by his people who was hiding weapons of mass destruction ultimately aimed at our homeland, they proudly sent their children to Afghanistan and Iraq, only to find that Saddam had no WMDs, that his oppressed masses were willing to fight to defend him (or at least their homes) against “our heroes,” that (according to Uncle Sam, at least) Osama had lived for years in Pakistan under the nose of anyone with half a mind to turn Uncle Sam loose on him, and that Osama’s devotees have increased in number every day since the first US soldiers were deployed.

Like Israel’s battle against Ai and covenant with the Gibeonites, things didn’t go as planned. Could it be that they didn’t go as planned because the Lord’s support was assumed, but the Lord himself was never consulted?

What soul-searching did 9/11 call forth on the part of US evangelicals? In Billy Graham’s address to the nation of almost 1500 words the Thursday after 9/11, the word repent occurs all of once, here:

One of the things we desperately need is a spiritual renewal in this country. We need a spiritual revival in America. And God has told us in His Word, time after time, that we are to repent of our sins and we’re to turn to Him and He will bless us in a new way.

Far more typical of the sermon as a whole, however, is this:

We also know that God is going to give wisdom and courage and strength to the President and those around him. And this is going to be a day that we will remember as a day of victory.

What kind of call to repentance is this to give to a nation that considers nothing more sacred than extramarital sex? Is this what the Bible means by “consulting the Lord”?

Is it really crazy to ask if in the over two hundred years of its existence our government—which killed thousands of Cherokee Indians on the Trail of Tears, killed hundreds of thousands of “its own citizens” to prevent them from seceding, killed thousands of Indians when stealing their land, killed hundreds of Hawai’ians and overthrew their government, killed thousands of Filipinos replacing the Spanish colonial government with the American “protectorate,” killed thousands of Koreans to establish a military presence and partition the country, and, as just mentioned, killed a million Vietnamese for no reason—would it really have been crazy to ask the Lord after days prayer and fasting if that government had ever done anything that would provoke just anger on the part of people in the Muslim world?

Would it have been crazy to ask if Uncle Sam—who planned at least one false-flag terrorist operation, who lied to his subjects about the sinking of the Lusitania to get the US into a spat between imperial powers in Europe, lied about the attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, knowingly deceived his citizens about the medical care it was providing, lied about the Kuwaiti babies being murdered in their incubators, lied about “no new taxes” and the New World Order, and lies unceasingly about his inflation of the currency—was really telling us the truth about 9/11 before encouraging our youth to become unequally yoked with unbelievers in the military—the marching cadence “Luke the Gook comes marching by, stick your bayonet in his eye!” comes to mind—and march off to war?

Instead, if my church is any example, evangelicals assume what they should be demanding that Uncle Sam prove: that soldiers who deploy really are defending us and our freedoms and not promoting the interests of those who are currently taking our money in taxes and using it to take our freedoms away. And following that assumption, they pray God’s blessing and protection on “our military” and refuse to even consider, let alone discuss, the possibility that that military is involved in at best an imperialist venture and at worst a cynical exercise in funneling tax money to armaments manufacturers who build weapons to fight a war that benefits them more from being fought endlessly than from being won.

Has anyone consulted the Lord on this issue? When? How did he respond?

It’s not enough to say that Islam is evil. Of course it’s evil. But how does the Bible tell us to deal with evil? “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Look at Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria today and tell me that evangelicals in the military are involved in overcoming evil with good.

On the basis of what specific counsel from the Lord are US Christians sending their children to kill instead of to evangelize the people of the Muslim Crescent? When did Jesus rescind the Great Commission and send his youth to the military recruiters?

Email Exchange with a Nigerian Christian about the Boko Haram Kidnappings

The first I heard of the Boko Haram kidnappings came in an e-mail from a Nigerian brother. I’m not sure what site he was quoting – the same information appears verbatim without credit in many places – but as far as I can tell it came originally from the Segun Oniyide Blog.

I responded with the message below after reading a post by longtime journalist Eric Margolis, to which I link.

