When God Really Does Order Genocide

How would you like to kill some women and children?

I don't mean just a few. I mean all of them, every one you see, from where you stand to the horizon in every direction and beyond. And you'll kill them from no more than four feet away.

She may be drop-dead gorgeous, but the only thing you're to stick in her is your sword. Or she's a toddler, squealing in terror as she sees you decapitate her mother—she's next. And you can nail that suckling child and his mother with one thrust.

Are you having fun yet?

And don't forget: in order to kill them, you first have to kill the men of the town who are defending them. Ragheads don't care about women, of course, but they sure as hell care about themselves and their property, and there's no more valuable property than a woman, so between their instinct for self-preservation and their jealousy over their property, they will fight as fiercely as they can.

Then you get to dispose of the bodies. And no "accidentally" letting the women's clothing fall off.

How about it? You up for it?

This was precisely the invitation the Israelites received when they left Egypt. They were to kill the "Amorites," all the occupants of Canaan. No one was to be spared.

I believe that the Bible is the word of God, so I have to believe that God did indeed command the Israelites to kill the Amorites. I also believe that God is incapable of evil, so that command must have been moral when he issued it. I will admit to harboring the thought that the omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate, and righteous creator of the universe and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ ought to have been able to think of a better way to take the Israelites into their homeland, but the Bible says what it says: the God who does not change ordered genocide. Like it or find another religion.

Can we use the invasion of Canaan to justify Christian participation in Uncle Sam's wars today? Does the death of innocent people then justify "collateral damage" today?

The warfare Uncle Sam's army is waging today is nothing like warfare then. The invaders of Canaan were hand to hand with their enemies; an arrow, a sword, a spear, or a stone could have come out of nowhere and killed any one of them. God had promised them victory, but he didn't promise that none of them would be killed. And indeed, some of them were killed, and not just those who died from Joshua's error at the first battle of Ai.

It's one thing for us to sit in our comfortable houses and read the accounts of the conquest in the past tense. It would have been quite another thing, even after forty years of manna, a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night, and the Jordan drying up at the height of the flood season, to face all those men in a fight to the death. Then, on top of that, they had to kill all those innocent women and children. Frankly, the thought sickens me; God called such squeamishness at the time rebellion.

I don't think obeying the call to invade would have been so difficult for the Islraelites if they had had Predator drones, rockets, bunker-buster bombs, mortars, and the like. I can see them clearing the land, including the areas they never did conquer, and saying, "Jeez, we've still got some whizbangs left over. Are you sure you don't want us to do some more?" Madeleine Albright was being merely human when she lamented that the Clinton administration had nothing to use the world's most powerful military on.*

Power corrupts, military power no less than any other. As the price of anything goes down, the demand rises. Our rulers have no doubt gotten us into wars, and soldiers have been willing to fight, because the politicians and higher officers wage these wars from safely behind the lines; gone are the days when kings, or even generals, led their armies in battle.

I think we need to be very sure we're not putting words in God's mouth when we use the invasion of Canaan to justify our present wars.

We must also reconsider our dim view of the conquest of Canaan. While the conquest was infinitely easier on the Israelites than it was on the Canaanites, I can't imagine the veterans of that war enjoyed remminiscing later about killing infants or made trophies of the corpses of the men. It was a horrible time, and "when the land had rest," I'm sure the warriors did all they could to see that they would never have to pick up their weapons again.

*What she might have meant was that the money being spent on the military was being wasted and should be diverted to education or other "entitlements," there being no enemies strong enough to justify the size of the military at the time, but the subsequent "humanitarian" invasions of Somalia and Bosnia make that less likely.

World Magazine Delivers

I thumb through the copies of World magazine in the mailboxes at my church as I wait for the early service to finish and Sunday school to begin so I can find out what my conservative brethren are up to. These are people who read their Bibles, pray, and tell the world unashamedly that they know Jesus, are his representatives, and therefore can speak for him.

There's always something to be learned from these sessions, but I should have realized I was in trouble yesterday when I saw the picture that was originally purveyed as President Obama and his staff following the assassination of Osama bin Laden "as it happened." While that photo and caption was front-page news on May 2, by the end of the week the back pages had told those who cared to listen that that photo had been staged; those folks were at least twenty minutes behind real time. The firefight they were supposedly watching didn't happen, Osama didn't hide behind his wife or have a gun, etc. Apparently Mr. Obama is a rat when it comes to domestic issues—World consistenty (and rightly) excoriates him for his evil policies on health care, education, and Social Security—but absolutely trustworthy when it comes to killing foreigners.

But I kept on thumbing, and I found a page that listed a couple of dozen instances of al-Qaeda terrorism: hundreds of murders, maybe a thousand or two, and that's even apart from 9/11. Yup, those al-Qaedistas are no good; they have a lot of innocent blood on their hands.

But though George W. Bush and Barack Obama each have the blood of more innocent people on their hands than al-Qaeda, the Jesus of World mag is OK with that. Al-Qaeda "targets" innocent people, like the spies in the embassies in Dar Es-Salaam and Nairobi and the generals in the Pentagon, to say nothing of the profiteers from the military-industrial complex in the Twin Towers. But those hundreds of thousands of people killed by Clinton, Bush, and Obama are simply "collateral damage": "we" knew they would die as the result of "our" actions, but "our" target was someone else (who got away for ten years), so "we" are not responsible for their deaths.

Of course, World also didn't mention that al-Qaeda was created by the CIA to run the Russians out of Afghanistan in the 1980s, nor that they are currently "our" allies in Libya. This was a time to celebrate the death of bin Laden, not to question the wisdom of our now-vindicated commander in chief.

Then I got to the cartoon page, where I found a connect-the-dots picture of Osama, the message of which was that had it not been for waterboarding, "we" wouldn't have caught him. That the great majority of those waterboarded were innocent of any wrongdoing and had no useful information to give is apparently of no interest to Jesus. Again, it's just collateral damage. "Stuff happens."

A few pages away was a review of a book that states that "some wars are worth fighting." I learned that an operation in Fallujah had turned up torture chambers used by the "insurgents." No reason for those chambers was given, but it's not hard to guess.

"Insurgents," as you know, are those who forcibly resist "liberation" by the US military. Those who object to "our" presence are either supposed to shut up, ask "us" nicely to leave (and shut up when "we" don't), or put on uniforms that say, "Patriotic Front against Imperialist Invaders" and stand out in the open so "we" can shoot them from helicopters. Operating an undergroud resistance was OK for the French against the Germans—they were on "our" side, don't forget—but it's not OK for "our" Iraqi "enemies."

I suspect those torture chambers were the scene primarily of revenge that escalated into gratuitous butchery. I will grant that Muslims and Communists can indeed be excessively vengeful. We saw after the war ended in Vietnam that those Communists who had lost family and friends to US bombs (and their sympathizers) took horrible vengeance on those who had collaborated with the imperialists. They also stuck it to those who hadn't collaborated but weren't sufficiently "patriotic" just for good measure. Human nature being what it is, I expect that those who ran the torture chambers in Fallujah had similar reasons for what they did.

But human nature is what it is, and Uncle Sam is no different. Tired of murder and plunder by Uncle Sam and his proxies (the Shah, Mubarak, Saddam, and Gaddhafi, for starters) in the Muslim world, Islamists took the fight to the US (the bombings of the World Trade Center and the embassies in the 1990s). Two wrongs don't make a right, and those killings were evil. But the US response has been to take the fight yet again to the Muslim world, killing tens if not hundreds of innocent civilians for every US victim of al-Qaeda.

I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, where six million people were executed without trial. Christians in Germany feared for their lives, having been starved by the US and Britain after the Great War, and afraid that the Soviets, who had killed a dozen or so million of their own subjects and enslaved survivors in an atheist hellhole of lies, murder, and plunder, would take them out as well. No doubt Jews who had been victims of pogroms under the Czar had sympathized with the Bolsheviks, so it was understandable that Christians would view all Jews as possible enemies. And because they couldn't tell who was innocent and who was guilty, they allowed the "collateral damage" to occur.

How much of that genocide can be traceable to legitimate fear and how much to the corruption endemic to the human soul I don't know. It is obvious that German Christians let their government get away with behavior they would never tolerate from foreigners, or even from their own children in their church nurseries. And US Christians are following that same path.

A friend came in on me while I was gagging on the cartoons. Hoping this was a "teachable moment," I began explaining that I really thought killing Osama was a bad idea, if for no other reason than we could have gotten all sorts of useful information from him.

My comments were swept aside with, "Hey, I'm OK with assassinating that guy."

Jesus, we hardly knew ye.

UPDATE: My friend from the last paragraph tells me he was just being facetious. I guess I take these things too seriously.

Why We Need the War on Drugs

If there are three good reasons for something, it's a good thing, right? "By the testimony of two or three witnesses shall all things be established."

I think I’ve come up with three good reasons for the war on drugs, three ways we benefit from it. Maybe this means I’ll have stop being so negative about it.

All three reasons for the war on drugs boil down to one word: jobs. With manufacturing gone overseas and real estate and the stock market flat for the foreseeable future, we need jobs, and the war on drugs is just the medicine we need.

