A Covenant of Meat

It was time, once again, to get our van inspected, and so I found myself sitting on a metal chair by an inspection station in the middle of the day.  It being the heart of suburban Annandale, all around me was strip-mall paradise, asphalt roads and asphalt parking lots radiating the heat of the mid-August Midatlantic sun.

In the sliver of shade afforded by the gas station's eastern wall, I observed my surroundings.  They weren't exactly verdant.  

Broken concrete and potholes abounded, wrappers and plastic debris scattered about, the endless flow of cars up the four lane of the Pike, all of it an anti-Walden of metal and rush and ambient polluting particulates.  Above it all, a dirty blue sky and a fiercely pressing light.  It's a harsh and ugly world we have made for ourselves, an alien incursion into the lushness of life.

Yet life adapts.  In almost every crack in that hard harsh habitat, pressing through blacktop and concrete alike were stubborn grasses.  Their roots set down in soil that was little more than crumbled rock, their shoots and growth defying and breaking apart our constructs.  

Near my feet, there lay the remnants of an almost finished hotdog.  Fragments of bun and a nubbin of sausage baked grey-black by the sun, it was hardly the most appetizing thing.  But there came a fluttering of brown and tan wings, and the sparrows landed, first one and then another.  They were dirty birds, ragamuffin birds, the sort of crass ubiquitous generalists that aren't worth a birder's notice.

They watched me warily, but still set quickly about the business of living from our waste.  They aren't the only creatures that do so.  There's a roaming murder of crows in the neighborhood that makes its way dumpster diving.  There are countless rats that do the same, sharp-eyed rodents which hide away from our eyes, knowing we're eager to poison and kill them.  When the neighborhoods around the strip malls were heavy with cicadas, the rats came pouring in to feast.  There are tiny critters...roaches, ants, and flies...that are similarly flexible.

These are the sturdy creatures that seem well adapted to the current Anthropocene mass extinction event.  Just as weeds and the small generalists endured asteroid impacts and planet-wide belches of volcanism, they'll do whatever they need to stay alive and reproducing while human hubris burns across our little world.

Observing the fiercely focused energies of these creatures, I recalled something spoken in an ancient sacred tale.  Up on the mountaintop, the Lord spoke to Noah and his family, standing wobbly on their land-legs after their vomitous forty-day journey through the tumult.  There, God unilaterally made two peculiar promises.

First, that flesh could now devour flesh.  Unlike the mythic perfection of a peaceful Eden, suddenly we were in a covenant of meat.  All creatures would fear us, because all of them were now ours to devour.

Meat was back on the menu, boys.

But that meant that we, too, would be devoured by the creatures that we consumed.  Further, bloodshed was the now the fate of all who shed the blood of others.  As divine blessings go, it's mixed, sharply double-edged, the sort of blessing one might receive when wished upon the withered paw of a monkey.

The Noahic Covenant, in Torah, is a peculiar one for another reason.  Unlike other covenantal commitments in the Bible, it's not between humankind and the Creator.  It's between all living things and the Creator.

Not just humankind, but with everything that lives.  

"I will never again destroy all of you," said the I Am That I Am, and he's talking to every living thing.

Let it be noted: God doesn't say "any."   Just "all."  "I'm not going to destroy all of y'all" means an unsettlingly different thing than "I'm not going to destroy any of you."

It would be fair at this point to note that in Hebrew, the meaning of the word kol (כָּ ל).  Kol is what we translate into English as "all" in Genesis 9.  Kol can mean both "all" and "any," and Hebrew requires us to grasp the distinction from the context of the statement.  But the context is clear as crystal here, particularly as expressed in Genesis 9:9-10.  All means all.

And that means that for some flesh, destruction may be still be God's intent.

Which for "some" flesh...that which won't adapt, that which won't listen, that which won't acknowledge the real or the good, that which willfully ignores God's fierce insistence on grace and justice...is a rather notable caveat.

One must take care around any one-sided covenant written in meat.

Religion and Violence

The followers of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be unto him, have a problem.

It's a problem that surfaces again and again, headline after headline, as those who interpret Islam as requiring violence act out their interpretation.  Villagers are butchered in West Africa.  Bombs explode in crowded markets.  Authors and cartoonists and filmmakers are murdered.  It's ugly, and it's horrific.