May Christians in Nigeria be properly skeptical of the "help" offered by the West, who, don't forget, drew the borders of NIgeria precisely to set it up to fail.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/05/eric-margolis/the-worlds-biggest-crooks/

I don't excuse Boko Haram for what they've done to those girls, but if Margolis is right that Nigerian Christians have been collaborating with the West over the years to cheat Muslims, there may be more to BH's actions than lust and greed.

Again, I pray that it will be you and other Christian leaders, looking to Jesus and not to the UN or Uncle Sam or other godless political entities and politicians, who will bring peace and justice to what is now Nigeria, winning many Muslims to Christ in the process.

Blessings,

My brother responds (reformatted for easier reading):

Henry this guy doesn't know much of the history of Islam in Nigeria and what Christians have been passing through in the hands of Muslims. He may have some political scores to settle with his own country but he is not competent to speak on the Nigerian situation. What he has said about Christians in Nigeria is the most unfortunate and is pontificating from a position of ignorance.

Most of the Presidents or military Heads of state in Nigeria were Muslims from the north. They have dominated in political leadership but they were more interested in self aggrandizement than developing the whole nation especially the north. Most of the individuals having oil wells in Nigeria are northern Muslims. Most Inspector Generals of Police were Muslims. The current National security Adviser to the President is a Muslim. The current Inspector General of Police is a Muslim. The Comptroller General of Nigeria Customs is a Muslim. The Minister for Defence is a Muslim. Muslims dominate in the army in their ranks and file, in the Nigeria police, in immigration, in customs and virtually all federal government agencies.

In the past those who were Christians never got promotions under Muslim leadership, which some who were not strong in their faith turned to Islam in order to get promotions and also acquire wealth. Muslims started destroying Christian property and lives way back in the mid eighties until Christians were forced to rise up collectively to resist that. But even so, Christians don't carry arms against Muslims but Muslims do that at will many times against Christians. What usually compounds problems which appears as if Christians have been retaliating is just that when Muslims go wild here they lump all those who are non-Muslims together for destruction.

Many non-Muslims who are also non Christians retaliate in some cases and a number of Christians may be found among them. The northern Muslims believe that political leadership is their birthright and no one else is qualified to govern Nigeria.

All this Boko Haram saga is a reaction against Goodluck Jonathan [Could this have been what Margolis was referring to?] just because they believe that it was the turn of the north to produce the President, which is an undemocratic way of producing leadership. As soon as Jonathan was declared the winner of the 2011 elections some prominent Muslim political leaders who lost in the election said openly that they would make Nigeria ungovernable. Then things started going wild with violence springing up in the north against Christians everywhere. This is a mere scratch on the volume of reality of the Muslim north causing mayhem against Christians.

Apart from the north, there is a significant number of Muslims in the south especially among the Yoruba people of the south-west. The Yoruba Muslims live peacefully with their Christian brothers. The Yoruba, both Muslims and Christians have been agitating for dividing the country so that they would move away from the northern Islamic madness. They are tired of one Nigeria but such an opportunity has not come yet.

Why are the Muslims in the north this way? I have personally struggled with their issue but the Lord has given me the grace that helps me not to hate them or hold resentment against them but I do hate their criminal behavior. I have a very cordial relationship with my Muslim colleagues in our university. One is free to sympathize with Muslims who are not actually the victims rather than Christians who are usually the victims of Islamic violence, but it is very sad for one who doesn't know much about the Nigerian situation to make such a spurious statement.

My response:

Thanks for writing. I said, "If Margolis is right," and it sounds like you don't think he is, and I would take your word over his. I'll read your comments a few times so I'm sure I know what you're saying. (The words are clear -- it's this old brain that needs repetition before it sinks in!)

I do think he's close to right, though, about how the West has furthered its own interests by drawing national borders to divide ethnic groups and "unite" hostile groups and by supporting the politicians that have oppressed you. Nothing you say contradicts that. My point was that the Obamas and their henchmen are trying to rally support in this country for a military invasion to "save" Nigeria. "Our troops" have turned Afghanistan and Iraq into rubble, and they're working on Syria. The US-backed government in Ukraine is shooting unarmed "insurgents." For that matter, Obama killed more Pakistanis in his first three days in office than Putin has in the weeks in which he "invaded" Crimea.