The first jobs the war on drugs provides are in the pharmaceutical corporations. Our bodies and marijuana were so made for each other that Dr. Joseph Mercola can write, “Your body also has naturally occurring endocannabinoids similar to THC [the active ingredient of marijuana] that stimulate your cannabinoid receptors and produce a variety of important physiologic processes. So your body is actually hard-wired to respond to cannabinoids.” But if people were to grow marijuana and make their own oils to deal with such things as cancer, they would buy fewer manufactured drugs, Big Pharma would sell less, and laborers—and who knows, maybe even managers—would lose their jobs.

Since it’s more important that workers in the pharmaceutical industry have paychecks so they can buy food and the other necessities of life than it is that goods and services be produced (let alone that those in the pharmaceutical industry produce them), we simply can’t afford to allow diseased people to use alternative medications.

Besides, you and I know that only goofballs take herbal medicines, so there is something to be said for the line that alternative medicines are illegal to protect people from themselves—and most of all to protect the children. But it’s really jobs that keep us from returning to the days when the response to kooky ideas like herbal medicine was, “Hey, give it a try. It’s a free country.”

The second set of jobs we need to preserve are in the military-intelligence-industrial complex. Without the CIA and the military going all over the world to do things don’t know about and decent people wouldn’t approve of if they knew, we would never be safe from those who hate us. Heck, without these brave folks, those who hate us might not even hate us, and we can’t have that: we need enemies so we can provide jobs not only for the Pentagon and the CIA, but also for the industries that supply them.

Folks used to think that all it would take to rein in the spooks and troops would be for Congress to cut off their funding. But that’s just not true: the CIA has a symbiotic relationship with a worldwide network of drug smugglers; they give the smugglers a monopolies by killing or imprisoning the competition, and the smugglers give them cuts from their handsome profits. If Congress cuts off “defense” funding, our “defenders” can still do things that make people who don’t otherwise matter hate us and keep the job bonanza running.

The third set of jobs is in the prison industry. Building and maintaining “correctional facilities” is a perfect way to revive a local economy: construction, maintenance, and day-to-day operations require people who in turn need grocers, schools, and electronics shops. Of course, guards, administrators, and janitors can’t be paid for doing nothing, so we need to find ways of filling the cells. There aren’t enough murderers, rapists, burglars, and other violent criminals to fill the cages, but druggies can occupy the space just as well. As a bonus, we can hire more policemen and dogs to sniff everyone and everything everywhere to find the evil weed. And if anything escapes their notice, that problem is nothing more technology can’t solve: infrared and ultraviolet goggles and unmanned aircraft are just the first things I can name off the top of my head that need hundreds of well-paid workers to produce and maintain. They may not be good for preventing rapes, but they can surely find marijuana growing in a basement.

Drugs that require acres of disclaimers in fine print, wars against foreigners who otherwise wouldn’t hate us, and prisons for people who pose no threat to anyone except possibly themselves. This is the stuff of prosperity. And it’s all brought to us by the war on drugs.

This is such a good idea that I can’t for the life of me figure why the Bible never recommends it. It must be that the Bible is just an old book that was perhaps OK in its day but has nothing to say to advanced creatures like us in the complexities of modern times.

Lords of the Earth

One of the books that inspired me before we went to Papua New Guinea (and later made me realize how easy we had it compared to true pioneer missionaries) was Don Richardson's Lords of the Earth, the story of how a stone-age tribe in western New Guinea's was first contact with the gospel. The book's timeline began months or years before contact with a scene designed to make Western Christians gag at the tribesmen's barbarity and appreciate the sacrifice and risk of those heroic missionaries who went to evangelize them.

Male Yawi, who considered themselves the lords of the whole earth, hence the book's title, were clad only in penis gourds, and their greeting was to click the gourd with their fingernail and say, "I like your feces."

But, as Dr. Seuss would say, that's not all—oh no, that is not all. They tossed a young girl over a cataract for some minor religious offense, and they summarily executed a prisoner of war—considering it an act of mercy, mind you—by crushing the man's head with a stone. Oh, how those nasty Yawi needed the Gospel!

Well, let's move to thirty years or so after the events Richardson describes, when Mother Teresa was the featured speaker at a prayer breakfast in Washington DC. I haven't been able to confirm any of this, but my conservative source at the time told me that when she had her full rhetorical momentum up, she looked that low-life skunk Bill Clinton, who was president at the time, in the eye and said, "When a society kills its own children [referring to abortion, the one freedom Mr. Clinton ever defended], there is nothing left of it worth saving." Take that, you leftist sicko!

Well, as we know, once Bubba was out of the White House, there was suddenly a whole lot worth saving. Mr. Clinton's successor didn't deny the abortionist crowd a dime of federal tax money, let alone do anything to make it possible for states, counties, or municipalities to make the practice illegal, but by God, when the Twin Towers went down, he could do no wrong, and nothing—no budget constraints, no constitutional rights of US citizens at home, not even human decency—could stand in the way of "bringing Osama bin Laden to justice."

Well, ding dong, the witch is dead. He's gone where the goblins go, below. Yo-ho! "Some people deserve a headshot, he was one of them."

I've already compared 9/11 to Uncle Sam's subsequent predations and so Osama to our current president. Let me also remind you that Lincoln killed a hundred times that many people he considered citizens of the nation over which he presided, Roosevelt killed far more innocent civilians by carpet-bombing Germany, and Truman killed far more by nuking Japan, and Nixon and Johnson killed more in Vietnam (for what Robert McNamara, the architect of that war confessed was a lie), all much more than died on 9/11. When it comes to killing innocent people, Osama, even if guilty of 9/11, was a piker. We name bridges and high schools after people with far more innocent blood on their hands.

I learned recently that the birth defect rate in Fallujah is now 80 percent. It's so bad that the Iraqi health ministry has told the people to stop having children. If they don't have children, who will take care of them in their old age? Not a problem! The cancer rate in Fallujah is like it was in the areas that were downwind from Chernobyl. They'll die before they get old.

If that isn't genocide, what is?

And remember, our brave men and women leveled Fallujah, a city the size of double-A baseball towns in the US, because a few people mutilated the corpses of mercenary soldiers in Uncle Sam's employ. They didn't torture living beings; they mistreated corpses, dead tissue. Which cities in the US should be leveled in retaliation for US soldiers' mistreatment of Afghan corpses?

Well, Osama was still worthy of death, right?

Was he even guilty of 9/11? I wrote in the above-linked post that he didn't act like one would expect the mastermind of 9/11 to act. Over the last decade we've gotten blurry pictures, and cassette and video tapes (in the age of camera phones and Skype?) that government experts—employees of the same government that couldn't predict the dot-com bubble, couldn't predict 9/11, couldn't predict the housing bubble, and isn't predicting a college loan bubble, and meanwhile has wiped out the savings of thrifty subjects to bail out the richest people the world has ever seen—tell us "could very well be" Osama. But where was his Lord Haw-Haw or Tokyo Rose? Where was his cult of personality? Again, compared to the Clintons, the Bushes, and Obama, he was a piker.

And, of course, now that he has no opportunity to face his accusers, we will never know what he knew about 9/11 beforehand. He joins the six million Jews tried in the media and summarily executed by Hitler. Just another Untermann.

Who has benefited from 9/11? Did the Iraqis? Did Saddam? Did the Afghans? Did the Taliban? For that matter, did al-Qaeda? Again, read the fatwa. What were his gripes? Did 9/11 get the US out of the Middle East? Did it get the US to stop killing innocents there? Did he get anything he wanted? So if he was so wrong about the consequences, how could he have been smart enough to pull it off? (Best answer if he's guilty: the world's most expensive, intrusive, and vicious intelligence and military machine is also totally incompetent.)

If he was such a "mastermind" that he could hit three of US fascism's most important buildings, is it reasonable to ask what he thought the US government's reaction would be? Did he expect Uncle Sam to say, "Oh, golly, this is nasty. Let's cut and run"? Or is it more likely that he would remember that the same Madeleine Albright who told the world that it was "worth it" to kill half a million civilians in a vain attempt to get them to rise up against Saddam had also asked, "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about, if we can't use it?"

And isn't it even more likely that the neoconservatives, like the Project for a New American Century, Keynesians who believe that war is good for the economy, as proven by World War II, which got the US out of the Great Depression, and who were saying for years before 9/11 that all that was needed to bring about the new world order they envisioned was "another Pearl Harbor," had at least a hand in the affair? They have certainly benefited, and they seem to be the only ones; literally everyone else, from formerly oppressed but now dead Iraqis and Afghans to US taxpayers, is footing the bill, with no end in sight.

There are plenty of fingerprints on 9/11, but I wouldn't bet they're Osama's.

One of my coworkers, a twenty-something, a literature major no less, paid a fellow musician a compliment the other day by saying, "He's the shit." All she's missing to be a good Yawi is a penis gourd. (Actually, I'm being unfair. She is the only one of my coworkers who has spoken out against the wars. But like a good Yawi, she uses feces as a compliment.)

We US citizens are now the lords of the earth. Our last enemy has now been vanquished. (The fans at the Phillies game last night erupted into chants of "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the news.) We can engage in genocide with no one to stop us. We can now execute people without anything more than a trial by the media. And you, dear reader, could be next.

Uncle Sam, I like your feces—not.

"Power Corrupts"?

If you had asked me a year ago if I agreed with the popular saying "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," I would have said no: the Bible teaches that all of us, from Pharaoh on his throne to the slave girl at her hand mill, are born corrupt; the thoughts of our hearts are only evil continually, and our hearts are so evil that we can't even know how evil they are (Gen 6:5; 8:21; Jer 17:9); what power does is remove the barriers to the exercise of that corruption.