Having read the entirety of the Quran, and read the Hadiths, and familiarized myself with the core of Muslim faith in my own secular study of religion, I see no reason Islam must be violent.  It is not, as its most radicalized opponents assert, an inherently violent religion.  That does not mean that I believe Mohammed, peace be unto him, was a pacifist.  He was perfectly willing to pick up the sword, and did on a variety of occasions.  In that, he was less like Jesus or the Buddha, and more like, well, the dude whose picture graces this blog.  If the Quran is to be taken seriously as an authentic exposition of his life and teachings, he was a warrior prophet.  Arguing otherwise is absurd.

But though he was a warrior, the faith that rests on his prophetic critique does not require war.  The framework of the Muslim life is the practice of the five pillars.  Faith in God, regular prayer, pilgrimage, charity, and the discipline of fasting?  Do those things, and you're a Muslim.

Those are gracious, good, positive things.  It's why so many millions of Muslims have no difficulty coexisting with their neighbors.  There's nothing, nothing at all, in the deep and authentic practice of their faith that stirs them to violence.

So why this seemingly relentless drumroll of horror, which is doubly...no... exponentially more horrible to those whose practice of Islam leads them to live charitable, gracious lives?

The reasons are many.  It's...complicated.  Islam exists in a region of the world that is economically troubled, and that in the next century will become even more troubled.  When the oil dries up, developed economies will transition to other sources of energy, ending the temporary growth that has made prosperity possible in that region.  That, coupled with political oppression, the dark residue of colonialism, endemic unemployment, and climatic resource depletion?  Things are going to be...messy. 

But perhaps the greatest challenge Islam faces is a challenge that badly burned my own faith: the fusion of religion and the power of the state.   For a millennia and a half, Christendom--the dominion of Christianity--was enforced at the edge of the sword.  Faith and the state were one.  The demands of faith are enmeshed with the laws of the state.

Whenever this is the case, religion becomes inherently violent, because the power of the state ultimately rests on the power to coerce compliance with a set of laws or social norms.  It is why so many were butchered in the name of Jesus, to "protect the faith" from impurity.  It was a horror, and one that Christianity must never forget.

If an individual can be imprisoned or physically punished for blasphemy or hewing to another faith, then they are living in a violent faith system.   I think folks like Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins are fools, and radically misrepresent faith.  But if a "Christian" government threatened them with imprisonment or sanction to protect my sensibilities, then my faith would be violent.

Therein lies the challenge for a faith tradition that exists in an area of the world where religion and the state remain dangerously entangled.  

What UVA Can Learn From the Church

As a pastor who was both a graduate of UVA and who lived for three years in a fraternity house, the last few weeks have been...interesting.

The Rolling Stone article and the horrific story of sexual assault it contained were hard to read.

When I attended Mr. Jefferson's University, one of the many primary reasons I joined my fraternity was that it was an outlier.  It was a wild place, to be sure.  But it was also a fellowship where groupthink was actively mocked, and where women were respected.  They were our friends, to the point that one of the regular house-meeting arguments was how/whether to formally acknowledge women as part of our community.

I also knew, 25 years ago, that there were fraternity houses that my female friends needed to stay away from.  Where if you were inebriated and a woman, you were taking a risk.

That remains the case today, which in and of itself is difficult.

Beyond the culture of misogyny, part of the problem, as I see it, is that the University completely misunderstands its role in dealing with sexual assault.  It's a misunderstanding that...after ten years in ordained ministry...I know quite well.  It has also afflicted faith communities, to catastrophic effect.

That misunderstanding is simple.

When an adult or a minor has an act of violence committed against them in a faith community, the response of that community is often to try to deal with it internally.  This is "our problem," or so the thinking goes.  And so internal systems and structures and processes are put into place to deal with it on an institutional level, to minimize organizational liability.  Committees are put into place.  There are task forces, and protocols, and trainings.

In so far as those things reduce the probability of violence, they're well and good.  If they help reinforce a culture that supports victims of violence and overcomes dysfunctional, assaultive norms of behavior, excellent.