I don't want to see US Christian soldiers do to Nigeria what they've done in the Middle East. I want to see the church in Nigeria show that just the kind of thing you've been doing -- digging wells, working with the Muslims in your university, reaching out and trying to make peace -- will defuse injustice and bring Muslims to Christ. At least that's what I'm praying for.

I'm glad to hear that Christians in the south are "tired of one Nigeria." It sounds like you've been oppressed by northern Muslims at least as far back as the Biafra war in the 1960s, and this current situation may be pushing people over the line so they realize that nationalism is a Western imperialist lie and that your real people are your family, your tribe, those who follow the same social rules you do, and most of all your fellow Christians. 

Thanks again for writing! I'm praying for you especially, but also for the families of the girls who were kidnapped.

My brother’s response:

Got you brother. Remain strong in him.

“Watch My Baby Starve to Death”

One objection to anarchist libertarianism runs like this: Suppose someone puts his baby in a window with a sign on it: “Watch my baby starve to death.” It’s plain that he intends to leave the baby there in plain view until it dies. Because the killer is the baby’s father and libertarianism’s core principle, the non-aggression principle, forbids me to violate others’ property, if he refuses to allow me on his property or to change his mind about killing the baby, I cannot use force to save the baby. Therefore libertarianism is morally bankrupt and needs to cede legitimacy to the state.

This objection fits in with God’s command that we intervene when we see injustice being done: “Rescue those who are unjustly sentenced to death; don't stand back and let them die. Don't try to avoid responsibility by saying you didn't know about it. For God knows all hearts, and he sees you. He keeps watch over your soul, and he knows you knew! And he will judge all people according to what they have done.” (Prov 24:11).

I would like to argue here that the objection to libertarianism is validly made only by Christians and that it is only through biblical morality that it can be overcome, however imperfectly.

To begin with, I don’t see how an atheist can object to the killing of that baby on grounds other than empathy: “I wouldn’t want that to happen to me.” (For the same reason, I don’t see how an atheist libertarian can speak of the non-aggression principle as anything other than a survival strategy.) I see no difference between a man leaving his child to die in a window and a herd of animals leaving the weak among them to the elements and predators. We see malice in such a person that we don’t see in the animals, but as malice is unique to humans, it has no more moral component does than the venom that is the key to the rattlesnake’s survival. If we are no more than cousins to the rattlesnake, just as it has to do what it has to do to survive, so do humans. Someone who would starve his baby might be stupid—harming himself by harming another, squandering the precious resource of human life—but again, an atheist can truly object to that only on a pragmatic basis: it is wrong the same way a mouse being killed taking the cheese in a mousetrap is wrong.

(This is not to say that no atheist cares about morality or meaning—it is a sign of the sickness of today’s US evangelicalism that so many atheists object to “collateral damage” and the War on Drugs, both of which kill innocents as surely as the father in our example, while evangelicals defend those atrocities in the name of Jesus—only that I see no way for them to derive their concern from their worldview; they need to borrow ours to make their case.)

Only the existence of a good god (lowercase will be intentional whenever it appears) who can call things either good or evil enables moral judgment to have any weight. A god who is not good can back up his decrees with power, and if he calls something good it is good even if it is evil, but that does not make what is evil good. Only and always when a good god calls something good is it necessarily good.

Here the question arises, How do we know that the God of the Bible is good? The answer is that if he is not good, there is no way of determining good and evil; we end up where we are if there is no god at all. To believe in good and evil is eventually to presuppose the existence of a god who is good, of whose nature good is an integral part. As the smorgasbord of gods included only one good, self-existent god —the God of the Bible and those like Allah derived from him—before people began to doubt the existence of any gods at all, I find it reasonable to say that either there is no god at all or the god who exists is the God of the Bible.

I see no way of avoiding circular reasoning here: We infer the existence of God because life has no meaning unless good and evil are real. We then use that inference as the presupposition to all the rest: we presuppose God and therefore infer that life has meaning. Circular reasoning is unsatisfactory, but the alternative is that life–including the unsatisfactory nature of circular reasoning–is meaningless. At best, God exists and life has meaning. At worst, circular reasoning is sometimes emotionally or intellectually unsatisfying.

