War and Christianity

Interesting Paolo. I've always viewed the Adam and Eve story as an allegorical rumination about the differences between mankind and the rest of the animal kingdom. Animals are blithely efficient in their actions, simply doing what is necessary for their survival without contemplation, and in harmony with their environments. On the other hand, since mankind has the ability to think in abstract concepts, nothing to us seems very simple. We tend to agonize over things that to an animal are no more complicated than a two position switch. As we learn more and more about how complex animal behavior actually is, it illuminates the arrogance of the allegory. For example, apes have complex emotions and innate sense of fairness. Ultimately, like all things human, the story of Adam and Eve is relativistic, placing man at the center of creation and the pinnacle of importance. It's also patriarchal in the extreme.

Nice posts Paolo, I agree with what you have shared waaaaay more eloquently than I. I tend to not be as gently in stating my case and probably lose some people in the process.

I agree with allot of what you are saying here too Chip. As for me, I do not take the story of Adam and Eve literally. There are 2 styles of writing describing the creation story. One is orderly and states kinda how it happened etc... God created the heavens and earth... just the facts man.

The other, Adam and Eve is being told kind of like a campfire story. Easy to understand, has meaning based in facts and explains mans fall from grace. Both stories have valuable, worthy information but whether Adam was in fact a man or analogous to mankind is another thing.

I am really enjoying this exchange, Chip! You have a very interesting perspective, and unlike most of the whiny drivel on these here forums, you cause me to stop and think.

Yes, I agree that the Adam and Eve story is probably more allegorical in nature (eek - watching out for stray lightning bolts!). However, I didn't mean to imply that Adam and Eve were non-thinking creatures. Rather, a better way of stating it would have been, "they were perfectly open minded about the universe."

Look at language -- virtually any language. Language is fundamentally flawed, or at least skewed toward this right/wrong paradigm. (hehe, I just cited an example of this in my own statement!) Our common vernacular makes it difficult to communicate much of anything without the assignment of some shade of moral judgment. My point was that Adam and Eve (allegorical or otherwise) had full intellectual freedom; the ability to think, create and be without an implied moral filter.

This thread has gone all over the place in terms of people's feelings on religion and spirituality and morals and etc... so rather than try to continue any actual conversation people are having i'll just give my feelings on it all.

I'm not a religious person, I don't belive in a god, and I honestly don't know if there is anything after death. I wish I was religious, i've known people who were and the comfort they took in "knowing" that there was something else out there was something that I always wanted. Unfortunately, i'm not a person who has that kind of faith. I need to see something to belive it, to see facts and actual events before i'll know something exists. If someone can get something out of their faith that I can't, more power to them, they are lucky people.

That said I can't understand, and won't accept, when people use their faith to try to influence other people's lives. When people use their ideas of what morality is to force other people to do something or stop doing something. That some people can belive that their faith is stronger and more important than someone else's faith. All humans across the entire Earth all have the same feelings and needs and intelligence. The form that these take can be different, but that changes nothing.

This was not in response or pointed towards anyone in this thread, it was just a description about how I feel. That's all.

Billy, your chronology conveniently omits all of our complicity in those events... for example, Hussein received training from the CIA and was on the CIA payroll. We encouraged him to stage the coup that put him in power. We provided him with the chemical weapons that were used in Iran, and in fact only four days after Iraq dropped chemical weapons on Iran, Rumsfeld went to Iraq for a meeting with Hussein. I'm sure you've seen the photo of them shaking hands and smiling. We were not there to chastise him for his barbarism. Before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Hussein had a meeting with an American diplomat, Ambassador Gillespie. He told her his intentions to invade Kuwait if they did not stop devaluing oil prices. He was told that we were sympathetic to his plight and would not intervene. Further, as should be obvious by now, our claims of Iraq's possession of WMD in violation of the UN sanctions was false. There were no weapons. The only way Iraq was in violation was in not properly documenting their destruction. You need to look at ALL the facts. Not just the ones that support your bias.

I agree with you Lianne, nice post.

Oh, I totally agree Chip. Our country helped create the monster and I will gladly join you in condeming that but the thing is, the monster now exists. You cannot put him back in the closet and pretend that the monster will go away by himself quietly. In my opinion he had to go and I am glad he is not in power any more.