That much is true, but there is more to it. I've become convinced that earthly power, especially the politial power spoken of in the aphorism, is like the power of the Holy Spirit: it enables us to conform our lives to the desires of our hearts.

Sanctification, the process by which God makes us holy and fit for his use, is the reversal of corruption. The biblical view of sanctification is that there are two sides to it, what a layman might call the legal and the practical. When I became a Christian, God declared me not only justified and righteous—that is, legally forgiven of my sins and a citizen of heaven—but also sanctified, delivered from the domination of my sins. My standing before God in all respects is that of Jesus Christ.

Since then, of course, I have sinned. I have even committed sins since becoming a Christian that I had not committed before becoming a Christian. But "God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction" (Gal 6:7-8). One thing that keeps me in the Christian camp when I have such deep and passionate disagreements with what I see Christians doing is seeing for myself that while forgiveness is indeed easier to get than permission, it comes with maintenance costs that make permission preferable.

And this is where the second, practical, aspect of sanctification comes in: God works with us to get us to hate our sin, at least at a basic level because we see that it is not profitable, but later and more importantly because it grieves God and keeps sinners who need the grace of Christ from turning to Christ. As he works in our hearts, we become practically what we are legally: like Christ, soul mates with Christ.

If the effects of political power on the human heart are not plain to you from looking at the history of our nation, maybe an analogy will help. This analogy will concern influence, not power, but the dynamics are the same. (Before doing so, let me remind those readers who do not equate extramarital sex with corruption that the common "barnyard" terms for such are also used to mean "to mistreat" and suggest that the synonymity is grounded in fact.)

Think of a teenage boy on a date. For the first few minutes, all he wants out of life is to hold his girl's hand. But after a few minutes of that, he wants to put his arm around her. But after a few minutes of that he wants to kiss her.

Of course, he may have asked her out in the first place because he wanted to kiss her. So so far, there's been no change in his attitude. But what happens after they've been kissing for a while? Even if other activities hadn't been on the to-do list before he asked her out, they will certainly be on it then. And the likelihood of his attempting to engage in them will be directly related to his perceived chances of success, and for each milestone successfully passed another goal will present itself.

It is this desire, which was not there previously, that I consider corruption brought on by successful influence. Put another way, we will do whatever we can get away with, if we think we'll benefit from it.

So what?

The impetus for this post came from an exchange with a Christian brother who writes, "How does the world’s only super power hide [by being like the Swiss]? ... I don't think a superpower can prevent itself from being attacked by staying home."

If Christians believe that power corrupts, is it not reasonable for them to ask if "the world's only super power" has a problem with corruption?

I would suggest that like that teenage boy, "we" are doing things today that weren't on the to-do list years ago: "just following orders," torturing innocents, imprisoning without trial, groping children at airports, bombing civilians, starting colonial wars to control natural resources, and saddling the unborn with debt. Why? Because, also like that boy, we've been getting away with doing these things in smaller doses for so long we consider it our right to do more. And most importantly, who's going to stop the world's only superpower?

"We" are becoming practically what "we" are legally: rebels against God and enemies of all that's good.

At least the teenage boy in the analogy is not using force. If his girl says no, that's that; he can get out of the car, lift up the back end until his hormones return to default levels, and get on with life. And if she decides that a guy who would even want to exceed the limits she has set is not for her, she can end the relationship.

Not so those who want to end their relationship with Uncle Sam.

If we as Christians have little sympathy for the teenage boy, how much less sympathy should we have for Uncle Sam? And if we don't want our sons to emulate that boy, how much less should we want them to be Uncle Sam's agents?

Smoking in the Boys' Room

At 4 AM on the first Tuesday in September of 1969, I woke up in my grandmother's house in Wayne, Pennsylvania, and, three hours or so later, began my junior year of high school in Annandale, Virginia, in a building I had only stepped inside previously, surrounded by teachers and students I had never met. My father dropped me off on his way to his first day at his new job at the Pentagon, and he would pick me up after work to take me to the room we were renting for six weeks until our house became available.

I stood outside the locked door of my homeroom looking at the other students, mostly the girls. One particularly beautiful brunette, who danced even when she walked, took my breath away—and made me glad I was carrying a binder. (As it turns out, I met her first ex-husband on the other side of the world more than a decade later.) Another cute number had nice, firm-looking, sticky-out breasts, the pocket on the front of one of which sported a cigarette package. (Does that hurt, or do the cigarettes get bent?) In fact, it looked like everyone who had shirt pockets, male or female, had cigarette packs in them. Except for me. Wasn't I the virtuous one!

In those good old days, I could go through the entire school routine with only one potty break, and I quickly learned to take that in the gym after PE. Even though selling cigarettes to minors was illegal, the boys' room across from the school office was always thick with smoke, and the others in the building weren't much better. At some point before I graduated, the administration got around to forcing the smokers outdoors, but smoking and smokers were as much a part of high school as shapely girls.

My parents smoked when I was young. I remember many weekend drives with the windows rolled up against Seattle's signature rain, the car filled with smoke. I blamed the migraine headaches that usually ended with reverse parastolsis on my parents' smoking, and I'm sure it didn't do me any good, but I still get those headaches, so that wasn't the culprit. And I was dumbfounded to learn that one of my heroes, Jacques Anquetil, who had owned the Tour de France a few years before, smoked. But I developed a healthy dislike for smoking and, being a descendant of Adam who grasps at any reason to consider myself "like God," considered smokers an inferior breed, especially when they threw butts out the window or dropped them on the ground.

Well, I wouldn't expect to see smoke in the bathrooms at Annandale High School today, nor butts on the ground outside the door to the bus stop. Tobacco taxes make cigarettes prohibitively expensive, and merchants who sell tobacco to minors face draconian consequences. There is simply very little opportunity for kids to smoke anymore.

But our society has embraced a "solution" that solves nothing.

A Clockwork Orange, a movie shunned by evangelicals because of sexuality and violence, deals (at least peripherally) with the question of forced morality. A violent young man is given the opportunity to be programmed to do good, or at least to be sickened by evil. When he asks the prison chaplain whether he should undergo this treatment, the chaplain replies that one cannot be moral without choice and the treatment will not make him good. And at the end of the movie, the young man is "cured"—of wanting to be virtuous.

Our government at all levels is frantically expunging all evil substances, whether tobacco, marijuana, alcohol, saturated and trans fats, or vitamin supplements, from daily life. You can be fined and probably jailed for not buckling your car seat belt. Many people, even evangelicals, want to see the Internet, the freest communication forum the world has ever seen, regulated. All this in the name of making the world a better place and our neighbors better people.

But there will be smokers and nonsmokers, chaste and otherwise, in both heaven and hell. I can't say we do anyone any good by taking away a person's choices in personal matters.

Smoking is stupid—unless you enjoy it, I guess—but I think I'd rather be with people who have chosen to smoke (at least at times when they're either not smoking or downwind from me) than with people who are glad that they aren't given the choice. Someone who knows how to choose is by definition able to choose between life and death, the blessing or the curse, heaven or hell, Jesus or idols. One who prefers not to choose will choose anyway, and wrongly.

It May Be Immoral, but We've Still Gotta Do It

Why not say—as we are being slanderously reported as saying and as some claim that we say—"Let us do evil that good may result"? Their condemnation is deserved. (Rom 3:8)

In our rebellion against God we tend to ask why bad things happen to good people, as though anyone but God were truly good (Mark 10:18). Maybe we should be asking why it is that good people do bad things. Me, for instance: I've earned a certain amount of respect from my peers, so I have some good traits (my wife even likes me), so I have to ask why I have done so many creepy things.

But I'm not alone. How is it that people who are to an impartial observer honest, generous, and sincerely concerned with the glory of God and the good of their neighbors can say in one sentence that a given action is immoral and in the next say it has to be done? I don't know for sure if people do this in other areas, but I have certainly seen it in regards to government policy, and I consider it a natural by-product of the idea that the institution of government makes some people immune to the personal responsibility the governed have to live under.

Here are highly redacted (and so probably slanted) reconstructions of exchanges I have had recently:

They: I hate it when people blame the US for everything.

I: US sanctions single-handedly killed 500,000 Iraqi civilians in the 1990s.

They: Did not!

I: Did too! When Madeleine Albright was asked about those deaths on 60 Minutes, she didn't deny responsibilty; she said, "It was a tough decision, but we think it was worth it." She would know what was going on. Those civilians died because we had no-fly zones and prevented the importation of medicines and equipment for Saddam to rebuild the infrastructure we destroyed in Desert Storm.

They: That's not our fault. We told Saddam he could sell his oil and help his people. He sold the oil on the black market and kept the money.

I: We also gave him the materiel he used to kill his own subjects before Desert Storm.

They: That's not our fault. We gave it to him to use against Iran.

Note their principle here: We gave him the materiel to do X, so we're not responsible for the deaths he caused when he used it to do Y. In other words, even though we knew he was a thug, we provided the opportunity for him to kill those we wanted killed, but when he used that materiel to kill people we're all of a sudden indignant that he killed (I remember no kerfluffle about it at the time), we're not responsible for the evil he did.

I: We should never have gone into Iraq.

They: Correct, but that's a moot point. We did go in. And now we need to stay or the people there will kill each other.