Where the danger lies is in imagining...from the silo of your thinking as a steward of an institution...that you have any meaningful jurisdiction over acts of criminal violence once they have been committed.

If a child is violated by an adult in a church, it isn't a church issue.  It's a felony.  If a congregant is raped by another congregant...or their pastor...it is not a church issue.  It's a felony.  It is a criminal act of violence.

Churches have learned, the hard way, that usurping jurisdiction leads only to disaster.

It destroys the integrity of the institution, and can stand in the way of stopping predators from assaulting others.  Teaching an ethic that fundamentally refutes violence is the task of the church.  But prosecuting such acts?  Holding the perpetrators accountable? That is not the job of the church.  That is the job of the state.

The administration of my alma mater seems to be operating under much the same category error, with equally disastrous results.  University administrators are in no position to either investigate or prosecute criminal acts, and in this particular instance, the results are disastrous.  The Rolling Stone article establishes allegations of an act of systematic, predatory, calculated violence.  

Not a drunken attack, where an intoxicated man forces himself on a woman.  That is rape, absolutely, and a crime.  But what is described goes further.  The story details a sober, calculated, ritualistic gang rape, part of a pledging ritual.  What is described is sociopathy, a level of predation that is both calculated and monstrous.  Such a story must be verified, supported with evidence, and prosecuted.  And it was not.

The most significant challenge I have in reading this article is that the young woman in question was not immediately supported in bringing criminal charges.  Instead, she was catastrophically misled by "friends" who counseled her not to immediately seek help, and given too wide a suite of options by the University, including the option of having the attack adjudicated by a board comprised of students and faculty. For a ritual gang rape. The idea that administrators would have the capacity to deal with an assault of this nature is absurd.

Just as the church has learned that it cannot deal with sexual crimes internally, so too UVA needs to recognize that its role in such an attack is to immediately support the victim as they pursue justice.  The best way to do so is to build supports for those who have been subjected to violence, but also to recognize that as an educational institution, it has neither the capacity, competence, or jurisdiction to adjudicate violent crime.

[edited 04.18.15]

And now, this seems doubly true.  The allegations in the Rolling Stone article have, over the last few months, been completely discredited.  The individual in question fabricated most of the story out of whole cloth, and may or may not have been assaulted.  It was a fantasy, or a delusion, a story with no ground in reality.

The alleged victim implicated a fraternity that was not responsible.  She lied about her friends, whose egregious behavior, as reported, had so offended me.

In crimes of violence, evidence is key.  What is not relevant is what people say on #twitter, or what people circulate with #hashtags about what they believe to be true from the comfort of their laptop.

What matters is not what an accuser asserts about their victimhood.  What matters is reality.

Look at How We Kill You

Yesterday morning, as I was doing the final edit on my sermon, I flitted briefly to web-based news sources to check in on the world.  It's always wise, before the community gathers, to be sure you're not blithely arriving, unaware of some momentous and terrible event.

There they were, a sequence of short videos.  A montage, if you will, courtesy of both the armed forces of my nation and those of one of our allies.  They were familiar images, in both content and format, ones we've seen from most of our recent wars.

The format was monochromatic, the images filtered through a FLIR or similar thermal imaging scope.  There, a nondescript building in a compound, marked with a targeting computer's symbol.  Three, two, and at one, there's an explosion leaping from the roof, as the armor-piercing portion of the munition punches through.

Then, a millisecond later, a much larger explosion as the primary payload detonates, obliterating the building, casting a fiery cloud of debris and dust that consumes most of the compound.

The video stops, and loops.  With it, there are others, which I watch.  Here, an animated GIF length image of a tank, which explodes.  There, a vehicle in motion--a truck, or a HUMVEE--and then it flares out as the explosion maxes out the thermal camera tracking it.

It is seven-thirty on a Sunday morning, and in preparation for worship I have just watched dozens of human beings killed.

What struck me, looking at the videos, was that they were a peculiar mirror to the net-circulated videos that I had only been able to watch in part, those from a few weeks ago.  Those were personal, brutal, savage and monstrous, of unarmed men butchered like pigs or cattle.

"Look at how we hate you.  Look at the way that we kill you," those videos said, and they were horrors.