The fact that we helped create the monster does not change what I said either btw.

Yes, nice post, Lianne. I am "truly blown away" by the level of personal authenticity revealed within in this thread. This is good stuff! (Uh uh uh, there's that good/bad language stuff creeping in! )

Regarding the use of faith to "influence," I am probably about to split a semantic hair. Whereas I have an issue with force-feeding one's faith upon others, I don't think there is any way for a person of faith not to "influence" others -- even if merely by example. Faith becomes core to the person, and thereby, faith has both subtle and profound impacts upon the mundane and the miraculous.

Hehe, I'm almost positive you had a similar concept in mind, Lianne. I'm just being a persnickety booger.

Well what I was talking about was not really that. Yes if someone has a lot of faith and it affects their actions, then it will affect those around them true. But the same is if someone has no faith, but their own high moral code or whatever that they just have for whatever reason (like I think I have). That affects people around them as well.

What I was talking about was a "if you don't have faith in a god, you can't be as moral or high-minded as I am" belief I see sometimes. I belive that moral values are the same in everyone, regardless of whether they came about from religion or your parents or just how you are...

Well said, Lianne. I don't think anyone has a complete grasp on the "bigger picture." It smacks of arrogance for any of us to minimize another person's worldview based on a simplistic presumption that "my way is the right way."

Paolo, I'm enjoying it too You make an excellent point about the inadequacy of language! It's something I've pondered a lot... how our need to categorize things in order to build any sort of intellectual framework makes it so we can't help but oversimplify everything. I'd never connected it to the Adam and Eve story, but it really fits. The more knowledge we gain and more concretely we come to understand things, the more narrowly we have to define them, and the less we can see possibilities as limitless. Toss out the concept of sin and you're left with an insightful allegory to the way knowledge closes as many doors as it opens.

Kind of like life... we are all innocent out of the womb... so sweet and gentile... but as we grow up and learn how big and bad this ole world is prejudices, hate, and a whole bunch of other crap creaps into our lil minds as we gain that precious knowledge. Interesting thought Chip.

Billy -

Why would you assume that just because someone does not support going to war with Iraq that the person thinks that Saddam is a nice guy or is "on his side"? It is this "if you are not with us you are against us" attitude that I find really frightening and very prevalent with supporters of the Bush administration.

It is my opinion that we should have captured Bin Laden and Al Qaeda BEFORE doing ANYTHING because AL QAEDA directly attacked our country. I think that 100% of our finances, efforts and blood should have gone into capturing and eliminating Al Qaeda. A lot of other Americans think the same way and it does not make us any less American or a "friend to Saddam".

Regarding Abu Ghraib - Saddam was not torturing those prisoners - WE WERE - Americans were torturing people. Who now leads the American people? Who is Commander and Chief of the Military? BUSH. So who does the responsibility ultimately lie with? BUSH. AND - each and every American person who has ever paid as single dollar in tax and voted in a single election.

The health and well being of prisoners of war become our responsibility when we capture them and we failed them. We failed American Soliders who may be captured in Iraq in the future and we failed the good name of America and by allowing this to happen, America's leadership failed us.

You don't just "get over it" - you make certain that it will never happen again and you hold the people at the highest ranks responsible, not just those at the lowest ranks.

Valid point that I respect Rose and being as objective and open minded as I can about it I can agree with this. Saddam needed to go but maybe after Osama. Who knows how it would have worked out had we chosen that route.


To make myself clear on this point, the full weight of the law should fall upon ALL of those responsible. I just do not believe President Bush had knowledge that anything like this was happening and certainly did not authorize such actions.

You can take your analogy a step further too. How about a soldier who commits some crime and lets say he is a Seaman Recruit in the Navy? Who should be punished?

The Seaman Recruit should be of course but if you use your example so should his section petty officer who lets say is a Petty officer 3rd class. Then since he is guilty you have to punish his division leader who lets say is a Petty Officer 1st class. Then of course his section chief, a Senior Chief. You can’t leave out the Ensign that is in charge of the section chief, and his commander, a Lieutenant Commander, as well as the Officer in Charge, the Captain of the ship and then the Rear Admiral and so on and so on including the President.

