A minor sermon:
Magic Christians clearly have hidden the meaning of this command up their sleeves. Today they justify violence against enemies explaining that we are dealing with good verses evil and never in history has there been such a battle as the one which rages today . They explain we have "evil" people who behead others, and suicide bombers who kill innocent people. They quake in fear saying our culture is debased and sinful unlike any in the history of human kind.Jesus Isn't Magic
This is blatantly false! Be-headings are as old as time.
Karen Horst Cobb/CommonDreams 21.May.06
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An important part of the formula that produced the outrage toward the beheadings Cobb cites, the shock and violent reactions to them, is hidden in the placental boundaries of the culture that saw those images as the assault of evil against its own proprietary and benevolent good.
These are people who were raised in the womb and never left it. Who went from the swaddled fluff of infancy to the swaddling fluff of television and consumerist shopping in seamless transition. And to whom these reminders of the presence of mortal danger in the world have become a goad, wielded intentionally like any other goad, to move the domesticated into and out of paddock and pasture.
Every other predator above the microscopic, except people themselves, and one sacred invisible harvester of human beings - has been removed from the human landscape.
That sacred harvester being the automobile, killer of the greatest number of children in America. Beheader of the innocent. The random sword.
There's a tacit understanding that the automobile and its damage are morally neutral. Accidental.
This comes from the received sense of morality as rising entirely from intent - no intent, no evil. The actual event mattering less than the act of will that did or didn't cause it.
The question we need to ask is whether or not there are actions and events whose natures are inherently evil, whether or not they've been caused directly by willed intent, or by accident, or by something in between.
It would be hard to find someone in the past who specifically willed the destructive assault of exhaust gases on the natural world. Yet here we are. Basically decent people in a tither because some dubious character got his head cut off on television, while 40,000 plus lose their lives every single year to the car and its worship. Where is the evil in that? How can it not be evil? How can it not be evil that the North Pole is being turned into clouds and rain?