And yet, here we are, sharing our own images of killing.   They are different, in the way that industrial killing is different.

"Now, look at how we kill you," our videos say.  They are distant and dispassionate, precise and clinical.

At the dawn of the internet age, there was this great hope: now, human beings will finally be able to share information freely with one another.  It will change who we are, the dreamers proclaimed.  Through that sharing, an age of peace and mutual understanding will dawn.

It hasn't quite worked out that way.

Our Love, Our Faith, and Our Violence

Of all of the cinematic experiences I've had this year, one stands out, and it wasn't even a movie.

It was The Last of Us, a game I played through over the last couple of weeks, although calling it a "game" seems vaguely unfair and inaccurate.  It was a participatory narrative, a story in which you engage and move, but which carries through you through the lives of human beings living after the collapse of our culture.

In that, it played off of some familiar themes in our storytelling.  There's been a fungal pandemic, one that renders its victims both insane and violent before devouring them completely.  It's a variant on the zombie apocalypse trope, and yeah, that's been done a whole bunch.

Before I continue just a warning--if you ever plan on playing this game, there will be spoilers coming up.  And they will spoil what is a simply brilliant experience.

The gameplay was good, and the graphics were evocative, but those weren't the best features of this game.  What was most striking, given that this is technically a "game," was the degree to which the animation and the voice-acting created a really powerful sense of the reality of the characters involved.  Our protagonists are Joel and Ellie, and their relationship is complex and finely drawn.

Joel, a grizzled man in his early fifties, lost everything that was precious to him when the pandemic hit.   Most significantly, he lost his daughter Sarah, a young teen who dies in the genuinely harrowing opening sequence.  All that matters to him now is survival--although he's cynical about even that--and any moral core that he once had has long since atrophied.

Ellie is a fourteen year old girl, who he's tasked with escorting across country for reasons the narrative will soon make clear.  She's never known anything but the fallen world, and is both a child and a young woman, both an innocent and hardened.

Their relationship develops slowly and organically over the 14-17 hours of gameplay, and as Joel bonds with the girl who echoes his daughter, she increasingly becomes the entire reason for his existence.  He's deeply reluctant to make himself vulnerable in that way, and self-aware enough to realize she's becoming a daughter to him, but the connection continues and deepens as their bond grows.  Protecting her, caring for her, watching over her--that becomes the purpose of his life.  By the end of the game, his love for her is palpable.

It also drives him to do terrible things.  The Last of Us is a violent game, intensely, realistically so.  It's not at all like Call of Duty or other shooter games, where violence is empty play.  It's rough, and unpleasant.  The game never lets you forget the mortal frailty of the characters you're playing, or the shared humanity of the people you find Joel and Ellie killing.

What you realize--in some very difficult but well-written sequences--is that eventually nothing matters to Joel but Ellie.  Nothing.  He will torture, he will kill, he will let all of humanity suffer under a plague forever, anything, so long as she is safe.   He will even manipulate her trust and lie to her, so long as he is convinced that his deception will keep her from harm.

There's a moment, the final moment of the story, when she realizes how far Joel will go to protect her.  She knows he is lying to her about what he has done to protect her, and knows he is lying because he only wants her happy and safe.  You see that awareness cross her face, and see her struggle with it.

Her safety becomes his purpose, his moral core, and the goal of his life.  She is the thing he loves above all else.  And while that is what makes him very connectably human, it is also what enables him to be a monster.

For human beings, that's always been true.  When we allow our lives to be defined by a singular goal--our existential ground, our life-purpose--that gives us our integrity as a person.  But that thing, if it is wrought too shallowly, can also be what allows us to inflict terrible harm.

We can be defined by ourselves, our pride, our desire, our ambition.  We can be defined by an ideology or nation.  We can be defined by our love for another person, our partner, our friend, our child.  Those things become the objects of both our love and our faith.

They also become what allows us to not really see those who are outside of that relationship as human, not see their value, and can become the foundation of our violence against another.

Our ability to love, if turned to the wrong end, is also the heart of our brokenness.

ISIS and the Purposes of God

"It's all part of God's plan," we like to say.