So we're not responsible for Saddam's evil even though we gave him the wherewithal to commit it and didn't complain when he did do it. But if we leave Iraq, the people will kill each other even if we don't give them any materiel, and somehow we'll be responsible, so it's just humanitarian concern that keeps us there, even though it was immoral for us to go there to begin with. It seems to me if we're responsible if we leave, we'd have been responsible for what Saddam did with the goodies we gave him; if we're not responsible for one, we're not responsible for the other.

Certainly nothing about withdrawing the military would prevent brigades of unarmed Christians from going there to stand between the warring factions and offering to arbitrate. They'd probably have to be Chinese, North Korean, African, or from south of the Rio Grande—we're too broke from the wars to send out more missionaries, and US citizens would have a rather large credibility problem there—but I'd jump at the chance to join them.

They: It's wrong for the government to run up debts and expect our children and grandchildren to pay them.

I: Like Social Security?

They: Yes.

I: Was Social Security ever moral?

They: No.

I: If we did away with Social Security and Medicare, . . .

They: That would be wrong. People depend on those programs.

I: If someone became dependent on a Mafia don and we put the don out of business, would we be doing wrong to the people who depended on him?

They: That's different. What Mafia dons do is illegal.

I: But you said that Social Security is immoral.

They: Yes, but it was legal.

There you have it. If government does it, even if it's immoral, it's OK to keep it going because it's legal. And even if the injustice against the innocent increases every day we continue the immorality, we can't stop—we dare not face God for having stopped—committing the immorality because the people who benefit from the injustice might suffer.

I know my heart is deceitful above all things and so desperately wicked that I can't know it, and I've done worse things than believing the ideas espoused by my sparring partners, but is this really God's truth? Am I really nuts to think that continuing to kill innocent people overseas and rob innocent people at home hurts our chances of being believed when we present the gospel?

(Actually, supporting the status quo probably does improve our chances of being believed by others who support it. Maybe Moses David Berg's Children of God were on to something when they were engaging in "evangelistic" sex.)

I can identify with at least the title of Bach's famous chorale "Komm, Süsser Tod [Come, Sweet Death]." If I'm right in thinking that one component of a believable gospel witness is leaving our targets alone to live their lives in peace and that coercion should only be used in response to violence, and then only as much as necessary to prevent its recurrence (including the death penalty for murder), then I'm ready to leave a world in which most people consider it their holy duty to force innocent people to suffer injustice. And if I'm wrong, I see no way in this world I'll be convinced of the truth; I might as well go Home and take my medicine.

Does the Bible Condone Slavery?

Everyone knows the Bible condones slavery, right? The passages that tell slaves to obey their masters and the lack of a call for slavery's abolition are all the proof any reasonable person needs that the Bible is a work of fiction or worse and those who take it at face value are enemies of all that's good. Furthermore, our advanced society doesn't tolerate slavery in any form.

I disagree on both counts.

I would like to argue that the Bible doesn't as much condone slavery as assume that slavery is an unavoidable condition. But even if it were avoidable, by any definition slavery, even if not so called, is alive and well in the US today.

I find no clearer definition of slavery than the Bible's: "A man is a slave to whatever has mastered him" (2 Pet 2:19). Even a man legally "free" can be a slave to such cruel masters as drugs, money, bad habits, or temper; in short, selfish desires. Or one can be a slave of a good master: the apostle Paul opened many of his epistles by calling himself a slave of Christ (e.g., Rom 1:1; 1 Cor 1:1), one who had a job to do (1 Cor 9:16) with love, concern, and self-denial (1 Thes 2:7; 2 Cor 11:27). So there is no option to not be a slave; you are a slave to whatever makes you do what you do. The only question is to whom or what you are enslaved.

The first slaves mentioned in the Bible were slaves of King Abimelek of Philistia (Gen 20:14). We know nothing about them except that they were given to Abraham as compensation for Abimelek's abduction of Abraham's wife. We can assume that they or their forebears were taken captive in some form of war and treated harshly as slaves: we have no reason to believe that a man who would abduct a sojourner's wife would have been a gentle master. So we can assume that their transfer to Abraham's (extended) family was a form of liberation, a shadow of the greater worldwide liberation to be accomplished by the Messiah, Abraham's greater son.

Did Abraham treat his slaves well? God told Abraham to live a blameless life (Gen 17:1), and one's love for God is shown at least in part by one's work for others' benefit (1 John 4:20). So one would infer that he did, at least in general.

But we know of one occasion when he didn't, when he impregnated a slave named Hagar. He was certainly an old man at that point, and the implication is that she was young, but nothing in the record rules out the possibility that she was favorable to having her status improved by bearing her sheik's firstborn. Indeed, once a mother, she considered her position enviable and secure enough that she could ridicule Abraham's barren wife (Gen 16:4).

But let's assume the worst: he essentially raped a helpless young girl. Does the biblical record chuckle at this? Look at Abraham's later life: he is alienated from his wife (Gen 16:5), he eventually has to send that firstborn son, whom he loves dearly, away (Gen 17:18; 21:11), and Ishmael's descendants were ants in the pants of Abraham's other son Isaac's descendants throughout the Old Testament (and are to this day). This is hardly an endorsement of Abraham's action.

So much for an anecdote. How does biblical law deal with slavery?

The first laws about slaves concern not abductees but debt slaves (Ex 21:1-6, 16). Slaves were to be bought, not captured (except in defensive wars); in fact, when the Bible speaks about the abduction that was the basis of the slave system most people think of when they hear the word slavery, it makes it a capital crime (Ex 21:16). The most coercive circumstances I can find under which people were to be enslaved is if they were guilty of theft or negligence and they were unable to compensate their victims (Ex 22:1).

Violent or irresponsible people need to be restrained somehow. The Bible nowhere prescribes prisons (which are certainly an example of a master-slave relationship), but it does prescribe what we recognize as slavery as a way for violent people to recompense those they have violated and learn habits that will enable them to fit back into society. It is only in this sense that the Bible indeed condones slavery, but this is not what most people mean when they say that the Bible condones slavery.

How are masters to treat their slaves? "Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven" (Col 4:1). That is, they are to love their neighbors as themselves (Le 19:18), something no one who sells his slave's family down the river can claim to be doing.

But wouldn't love for a neighbor demand that a master free his slaves?

I say earlier that a person is always enslaved to something. If this is so, setting a slave "free" may not be the best thing for that slave. The black spiritual "Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child" dates from Reconstruction, after the slaves had been "freed," not from the period of slavery; its message is simple: some people considered themselves worse off under Reconstruction than they had been under slavery. The Bible understands that what is called freedom is not always such in fact, and it makes provision for slaves—not, be it noted, their masters—to make their enslavement permanent (Ex 21:6).

So people can be slaves without being such legally, and some people's best option is to be legally enslaved. Again, the Bible is right to say that slavery is not a matter of legal standing but an inescapable condition.

Now we take up the question of slavery in today's society. Supposedly Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves almost 150 years ago, but by the biblical definition of slavery, he did no such thing. (Nor did he do so according to the usual definition: the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the slaves in those states that had rebelled; the slaves in the states still in the Union were slaves until after the war ended and they were freed by a separate law.)

But surely legal slavery has been abolished? Wrong again. A legal slave is one to whom the law gives the legal right to the fruits of his labor and his personal decisions to another. I have already mentioned parenthetically that our present prison system is slavery.

But by that definition even Lincoln himself was a slave master. What is it but enslavement for him to force his subjects to become soldiers, to face possible death from enemy fire or certain death from "their side's" firing squad, or a jail sentence? Or to force them to accept devalued currency at face value as "legal tender"? Or to destroy the facilities of newspapers in the Union and jail the editors?

And his legacy continues today. What is the expropriation of the fruits of people's labor inherent in taxation and forced participation in medical and retirement schemes if not slavery? What is the war on drugs and nutritional supplements and "non-foods" and the jailing and fining of those who violate government editcs if not slavery? Or "rendition," "enhanced interrogation," or even "detainment"?

We may not have "slavery," but we do have slavery.

The Bible considers us rebels against a God who loves us, wants the best for us, and has sacrificed what he loves most to reestablish a relationship with us (e.g., Is 53:6; Rom 3:11-12; John 3:16). We can expect rebels to be repulsed by their lord's words, and indeed the Bible when correctly understood is hard enough for every Christian I know to swallow without choking on, so I can understand why people disdain and ridicule it. But I would hope that a dose of the truth would defuse some of that disdain and ridicule.

"People Wanna Be Free"?

All the world over, so easy to see
People everywhere just wanna be free
Listen, please listen, that's the way it should be
Peace in the valley, people got to be free.

I've been asked a few times over the last few weeks what I think of the situation in Egypt. Of course, I hope that the people in Egypt, Tunisia, the US, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and others will be better off in a year than they are now, but I don't think they will be. While the sentiments expressed by the Young Rascals in 1968 sound as wonderful now as they did when I was in junior high school, they just don't match reality.

What do people in the US mean when they say they want freedom?

Come on, you say, they mean that they want to be able to do what they want to do. You know: get a job, go to school, watch TV, go on vacation, say what they want, etc.

But, I reply, they also want to educate their children, go to the doctor, be provided for when they're unemployed, and retire at other people's expense. So they want to be free themselves, but they want others to be less free.

Ah, yes, you say, but we accept our responsibility to pay into the system even when we're not benefiting.

