The incident in the temple when Jesus used the scourge of small cords (John 2:13-17) is often cited as indicating Jesus sanction of war. The very most that can be said in this regard is that Jesus' sanctions the use of force. To say this is not proof that Jesus sanctions war War. ...If Jesus had used force in such a way as to give supremacy to military necessity, to destroy human life, to break down reverence for personality, to retaliate with evil for evil, to compel the surrender of his moral freedom, we might then well believe that he sanctions war. The use of force is one problem, the morality of war as a means to an end involves so many additional factors as to be quite a different problem. Each should be judged on its own merits.
Kirby PageRelated topics
additional believe break different end evil force freedom human incident jesus john life might military moral morality necessity personality problem proof quite regard reverence sanction say scourge should small supremacy surrender temple use war way well means cordsRelated quotes
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has a difficult job living with his civilian bosses, the Secretary of Defense and the President, striving to convince them in terms they can understand matters that he views as military necessity, and, in General Wheeler's case, within the concept of one thing at a time. One thing at a time was all he could hope to accomplish. Since Vietnam was the visible part of the iceberg, the part he knew was perturbing his civilian bosses, Vietnam rather than the strategic reserve was the context in which to present the request for additional troops. If he could gain authority to raise the troops, exactly what was to be done with them could be decided once the troops were actually available.
William Westmoreland
Ben, the ethics of sex is a thorny problem. Each of us is forced to grope for a solution he can live with - in the face of a preposterous, unworkable, and evil code of so-called "morals." Most of us know the code is wrong; almost everybody breaks it. But we pay Danegeld by feeling guilty and giving lip service. Willy-nilly, the code rides us, dead and stinking, an albatross around the neck.
You, too, Ben. You fancy yourself a free soul - and break that evil code. But faced with a problem in sexual ethics new to you, you tested it against that same Judeo-Christian code... so automatically your stomach did flip-flops... and you think that proves you're right and they're wrong. Faugh! I'd as lief use trial by ordeal.
Robert A. Heinlein
We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good - have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: "If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. ..." And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.
Emil Cioran
With the technological revolution in the military field and the enormous organizational reconstruction of the army and navy, and now that their prime shock force is made up of rocketry, voices may quite frequently be heard asserting that this is an era of "push-button warfare" where man plays nothing but an auxiliary role. This view is wrong. Without arguing the great importance of rocketry and nuclear weapons, it is a fact that regardless of the scale, nature or method of warfare, man always played, and will go on playing, a major role in it. War will still require the participation of large masses of manpower- in one case directly in the armed struggle, in another, in war production and the comprehensive material backing of armed struggle.
Georgy Zhukov
Well, our forefathers abolished this system [of monopolies]; at a time, too, mark you, when the sign manual of the sovereign had somewhat of a divine sanction and challenged superstitious reverence in the minds of the people. And shall we, the descendants of those men, be found so degenerate, so unworthy of the blood that flows in our veins, so recreant to the very name 'Englishman,' as not to shake off this incubus, laid on as it is by a body of our fellow-citizens? ... We advocate the abolition of the Corn Law because we believe that to be the foster-parent of all other monopolies; and if we destroy that-the parent, the monster monopoly-it will save us the trouble of devouring the rest.
Richard Cobden