"It all works together for good," we say, part of the mysterious plan of God's providence.  This was something, frankly, that I used to believe myself.  We just let go, and let God, and all will be well.  All we have to do is trust that it'll all work for the good.

But as my faith has evolved and grown over the decades, I no longer believe that to be so.  Most particularly, I no longer believe that every action of every human being is part of the divine intent.

The recent actions of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria seem an agonizing case in point.  As they butcher their way across that troubled region, murdering and enslaving and raping, all of the bloody and difficult work to rebuild Iraq seems close to unraveling.  Whether we should ever have poured the lives of our citizen soldiers into that misbegotten quagmire in the first place is another, painful matter altogether.

Right now, though, that mess seems only to be deteriorating, spinning down into the dark chaos of ignorance, violence, and tribalism.

From that mess, the release of a video in which ISIS beheaded American journalist James Foley really did strike home.  As the son of a journalist who spent time in that troubled region, I feel the anguish of his family and friends strongly.  How would you watch as your loved one is forced to speak words he does not believe, and then is butchered like meat?  What a monstrous thing.

More significantly, how does a human being do such a thing to another?  And not just to one man, but to many, many others.

It is that latter reality, the actions of the ISIS members, that I cannot claim as part of some broader overarching divine plan.  Nor, frankly, would I ever tell someone that the murder of their loved one was a necessary part of God's plan for our lives.

It is not.

I believe this, oddly enough, because I will not allow myself to deny the humanity of the individuals responsible for this horrific act.  It would be easier to write them off as monsters, because they act as monsters.  That would make it easier to cope with them, and far easier to kill them.  Dehumanizing the Other always makes it easier to kill them.

But they are sentient beings, albeit ones who have chosen to live under the thrall of a monstrous ideology.  They are still free to choose their actions.  It is what makes them culpable, ultimately.

If God had structured creation as one single linear narrative, in which there was only one beginning and only one end, then this would not be true.  The members of ISIS would just be part of that story, and the blood and the suffering they inflict would have always have been their purpose.  God's purpose.

And if it is God's purpose, then they are not to blame for their actions, not in any meaningful sense.  If there is no freedom, there can be no sin.

I no longer believe, because it does not seem to be so, that there is only one way things can happen.  That's just not how God made things.

And if creation is not just one story, if we are indeed free to choose to move down other potential paths, then our choices count.  The Creator has laid out, clear as crystal, what it means to live rightly and in peace with one another.  If we choose the hateful path of bloodshed and sorrow, then God will allow us to shape our time and space into that dark thing.

Is that God's gracious desire for us?  No.  Neither is it necessary for us to choose that path.

Turn away, God says.  Turn away, because you don't need to live as you are living.  If only more of us realized that.

Following Jesus in a Boko Haram World

Boko Haram makes me struggle with my faith.

The conversations have been everywhere, about those girls, about their fate.  It's been a wild mess of a discussion.  

For the right-wingers, woken from obsessively muttering "Benghazi" to themselves in their twitching, disturbed sleep, the answer is simple:

Kill Boko Haram.  Just kill 'em good.  With drones, preferably, although if Vlad the Impaler can be somehow roused from his sarcophagus, his strategic inputs would also be welcome.  He was always such an excellent negotiator.

Done and done.  Now can we talk about Benghazi again?  There are Documents That Were NOT Released in a Timely Manner, Dagflabbit! 

Leftists?  Well, they're doing what leftists do.  On the one hand, outrage!  Racist America is silent and ignorant, and does not care about these young women of color!  We must raise awareness!  But also, Outrage! Because we are daring to speak about these Africans through social media, a clear sign that we are #slacktivist #privileged cultural imperialists!  But wait, Outrage! Because we allow these girls to be nameless faces, unaware of their identity as persons.  But hey, OUTRAGE!  Because we're naming these victims of sexual violence, thus exposing them to cultural shame.

The American left needs to get out more.  Or not.  Maybe not.  Maybe the aimless nattering chaos of #twitter is the best place for it.

Stepping outside of the din, and into encounter with this horror, part of the butchery of a madman whose methods even give Al Queda pause, I wonder at how to respond from the discipline of my faith.