Fair enough, but is that really freedom? You are participating willingly, but what about those who would like the freedom to opt out of the system? Suddenly freedom isn't such a good thing, and indeed, those of us who would like to opt out of the system are few, far between, and either ignored or outright disparaged.

So what kind of freedom are the demonstrators in the Middle East calling for? They say they hate the dictators who restrict their rights, torture innocent people, and grow rich on the system of cronyism paid for by US taxpayers, and who can blame them? But what would they replace it with?

Conservative pundits decry the rise of "Islamofascism," and most of these demonstrators are indeed Muslims. Are they also fascists? Before I hazard a guess, I'd like to ask if the pot is calling the kettle black.

Textbook fascism is a social structure in which "private" businesses are an arm of the state. As Mussolini put it, "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." (Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, as it were.)

We're told that World War II was a war against fascism, yet if Rosie the Riveter worked for Boeing or Douglass, she was part of a system every bit as fascist as Hitler's Volkswagen, and so today are those who work for war materiel contractors like Boeing and Raytheon, the mercenary "contractors" of Xe (née Blackwater), and employees of government-run businesses like General Motors; so are those who work for KFC and Cinnabon at military bases overseas, and so are those who run "private-sector" prisons and charter schools. Even "private" colleges that accept students who receive loans and grants from the government can do so only as long as they accept federal restrictions on their policies; that is, they are "private" entities executing the will of the government, the embodiment of the textbook definition of fascism.

Yet most people consider it bad manners for me to talk this way. Fascism is nasty—unless it's our fascism. Then it's "freedom."

So my guess is that the demonstrators in the Middle East, like people in the US and most people in most times and most places, do not want to be free; they want a fascist state. What they want is much like what they have, but they want to join the net winners of the zero-sum game. They want to be free themselves, but they want restrictions on their neighbors.

This seems to be the natural human condition. You can probably scratch any libertarian, me included, hard enough and find a fascist.

And, as the saying goes, the leash has a slave at each end, so no, I don't think today's tyrannies will be replaced by free societies.

True freedom is Jesus, and he tells us that our worst enemies are ourselves: our hearts are so incurably deceitful that we cannot know our own evil (Je 17:9). Governments are vicious, and he tells us to avoid being like them (Lk 22:25-26), but only we can ruin our lives (Pr 19:3). He came to set us free (Jn 8:36), but that freedom is based on and can only follow repentance and a right relationship with God (Mt 4:17).

But back to the original question, if even the Black Regiment, the Protestant clergymen who played such an influential role in the American revolution, brought forth a polity in which not only were there slaves, but those in the "free" states were legally bound to return fugitive slaves to their masters, what can we expect of adherents to a religion as inherently political as Islam? Not much, I'd say: unless the person of Jesus, the Prince of Peace and true "author of liberty" is welcome in the new Middle East, the new boss will be the same as the old boss.

Though I'm open to being pleasantly surprised.

Christian Heroes of the Holocaust

My crisis of faith was deepened years ago when I read that in the years leading up to World War II Germans of my theological stripe, far from opposing Hitler, were some of his most zealous supporters. These were literate, pious people, and there's every reason to believe they read their Bibles, prayed, and heard Bible-based preaching. I still find myself asking, Why couldn't they see what was coming? Why didn't the Holy Spirit speak to them?

At least as disturbing was learning that Nazi government organizations supported Christian missions. Couldn't those in charge of the missions organizations see that the money they were receiving had been coerced from people and had not been gathered from cheerful givers (2 Co 9:7)?

Of course, I have the benefit of hindsight; if Hitler could say of the death camp system once it was fait accompli that the world would never believe such was possible, I need to cut my brethren in Christ some slack if they could not have anticipated it. But that same hindsight should enable me to look at the present and ask questions about the direction my brethren are traveling in today. While people can be forgiven for not believing the unbelievable, it's a different story when they refuse to see themselves falling into a pattern that is all too familiar. One should also look at those who bucked the tide at the time and see what it was that kept them from joining so many others in doing evil.

I saw a video the other day that showed both how easy it is to fall into horrific behavior and the courage of those who resisted doing so. Weapons of the Spirit, made in the 1990s, tells the story of Le Chambon sur Lignon, a Huguenot village in southern France, where thousands of Jews found refuge during the Holocaust. As far as I can tell, this is a documentary made by a Jew giving credit where credit is due; for that reason it is more important than it could have been had it been made by an evangelical (Pr 25:2).

One theme that runs through through the video is that character is developed over time; the Hollywood fantasy of the do-nothing who becomes a hero at the right time because he intensely wants to is just that—a fantasy. Rather, we are in a crisis what we've been all along. It was because David had been fighting bears and lions for years that Goliath was just another wild beast to be slain, and in the same way, Jewish refugees were nothing out of the ordinary to the people of Le Chambon because they had been taking in strangers for centuries. Of course, this disturbs me because I don't see enough of that hospitality and habitual righteousness in my own life.

Nor was the opposition of the Germans or the Vichy French government to what the Chambonais were doing anything new: when the nineteenth-century Enjolras sings in Les Misérables "the blood of the martyrs will water the fields of France," those fields had already been watered with Huguenot blood centuries before. The French had never liked the Huguenots, nor had they liked the Jews, and their participation in the Holocaust was simply an extension of who they already were, as was the resistance of the Huguenots.

I was also disturbed by the parallels I see between France and today's US. When northern France fell to the Germans, southern France was under nominally French control. It was the French who had originally built the internment camp facilities, though for refugees from the Spanish Civil war; it was the French who helped spread propaganda about the "Jewish threat"; it was French police, not German soldiers, who rounded up Jews off the street and put them in the camps; and it was the French who took them from the camps and put them on the trains to the death camps in Germany. Perhaps they felt they had no choice and were going along to get along, but I'm more inclined to think many believed the propaganda and served from their hearts.

In our own society, we have the Muslim threat, we have a military that cavalierly kills innocent people, we have the National Guard already experienced in running US citizens out of their homes and confiscating weapons, and we have refugee camps built by FEMA ready for occupants. And just as the French probably had no particular love for the occupying Germans, US conservatives have no love for the Obama administration, but they still support his wars foreign and domestic (e.g., the war on drugs). How far would they have to stretch to support the interment of Muslims or free-marketers? For that matter, how far would liberals or centrists have to stretch? If the equivalent of the Reichstag fire^* were to light the fires of US patriotism (as many believe happened on 9/11), our society would be more like what it is today than it is already: blindly following the government to war against innocent people.

What side is the church in the US on? Is she used to standing for righteousness and against oppression? Is she used to defending innocent members of despised groups from persecution? Is she willing to have her blood shed that she might not shed the blood of the innocent? Does she view anyone who doesn't know Christ as a possible future brother or sister who needs to be won over by love and grace?

If you would like to see an inspiring story of Christian brethren who put themselves at mortal risk to stand against the tide, yet never considered themselves heroes or martyrs, I heartily recommend Weapons of the Spirit, which is available from www.chambon.org. It's a few bucks and ninety minutes well spent, and you might think of nonbelieving neighbors who would also be interested.

^*The Reichstag fire was set not by Jews, but by the Nazis, and by blaming it on the Jews the Nazis were able to gain the support of Josef Sechspackung for what he was assured were "temporary" violations of human rights.

Joy in the House of Mourning

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart. (Ec 7:2)

As excited as I was about the possibilities for the halftime show at tomorrow's Super Bowl, there's no way it could ever match the funeral I went to today for sheer joy.

Kim Ohanian's earthly life ended a few days ago, and hundreds of people came to our church today, not to "pay their respects" or "say goodbye," but to celebrate a life given to Jesus and transformed into triumph. Kim had given her time to our church's preschool program, and former students and their parents attended, as did many members of the church she had been active in before coming to ours and probably many whose connections with Kim I have no idea of. In the almost ten years we have been at our church, I have never seen so many people in the building at one time.

The result was an hour and a half of music, testimony, and preaching that surely brought smiles to the entire heavenly host. As my wife put it, no one could have left that service without understanding what life in Christ was all about. Even my cooling heart warmed a bit.

Her husband John gave an eloquent remembrance of the priority she had placed on the Christian mission, whether as an English teacher in Korea, as a mother and stepmother to his children, or as a member of our church's missions committee. His son and daughter spoke well of her taking over as their mother figure. My daughter and a good friend sang a duet about heaven—appropriately enough stating that we have no idea what to expect—that drew the first applause I have ever heard of occurring at a funeral.

But what brought out the tissues, at least where I was, watching the video feed to the overflow crowd in the gym, was Kim's teenage daughter Joy describing her Mama. As she listed what she remembered her mother doing for her, I asked how well I had done each with my own children. Did I encourage and model daily time in Scripture and prayer? Did I spend countless hours talking about their spiritual condition? Was the mission of the church my first priority? Is it now?

If I had needed a list of worthwhile things to do with one's time, that was it.

Apart from two of the dozens of slides in the slideshow on the screen in the gym during the after-service luncheon, there was no indication of what government Kim was subject to. I don't know if she listened to Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin or read Murray Rothbard or voted Democrat. But if I hadn't known from working with her on the missions committee that she loved Jesus and wanted people—family, friends, and strangers alike—to know him, I would have had it massaged into me today.

I needed to hear it all. I have been wondering for some time whether the Bible is, for better or worse, a work of fiction. And as any three random posts on this blog will evidence, I look at the way the Christian church—and I mean sincere people who read the Bible and pray and can be generous and otherwise good neighbors—has fallen into the idolatry of nationalism and wonder "whether there be any Holy Ghost."

