Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Hey all.

Here's a question.  Feel free to leave comments, I'll discuss it with you in the comments section.

What justifies war? What makes a war not sinful?
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4 comments:

Simon Templar said...

There are things that make a war just, even righteous.

#1 Self defence. It is always just to defend yourself against the aggression and violence of others.

#2 Defence of others. It is just to defend your allies, and to defend those who can not defend themselves. This of course presumes that the aggression is unwarranted. If some nation justly brings the wrath of another upon themselves, it may not be just to defend them.

#3 Gross evil/divine mandate - this is the hardest of the causes to defend in practice because it is the most subjective. If a nation becomes so evil and defiled that it will allow, or undertake something like genocide, canabalism, etc it is deserving of destruction.

7:22 PM
Mathaytace_Christou said...

While I tend to agree with you, I have had a question floating around my mind.

We have the ability to feed many more people than we do. Yet we spend Billions on The military.

While I believe we have the Right to defend ourselves, is defense a primary job, or a secondary job?

11:29 AM
Mathaytace_Christou said...

BTW, I am starting to tend more and more towards defense as a primary goal. The more meditation I put on the subject, the more I realize that we cannot (save a gift of God) care for people if we allow those people to be destroyed.

However, when I wrote this I was contemplating some very heavy things.

11:31 AM
Simon Templar said...

There is a difference between being able to feed everyone, and being able to produce enough food to feed everyone. We can probably produce enough food to feed everyone, however we can not feed everyone largely because of political/ideological problems. This of course is a refrence to world hunger rather than domestic hunger.

The united states has the unique situation that it was intended to be a free society. This requires that there be a minimum of government interference in people's every day lives. The primary job for which the government was created was to secure the defense of the people's rights, both from foreign enemies and from each other as well.

Our entire system was predicated upon the idea that its not the government's job to engage in charity.. thats the people's job and the church's job. In order to effectively do that work, the government needs powers it probably shouldn't have. It also will never be as effective or as efficient as local private and religious charities can be. If people think this job isn't being done, then they should start doing it themselves, and start making their churches do it. Making the government do it is basicly sloughing off the responsability on to someone else.

In addition, in the US there is plenty of poverty. There is not much risk of starving however. Most communities have food banks and charities which make food available to the poor and homeless.
I have a fair amount of contact with the homeless in my community because of my job, and most of those who are not being fed by the shelters and food banks, are in that circumstance by choice.

Usually charities will require something like a minimal form of community service (usualy at the food bank or shelter) and they usually require people to stop drinking while they are at the shelter and the sad truth is many would rather be on the street and risk starving than meet those conditions. I've seen it time and time again.

5:17 PM

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