What happened to personal responsibility for their own actions? Your scenario is far-fetched and not practical. By the time you are done half of the Navy would be behind bars for something they had no knowledge of. Not a good idea or even the right thing to do is it?

Not even just bad things, Billy. Before we have knowledge of something we are free to imagine it as almost anything. When we learn about it we no longer have that same freedom, unless we care to deny reality. There's a great quote in the movie "Inherit The Wind" (one of my all-time favorites) where Clarence Darrow is making his summation and he talks about how Darwin took us to the top of a hill and gave us a view we hadn't had before, but it came with a cost... to accept what we could see we had to give up some of what we could imagine. I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember the exact words or find a transcript.

*Nods*

Just as sh*t rolls down hill, responsibility should roll up hill. The officers who were in command of the men and women caught torturing prisoners should be remanded and bumped a rank, Rumsfeld should have resigned and the American people should look at Bush with less than stars in their eyes to think that he appointed a Secretary of Defense who appointed officers who allowed this to happen.

By doing this, the American people and the American government would demonstrate to all others that we respect and uphold the Geneva Conventions and that this atrocity will not happen again.

Am I naive enough to think that if one of our soldiers was captured by Iraqi insurgents that they would not be tortured despite the Geneva Conventions? No.

But without American observation of these conventions - they would not have a chance even with a captor who did honor them.

One of the things that made me proud to choose American citizenship (at 18 I had a choice), was that Americans did not do this sort of thing. That they were honorable people.

As an American, I did not feel so honorable looking at pictures of those prisoners.

Wow, that perfectly articulates what I've been feebly trying to express. Thanks for that quote, Chip. Gotta check out the movie.

Yeah, very true. Though, Billy does have a point. Taken to its extreme, this approach renders virtually all of us culpable. (We are, after all, a government of the people for the people.)

Hehe, I'm laughing at myself because I just had this thought: What you describe is very much like the concept of sin: It was pushed down the generational hierarchy from the "first humans," and accountability for it can be traced all the way back up.

...Then again, this article is proof, to a certain extent, that any evidence supporting *conventional* evolution is circumstantial...

"In China, scientists have identified the fossilized remains of a tiny dinosaur in the stomach of a mammal. Scientists say the animal's last meal probably is the first proof that mammals hunted small dinosaurs some 130 million years ago.

It contradicts conventional evolutionary theory that early mammals couldn't possibly attack and eat a dinosaur because they were timid, chipmunk-sized creatures that scurried in the looming shadow of the giant reptiles."

here's a link to the rest: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=9&u=/ap/20050112/ap_on_sc/belly_of_the_beast

Theories about the behavior of extinct animals have nothing at all to do with evolution. Odd that they would make that statement. What it contradicts is our timeline for when mammals came to be, but that's not anything new. There have been lots of finds in the past few years that have shown that our ancestors coexisted for a time with the hominid branch that went on to extinction. Our views of all of it will continue to change as new discoveries are made. I don't see it as contradicting the theory of evolution. I'm not 100% sold on it, but I'm 0% sold on creationism

It's an awesome movie Paolo. I prefer the remake that Showtime did a few years back with Jack Lemon but I've never been able to find it on video. The original is great too though. I have it on DVD.

I agree that taken to extremes it is not feasible but that said, I don't think we did enough about it. And... my real point is that we, the American people, ARE all culpable. We should feel ashamed that this happened and responsible for making sure that it does not happen again. For our own dignity as Americans and the lives of all of our soldiers.

I completely agree Rose. And I'm apalled that Bush would appoint the white house counsel that drafted the memo telling Bush that torture would be legally justified and calling the Geneva Conventions "quaint" to Attorney General. Why should the rest of the world believe that we don't condone torture when we appoint someone who condones it! Disgusting. Talk about talking out of both sides of your mouth.

Yes.. amazing find. And definately an exception to the rule, but the planet is full of those. The problem with the hard and fast rules of evolution is that with each new discovery, we face the possibility of it upsetting the status quo. It doesn't mean that evolution is wrong, it means that our timeline *could* be wrong and our knowledge of the era is definately not complete.

Great article.