But today God blew on the coals by showing me someone who took what he gave her and used it for his glory alone, and I could look around at hundreds of people and see the effect she had had on their lives.

More than I did yesterday I want to do the same.

Presidential Humor

What can I add to this?

The one person in the world who can order the death of thousands of innocent people through the mediation of Predator drones jokes about killing his own subjects if they step out of line.

President Obama jokes about killing the Jonas Brothers

This man has indeed ordered the killing of American citizens without trial. But now we can joke about it. Ha, ha, ha.

And now this knee-slapper about airport patdowns during the State of the Union address:

President Obama jokes about airport patdowns

If this man were the president of any country where the inner power circle was people of color or speakers of a language unrelated to English, he would be called a monster. But because his backdrop is Old Glory, only the lunatic fringe howls at his barbarism.

I work in an office populated by two dozen people as hostile to evangelical Christianity as any two dozen randomly chosen people in our nation (though I should hasten to add that they treat Christians and all persons with respect), yet the first comment I heard the first time the subject of airport patdowns was raised was, "What will this do to people who have been abused?" But the conversation died soon thereafter. Hey, if the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize can joke about patdowns, they must be funny, right? People who have been abused be damned!

Have Christians in the US gotten offended at the idea of women and children being "felt up" (as stated in my office) before they can fly? If they have, I haven't heard anything. I know at least one of the guys who started WeWontFly.com, and they're not evangelicals, but they do stand "for basic human dignity" and back up that stance with their time, their money, and their willingness to have Whoopi Goldberg castigate them on worldwide TV. But the evangelical church stands by President Obama, whom they had a boatload of biblical reasons to deny their vote, and, I would say, against the basic dignity of those they say are created in the image of the God they worship.

Worse, they merrily send their children off to kill and die for this monster. If my church is typical, their prayers are, "Dear Lord, bless your missionaries, many of whom serve under difficult circumstances. And for those who have answered your call to serve in the armed forces, we ask that you will bring them home safely. May they serve with honor. We pray that you would put a hedge of protection around Abel Baker, Charlie Daniels, Edward Foss, and George Hardy." Do you see the difference? The prayers for the missionaries are cryptic and general; for the soldiers they are lengthy and specific. "Where your treasure [including time] is, there will your heart be also."

Yet no matter whom I mention this to, the reaction is that I am attacking those who do the praying. "How dare you criticize the prayers of a brother?" But it seems to me that when this has been an almost-weekly occurrence (well, many weeks there are no prayers for the missionaries at all) for almost eight years, we're not talking about personal foibles here; we're talking about the official policy of the church: an official, unverbalized claim that Jesus stands behind or goes ahead of Uncle Sam's army and that the death of innocent people by the thousands is simply collateral damage—in the words of Madeleine Albright, "a tough choice, but . . . worth it."

So Jesus is saying through his church that it's OK to kill innocent people and let God sort them out. (As one with more than my share of foibles, I have to note that it seems that perverts go skinny dipping with women and children; good Christians drop bombs on them.)

Jesus, we hardly knew ye.

A Green Shoot

I can't remember the last time I wasn't tired. Part of it is age; nothing works as well as it used to, and the system that performs maintenance on my body while I sleep is going downhill along with my skin, muscle tone, digestion, vision, hearing, short-term memory, and everything else. The idea of living forever doesn't have any appeal to me whatever, and I'd even bypass drinking from the fountain of eternal youth, given the sins of mine.

And, to tell the truth, the promise of heaven doesn't thrill me much, either. Though Jesus says that those who are faithful to him will hear him say, "Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your lord," meaning that his happiness will guarantee mine, the Bible doesn't really give us any glimpses of heaven that make me feel like I'd belong there or even want to.

So we're left with looking at life on earth, or some aspects of it, as a foretaste of what God has in store for those who love him. I write this blog because I see much room for improvement in that earthly picture, at least the part involving the church in the US. And I find myself wondering if there really is a Holy Spirit: if God is a thinking, speaking, feeling, acting being, why is the church in the US, with all its Bibles, sermons online, and prayer meetings, on the wrong side of so many issues? Or if the church is right, why won't he tell me what I'm doing wrong so I can repent? Has he given up on me and sent me lies because I don't want to believe the truth?

Well, I think I've seen a green shoot in the desert.

This morning we sent off our contribution to Samaritan Ministries, a Christian health-care co-op we've been a part of for more than a decade. Actually, we sent the money to a fellow "subscriber," someone who made their financial need brought on by medical treatment. They told Samaritan of their need, and Samaritan passed their name on to us so we could send them a predetermined amount of money and pray for them. We do this every month, and the understanding is that if we have medical needs we'd like prayer and help paying for, we can make our needs known. I had a hernia repaired last month, and depending on what I owe after my employment-based insurance pays, I may submit a request.

Samaritan started out when health-care costs were merely unreasonable. Now that government coercion has made health care almost unaffordable,voluntary organizations like Samaritan are more important than ever in enabling us to have somewhere to turn when medical costs overwhelm us.

During the runup to ObamaCare, Senator Christopher Dodd put out a call for those interested in commenting on the subject to contribute to an online forum. Samaritan told us about it, and so I put in my two cents' worth a couple of times. One contributor referred to us "subscribers" as "minions" and huffed that he would never qualify as a member, hence Samaritan was somehow immoral, and if ObamaCare destroyed it, so much the better. I suggested to him that if he wanted to set up a similar organization for atheists Samaritan would be happy to help him get it running. I later asked someone at Samaritan if I'd gone overboard and was assured that I hadn't.

If being part of the church means being part of Samaritan Ministries, a group that helps people every day and would willingly help more, all in the name of Christ, count me in, my doubts be damned.

If that weren't enough of a green shoot, the people we sent money to today are in Mexico. Perhaps they are US citizens down there as missionaries or retirees, but the names are thoroughly Spanish. I'd prefer to believe that they are simply José y María Paquete de Seis (not their real names!), a brother and sister in Christ, who heard about Samaritan and wanted to get in on a good thing.

Kings and kingdoms will all pass away (and so will democracies and republics), but there's something about the name of Jesus.

The Red, White, and Blue at the Rose Bowl

I only caught parts of a few bowl games this season. Though I say "only," I consider watching any sports unless under duress proof that I am not totally sanctified. This year's intake was more than in the past, and like any addict, I find that the more I take in the less I enjoy. On the other hand, having an excuse (if not, alas, this time, the opportunity) to rub my wife's feet during the game goes a long way to making the experience worthwhile, even if I find my inability not to watch the third replay of an incomplete pass and the fourth showing of a commercial I didn't like the first time reprehensible.

If you really hate me, buy me a wide-screen TV and a hundred channels of cable to go with it. You'll never hear from me again. I will literally amuse myself to death, and sports will likely be the most healthy part of my suicide diet.

But just as the best action is not without sin, neither is a serious waste of time without some gain.

Did you catch the Rose Bowl? I don't mean the game, I mean the stadium. You had to be looking for it, because the cameras never focused on it, and I can't find any pictures online to back this up, but if you can find a recording of the game, look for shots of the front entrance to the stadium and the facade on the press box. You'll see a red, white, and blue theme, not really a flag, but certainly reminiscent of it, and four words, which I think included strength and integrity, maybe duty, honor, and justice. As I say, it was backdrop, and I didn't think to write the words down. While these words can apply to football, I don't think that was the point. I think it was about the military.

My guess is prompted by something else I noticed. The referee, and probably all the officials, were wearing prominent American* flags on their chests (to the left, under the heart). Now there have been nickel-sized American flags on the backs of college and professional football helmets for years, and Major League Baseball jerseys all have on one sleeve American flags the size of those worn by the astronauts, and referees' shirts probably did also. These are somewhat unobtrusive, and if their purpose is ungodly, they are effective by being insidious; the equivalent in the sexual realm would be, oh I don't know, the beginnings of a cleavage or butt crack. But there was nothing insidious about the flag on the Rose Bowl referee's shirt; it was meant to be prominent, like a "cleavage" that includes everything above the nipples.

So what's wrong with displaying the flag? you ask.

I reply, Flags are political. What do sports have to do with politics? Isn't this supposed to be a fun time when we gather as a community to celebrate young men who have been training for years as individuals and as teams as they get together to enjoy the pleasure of competition and sportsmanship?

At which you guffaw, and rightly so.

Bowl games, and really all intercollegiate sports, are where we have tax-supported institutions (and even the "private" ones are tax supported through government loans to students) fielding teams to play games in tax-financed facilities that are broadcast over government-controlled media. But the purpose is indeed to build community. What kind of community are these events intended to build?

Here's where the flag comes in, because it is the symbol of that community. This is why all sporting events begin with a salute to the flag: this is the time for those in attendance to state the purpose of the gathering. The flag stands for what the gathering is all about, a symbol for the cement that holds the community together.

What does the American flag stand for? Not what did it stand for ten, a hundred, or two hundred years ago, but what does it stand for now? If nothing else, the flag at a sporting event stands for the government's right to take money from people under threat ultimately of death to finance sporting events. You got a problem with that?