So now we return to the baby in the window. We can infer from God’s command that parents raise their children to know God (Prov 22:6) that they are to provide to their children the sustenance needed for that child’s physical life. Not to do so is a sin against God; because God exists, our objection can move beyond pragmatics to morals: we can state that the father’s actions are evil.

Now the question becomes this: Do we have here a case of “Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord, “I will repay,” in which case we shrug and walk away, or does he authorize us to intervene forcefully to save the life of the baby? Can we violate the father’s property and patriarchy to prevent sin the way the Hebrew midwives violated truth and disobeyed Pharaoh’s decree to prevent him from murdering babies?

If Romans 13 is the linchpin of social organization, the Christian answer is to convince the powers that be, ordained of God, to intervene by taking custody of the baby by using whatever force is necessary. If the powers that be refuse to intervene, the Christian has no further recourse: “Those who refuse to obey the laws of the land are refusing to obey God, and punishment will follow” (Rom 13:2). If Christian soldiers are guiltless when, “just following orders,” they stuff naked Jews into gas chambers, then all Christians are similarly guiltless when, “just following orders,” they obey the decree of the powers that be and allow a father to starve his baby to death.

If instead “do for others what you would like them to do for you” is indeed “a summary of all that is taught in the law and the prophets,” then it would seem that that and “love your neighbor as yourself” and “do not follow the crowd in doing evil” trump Romans 13 and not the other way around. If that is the case, given that “the powers that be” cannot “be” without first violating others and their property, there should be no “powers that be” to convince to violate the father’s property by force. So then what do we do?

Contrary to popular belief, free-market anarchism does not do away with civil government; it merely removes the element of coercive participation from it. Instead of being taxed to pay hefty salaries to policemen who extract even more wealth by writing tickets and caging people for activities that have harmed no one, people pay for protection the same way they pay for potato chips: to agencies who offer the proper balance of benefits and costs. Further, such agencies, unlike coercion-based governments, which exist and operate on the principle that might makes right, would be subject to market forces: those who don’t like how they’re treated would be able to stop paying less-satisfactory agencies and start paying agencies more to their liking: (“Fifteen minutes can save you fifteen percent on car insurance!”). There are still “powers that be,” ordained of God; they “be” by the godly means of providing better service, not by the ungodly means of winning wars of conquest or elections.

One of the first things I and most other Christians would look for in such a protection agency would be assurance that fellow clients would not be permitted to kill their babies. So if a fellow client of my security agency were to attempt to kill his baby publicly, he would be subject to a clause in the contract that allowed the agency either to use whatever force was necessary to rescue the baby or to terminate the contract, treat him as an outlaw, and then, at least by implication, allow those who chose to rescue the baby at their own risk to do so.

If the father were the member of no agency at all, he would be an outlaw, and again, those who were willing to take upon themselves the risks and responsibilities of their actions—assuming that the would-be saviors’ agency would take no responsibility upon itself—would be free to do what they could to rescue the baby.

If he were a member of another agency, chances are there would be in place a memorandum of understanding that would enable the saviors’ agency to negotiate with the father’s agency and get it to intervene. It is true that if the other agency refused to intervene, the baby would die, but the would-be saviors would then be no worse off than they would be under a Romans 13 system if the “powers that be” refused to intervene.

“Any government powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take away everything you love.” If the government can step in to rescue a baby from being starved to death, what stops it from stepping in to keep that baby from consuming unpasteurized milk or potato chips or the Bible? Only a system of voluntary protective agencies allows clients to choose the level of interference that that agency will exercise on their own lives.

Free-market anarchism will not bring in the Millennium: only Jesus can do that. A corrupt people will live in a hellish society, whether under a might-makes-right government or in a love-your-neighbor anarchy. But to the degree that the process is good—and respecting others and their property is good, certainly better than might makes right—the product will be good.

So while libertarianism per se has no principled way of preventing the baby in the window from being starved to death—and atheist libertarians have no principled reason for doing so—Christian morality, whether as such or borrowed by unbelievers, provides not only the rationale but the mechanism. Further, trumping “might makes right” with “let’s make a deal” increases the likelihood that the baby’s life will be saved without the monster of all-powerful, intrusive government being unleashed.