But that's not all. When the Blue Angels or Thunderbirds fly over the stadium, the message is that the government has the right to send soldiers where it wills so they can do what soldiers do best, and that's creating a demand for orphanages and hospitals, not filling it. And when there is a moment of silence for "those who have made the ultimate sacrifice," the message is that real heroes go where the ruling class tells them to go, and they fight, kill, and sometimes, tragically, die.

Are these people the real heroes?

Years ago documents were declassified that showed that Uncle Sam lied to the public to build support for the war in Vietnam. The architect of that war, Robert McNamara, said the same thing before he died within the last year. Yet this is never mentioned during the solemn moments at athletic events.

During the war years, there were at least three men who suffered greatly because their overt opposition to the war was not well received by the public: Daniel Ellsburg, and Fathers Philip and Daniel Berrigan. And, of course, many young men had to choose between leaving their native land for Canada or either serving in a war that they considered immoral or going to prison. Why are these men are never honored? Is it more heroic to march off unquestioningly to participate in a "theater" that involves the killing of innocent people, or is it more heroic to call a lie a lie and suffer rather than go along with it?

I've written about last year's Super Bowl halftime show, how intentionally or otherwise it looked to me like a deliberate poke in the eye of the warfare state. Poke or no poke, that state has become more intrusive and abusive over the last year, but the same company that sponsored last year's show is sponsoring this year's and their featured artists, the Black Eyed Peas, have a song out that pulls no punches in its opposition to Uncle Sam's wars.

Will they dare perform it? If they do, will anyone whose mind might be changed be listening? The song for which I know the Peas is downright crude, and if they perform that song before they perform "Where Is the Love," the Sarah Palin crowd will have turned off, if they had even begun to watch out of curiosity. (What we're known for definitely affects how our message is received.) But the main stream of viewers, for whom "My Humps" is frivolous at worst and the wars are far away, might well be paying attention, and some might even change their minds.

How ironic that a music group that makes its money mocking godly sexuality joins the distinguished ranks of the Berrigans, Daniel Ellsburg, and Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, while the bride of the creator of the universe stands with those who lie to bring on death and destruction. When the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?

UPDATE: On second examination, "Where Is the Love" is not as anti-Uncle Sam's wars as I'd first thought. That should make some people happy.

*I use the word "American" here simply because I expect people to know what I mean, not because I think that Old Glory represents America in any meaningful sense. For what a truly American flag would represent, see my post on America.

The Julian Assange Rape Case

This is a follow-on to my discussion of anarchy and heinous crimes. Rape is certainly a heinous crime, and as I have expressed support for Julian Assange in the past, I think I need to do what I can to show that I do not condone either rape or fornication. And, of course, there is the question of the relationship between the rape charges and the leaks that put Mr. Assange's name in the public eye.

While I would not want my daughters to date the likes of Julian Assange, I would not hesitate to have him as an overnight house guest. From what I can tell about the situation, he is no stranger to casual sex, but if it is true that the women he is accused of raping were seen with him afterwards in cordial settings, I have a hard time believing he actually forced himself on them. If he didn't force himself on them, he is still sexually immoral, but not all sexual immorality is rape. I have no fear that the females in my family would engage in consensual sex with him, nor do I fear that he would rape any of them.

I believe that a woman has the right to say no to sex at any time. The bedroom scene from A Man and a Woman comes to mind: they're in bed naked (this was the early 1960s, so we only saw their heads and his bare shoulders, but I think the inference is reasonable) and he's on top of her and she says no. That's her right, or more properly, once she says no, he has no right to proceed with intercourse.

Again, I don't think the guys I want my daughters with need anything from them they can't get from six feet away until they've committed their lives to them, and a woman who is willingly naked in bed with a man she's not married to has already given away far too much, but I don't regard "temporary insanity due to arousal" as a legitimate reason for a man to force himself on an unwilling woman. So even if Mr. Assange climbed into bed with reasonable basis for assuming that those women were OK with him having unprotected intercourse with them, if they said at the last split second that they wanted him to use a condom or the deal was off and he went ahead unsheathed, then he has committed rape.

Let's assume the worst, that the understanding when these women went to bed with him was that he would use a condom but he forced himself on them. Now what?

As Gary North has written, the primary concern for those dealing with crimes should be the welfare of past and likely future victims of crimes. The best solution will, of course, exact restitution from the perpetrator to his victims, which include the victim of the crime itself and those involved in resolving the situation. The paragon of such a situation is the resolution of a theft by the thief paying back what he stole to the victim, plus compensation for the victim's lost time at work, damage to property, etc., as well as payment to those who tracked down the perpetrator, heard the trial, and supervised the payment of restitution.

Rape, and especially date rape, is unlike theft in that one does not damage a tangible object in the same way as one does when one, say, steals a car, sells it in pieces, and spends the money, so it is difficult to assign a monetary or other physical value to the damage. (If the victim becomes pregnant or sustains cuts, rips, or bruises, these are clearly matters of paternity and battery and should be treated as such.) But clearly the woman has been violated: how does one measure the extent of the violation?

This question cannot be answered by any government court. There are so many variables that writing, let alone passing, a law that would cover all of them would be all but impossible. To take one reasonable example: if the man says at dinner that he doesn't like condoms but the woman, unbeknownst to the man, is distracted at the moment by a passing thought and the statement doesn't register, and she is the one who offers the wine after they get to her apartment, and it isn't until after fifteen minutes of foreplay that she remembers to ask him to put on the condom, but by then he has assumed that her lack of reaction at dinner means that their sex is to be unprotected and .... How can any legislature write that down or any jury sort it out? (Good grief—who would want to?)

So how does such a victim get justice? For that matter, how does the perpetrator get justice by not being treated the same as someone who climbs in the window and rapes total strangers?

Again, only anarchism provides the answer. The victim and the perpetrator agree on an arbitrator (an individual or a group), whose decision will be final. Such an arbitrator would be known to both parties and trusted because of his ability to ask the right questions and make fair decisions. Refusal by either party to engage in arbitration or to abide by the terms of the settlement would result in that party being considered an outlaw and therefore liable to attack with impunity by the other.

As such a system came into being, people would band together with those of like minds, so both parties would likely have what Stefan Molyneux calls dispute resolution organizations (DROs) to arrange the arbitration, and the "trial" would more likely be a discussion between the organizations the parties belonged to, with the parties called on to provide their views of the facts of the case. The victim's DRO would be working to see that its customer was compensated for her hardships and would likely also provide suggestions or directives for changes in her lifestyle so she not be victimized again in the future. The perpetrator's DRO, after compensating the victim, would definitely protect its other customers by making sure that the perpetrator did not repeat his misdeed, perhaps even to the point of declaring him an outlaw and canceling his membership in the organization, thus leaving him open to execution by the victim's DRO.

To be brief, I don't know what the result of this trial under anarchism would be, but a greater mind than mine—and I'm sorry, but I don't know whose it was—has said that when the process is good, the result will be also. The means is an end in itself. Just means will yield just ends. Otherwise we are left with doing evil in the hopes that good will result, which violates a clear teaching of scripture (Ro 3:8).

The elephant in the room of the Assange case is, of course, that the women did not come forward with their accusations until after Mr. Assange was wanted by Uncle Sam for the Wikileaks. Are the women really acting on their own, or are they Uncle Sam's agents, willing or otherwise? Is this part of a plot to land Mr. Assange in the same kind of torture cell that Bradley Manning now occupies?

I don't know, but my guess is that if Mr. Assange is sent to Sweden to face rape charges, he will be incarcerated there, and once incarcerated he will be extradited to the US and tortured. I could be wrong—one could say that the British are more likely to extradite him than the Swedes—but I see the British role—and I believe the whole thing is a stage play—as that of the neutral party keeping the factions from coming to blows, at least for now. I expect them eventually to hand him over to the US directly, or if not, to the Swedes.

How much more believable the whole thing would be if an independent arbitrator, agreed to by both parties in the rape case, were to hear the arguments on both sides and render a decision. Mr. Assange could stay in Britain, the women could stay in Sweden, the hearings could take place using encrypted video conferencing software, and once the decision came down, we would find out for sure what the parties were made of by their willingness to abide by it.

As it is, the rape case is inextricable from the leaks case, and in the latter we have a small organization facing the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. And while that empire has found itself unable in the past to defeat small organizations like the Viet Cong, al-Qaeda, and numerous drug cartels, it has certainly managed to spill a lot of innocent blood in its futile attempts to do so. This does not bode well for anyone's future.

When it comes to bloodshed, nobody does it better than the state. If you want the antithesis of bloodshed, look to the antithesis of the state.

Wikileaks II

(This is a response to the last comment by Anonymous to my previous post.)

I have attempted to answer your questions, but either you don't agree with my answers, which is your choice, or, if you think the substance of my answer was the Hillary Clinton comment, I'm not making clear the difference between a substantial answer and an attempt at comic relief.

So let me try again: all humans have the right to go to hell. Period. Anything more than that is grace. God has allowed us life at all by grace. He has made rules for our benefit: don't kill (i.e., violate people's bodies), steal (i.e., violate their property), commit adultery (i.e., violate their trust), or bear false witness (i.e., violate their reputations). To the degree that people do that, they will enjoy justice, peace, and prosperity according to their willingness to serve their neighbors.

The only time God allows us to suspend these prohibitions is when a person has violated them, and then only to the degree that we either force the perpetrator to make restitution or execute the perpetrator of a crime for which restitution is impossible.

Let me expand on a point I made in a response to your earlier comment and go through just one action our government has undertaken that as far as I'm concerned negates its claims to godly authority and therefore to secrecy or confidence of any kind.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Uncle Sam told us peons that if Vietnam went communist all Southeast Asia would follow and we would be either doomed or involved in an even worse war than the one we were fighting in Vietnam. A few years ago, government documents were declassified that showed that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which Congress passed in 1968 in lieu of a constitutional declaration of war, was based on a lie: the incident that it was supposed to be a response to had never happened. Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War, before his death this year said the same thing.

So sixty thousand US soldiers, many of whom were drafted—sent over there under threat of imprisonment if they refused to go—died violent deaths, many more were maimed, a million Vietnamese died, more were maimed and made homeless, and the land was so devastated that decades later defoliants kept crops from growing and people were being killed by leftover land mines. All this because Uncle Sam lied and people believed him. And, of course, Vietnam went communist, but the worst regime in Southeast Asia today is not communist, it's Myanmar, and we are not threatened by any children of the Viet Cong, ideological or otherwise. Daniel Ellsburg knew the situation and released the Pentagon Papers in 1970, but no one paid any attention. Had there been a Bradley Manning in the Pentagon in 1968 and people had believed him, almost all that carnage could have been avoided.

As for the present wars, media giant Dan Rather has made a rather startling admission that is probably not front-page news in the mainstream press (part of which I count Fox News): "There was a fear in every newsroom in America . . . a fear of losing your job . . . the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic or otherwise." It would appear that the government and its lapdog media are lying to us today and Bradley Manning has done us a favor of allowing us to see just what lies Uncle Sam is telling us now so we can tell him we won't take it anymore.

I place the blame for most of our society's problems on our government's violations of our rights and list them in my original post. I could have added to the list the existence of nuclear and biological weapons of mass murder: what biblical justification is there for taking people's money and using it to pay scientists to develop weapons that cannot help but violate the principles of just war every time they are used? If you're going to justify the development of the weapons in the first place, you have to factor in the inevitability of those weapons eventually falling into the hands of people you don't like, and, as you say, that's not a pleasant thought.

I also answered the question about North Korea: our government has no business interfering in those negotiations. If you are so convinced that North Korean soldiers shouldn't march into South Korea's killing machines, in the name of Jesus take your own money, go there, stand in front of them, and tell them to turn around and go home. You wouldn't have a hard time convincing me to go with you. But I'm not convinced that you have the right to vote money out of my pocket to send soldiers over there, and if they choose to march and die by the millions, that's their problem, not mine.

Finally, it's not the government that's keeping VX gas away from the public. As I said, it looks to me like anyone with the prerequisite knowledge of chemistry and enough motivation could make it given information available on the Web. That goes also for primitive nuclear bombs. The important thing is the motivation. Bill Gates doesn't have the motivation to pay someone to build a nuke. And, as the incidents with the underwear bomber, the Fort Dix wannabe bombers, the Times Square wannabe bomber, the Michigan wannabe bombers, and the Portland Christmas tree wannabe bomber have all shown, what motivates them to attempt bombings is US-government-sponsored murder in Muslim lands. (All these guys but the Times Square guy were recruited by US government agents who lit their fires by talking about US actions overseas, not our wealth, freedom, or degeneracy at home; the other acted on his own, but for the same reason.)

Have I answered the question yet? Maybe you need to rephrase the question.

Wikileaks

From a correspondent:

The [Wikileaks] have undermined the relationship between our nation and other nations, and now they aren't willing to send us confidential documents, including negotiations. Aren't we conducting sensitive negotiations in the North Korean part of the world right now? Is the Pentagon allowed to keep things secret from the people such as how to construct nuclear weaponry? VX gas? if they didn't keep secrets, we would have many more biological weapons on the streets.

You've asked a reasonable set of questions. They deserve a principled set of answers. I'll state my principles first and then apply them.

First, Christians are to do everything for the glory of God. Only God, his word, his church, and his people are eternal. Anything that gets in the way of the God's kingdom is expendable. We know we are serving his kingdom when we obey his word; there is no other test.

Second, we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. This means treating them the way we want to be treated. At the base, that means that we don't do to them what we don't want done to us: we leave their bodies and property alone; we don't violate them directly, by proxy, or by deceit. Again, we know we are serving our neighbors when we are obeying the word of God and not doing to them anything we would not want them to do to us.

I don't need to tell you that North Korea does not live by these principles, but I may need to remind you that Uncle Sam also violates them: he takes your tax money and uses it to facilitate abortions; he touches the genitals and other private parts of men, women, and young children at airports; he has taken the capital that businessmen who could otherwise have hired a certain intelligent graduate of an exclusive Christian college and given it to some of the richest people the world has ever known, first through loan guarantees and then through bailouts; he has destroyed the doctor–patient relationship that was the mainstay of community health through fascist and now socialized medicine, as well as the cohesion of the family through Social Security and "public" schools. He has arrogated to himself the right to determine what you may and may not (under penalty of jail) put in your body or look at or read. He tortures people accused—not convicted—of crimes. He reads your e-mail, and he keeps track of every Web site you visit, everywhere you go, and every purchase you make.

(To the last of which you no doubt say, "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear." To which I say, if Uncle Sam has done nothing wrong, he has nothing to fear from Bradley Manning.)

Does he do this for the glory of God? Or is it more likely that he's looking out for himself and those in his inner circle? Do we not agree that to ask that question is to answer it?

So why is he negotiating with North Korea? What business is it of ours what North Korea does? Is Uncle Sam about to bring the kingdom of God to North Korea?

It's a little-known fact that when US soldiers first went to Korea in 1945—years before what we think of as the Korean War—they were resisted forcibly by South Koreans. Needless to say, those Koreans didn't live to tell their side of the story.

And that was over 50 years ago. Why are US soldiers still there? South Korea has a world-class economy; North Korea is a well-armed pauper. Why don't we leave the Koreans to sort out their differences? "South Korea might go communist." So what? Vietnam went communist, but that didn't stop me from having a Vietnamese guest for dinner a while back or wearing shoes made in Vietnam today.

What good would it do North Korea to bomb us? If they come here under the banner of "what's yours is yours; let's make a deal," they would be as welcome as immigrants were a century or so ago (and, as anti-immigration politicians who get caught hiring illegals demonstrate, still are today), and they wouldn't have to hide in a fortress to keep from being IED'd by "insurgents."

Why would they invade if there were, as Yamamoto put it, "an armed American behind every blade of grass"? "Ah, but Americans aren't all armed." Could that have anything to do with Uncle Sam's ban on private citizens owning heavy arms?

"But if we could own combat weapons, America would become a war zone." Only if America is the dirt under our feet: America is the idea that people have the right to life, liberty, and property, and Americans don't use weapons offensively. If the US were to become a war zone, it's because the church hasn't done its job to convince people that God's ways are best, even for nonbelievers. And Uncle Sam certainly isn't putting that word out.

Uncle Sam is not doing what the Torah says he should be doing—forcing those who violate others' bodies and property to make restitution to their victimvs, and executing those for whose crimes restitution is impossible (and yes, I'm leaving aside for the moment my claim that the Torah does not allow for what we know as a state)—and he is doing a lot of things he shouldn't be doing. In fact, if we knew more of what he's doing but keeping secret from us, we might be motivated enough to tell the emperor he has no clothes and laugh so hard at his nakedness that he beats a retreat. If only we had someone with access to his secrets....

As for the building of nuclear weapons and development of VX gas, use of both of those weapons systems necessarily violates the just war theory requirement that noncombatants not be targeted. If A fears B and so acts in such a way that may or may not stop B but will certainly kill C, who is otherwise not involved, he is a murderer. I assume you didn't vote for Obama, so this should make my point: If the Iranians were to fear Obama and so engage in a pre-emptive that cost you your eyesight, wouldn't you cry out for God to hold them morally accountable? That's what Uncle Sam has done to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, at least 70 percent of those who have gone through the hell of Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.

If Germany had had a Bradley Manning in 1938, there might not have been an Auschwitz. For that matter, if there had been a Bradley Manning in Wilson's White House in 1917, the US might not have gotten involved in the War to End All Wars, and there might not have been a Hitler to begin with.

As Crovelli put it, if the system from Manning's immediate superiors to the White House is involved in murder and cover-up, where should he have gone with the information he had? Isn't the biblical course of action to bring these things to light (Pr 24:12; Ep 5:12-14)?

What is Uncle Sam using all those secrets to protect us from?

Communism? With Obama in the White House and the GOP preaching Obamunism Lite, what do we lose if we lose that we haven't already lost?

Are you afraid you'll have to wear a burqa? I like grokking cleavages at least as much as the next guy, but I'm not proud to say it. Maybe burqas would make life easier for me. I'm not a woman, but I think I'd prefer wearing a burqa to being felt up at the airport. Oh, I forgot: they feel up women in burqas, too.

Bankruptcy? Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the debt alone will cost as much as the entire federal budget before long.

Back to principles: Are we spreading the kingdom of God by supporting Uncle Sam's activities? Or are we spreading the predations of a government run amok? Does Uncle Sam treat our neighbors the way we would want to be treated?

I say no, yes, and no. If you disagree, rejoice! You're in the majority (Mt 7:13). I just hope that when your heroes get their way they don't decide I'm more valuable to them alive than dead, because I think that when that day comes the living will envy the dead (Re 9:6). I gather that Bradley Manning already does.