Having spent time in Nigeria, I feel this one.  My mom used to personally teach young girls from our neighborhood in Ibadan-- a city 130 klicks northwest of Lagos--to read, inviting them into our home and providing them with materials.  This is a real thing for me.  I see the faces of those girls, as people I know.  

But I also know there is nothing that I personally can do.  Not here, not from this distance.  I can be aware, as I  try to be.  I can speak, as I am here.  I can pray, as we do when there is nothing material we can do.

When faced with such hateful, monstrous violence, though, I am torn.  The heart of Christian faith is self-sacrificing nonviolence.  It is the way of the cross.  This is radically, intensely, inescapably true, no matter how much we wish it not to be so.

Nonviolence transforms and restores.  Nonviolence heals cultures, just as Jesus healed.  I know this as a truth, because when we have had the courage to try it, it has had power.

Yet I hear the empty, feverish hatred in the voice of Abubakar Shekau, the Boko Haram "prophet," and I see no purchase for nonviolence.  I see only a maw into which peaceful and nonviolent lives would be poured.  I see only madness and the incoherence of a broken soul.

Perhaps this is just a failure of my faith.  It is easier to see such a person as little more than an animal, a being who has lost hold of the sentience that is our created nature, and now is no more responsive to grace than a rabid dog.  You put them down, as you would kill an animal that was threatening your children.

That's the easy way.  But it is a profoundly dangerous way of thinking, if you claim Jesus as your master.  You can never approach another human being as an object.  Ever.  No matter how hateful and monstrous they have become, your stance towards them must be grounded in the awareness that they have within them the same potential for relationship with God that you bear in your own self.

You must love them, as God loves them.  This is very, very hard.

Faced with predatory violence, I am still not sure that I could see the path of nonviolence.  Or rather, I can, but I do not know if I could take it.  I could see, perhaps, how after hundreds of nonviolent resisters poured themselves out in love...gunned down, assaulted, hacked to death with words of forgiveness on their lips...that such relentlessly gentle madness might make an impression on Boko Haram.  Might.

But I wrestle with how many kind, gentle, and justice-loving souls that would cost.

I also know, from faith, that we are fundamentally interconnected by God's love, which is the inescapable foundation of God's justice.  We participate in one another, in ways that we do not see in this life from behind our walls of existential isolation.  Allowing a blighted soul to spread horror sets them towards that horror as the defining feature of their relationship with God.  

The full reality of every rape, every mother's tear, every death that Boko Haram inflicts is their inheritance in eternity.  That will be Shekau's hell.  I know this as surely as I live and breathe.

Believing this, I wonder if using force to stop the madness of unthinking violence might be a mercy to the one who is inflicting harm.  With Augustine, this is where I find myself when it comes to protecting the innocent.  It is not an easy place.  Ending the life of a broken soul is like killing your own broken child, your own lost and prodigal son.  If it is not that hard, then you do not understand God's love.

And so I still struggle.  It is a struggle worth having.

I Am A Violent Man

I'm forty-five years old, and I've never punched another human being in anger.  Not once.  Oh, I've come close.  There was that time in middle school where I snapped of a series of lightning jabs, "landing" them a fraction of an inch from the face of the kid who was unsuccessfully attempting to bully me.  I didn't intend to land them, and because he did not choose to walk into them, I didn't.  They had the desired effect, and he took off.

There have been other times, but they have been few and far between.

That was before my commitment to following Jesus had become my vocation.  I honor nonviolence as the noblest path.  It is the response of God to evil.  Violence is not necessary to destroy evil, because evil bears the seeds of its own annihilation within itself.

But as I read through Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You, as he lays out a relentless assault on the legitimacy of violence, I find myself both drawn to it and struggling with it.

I am drawn to it because his view is uncompromising and absolutely real.  This is what Jesus and Paul and the early church lived out.  It is the reality of the Reign of God, with the obfuscation and the rationalizations stripped away.

But as I examine myself in the light of that clarity, I do not know with certainty whether I am completely nonviolent.  In the abstract, yes.  In the pursuit of a goal, yes.  And even in organizational life, I have found that if given the opportunity to destroy or attack a vulnerable opponent, I will not take it.  I will and have shown grace, even at personal and vocational cost.

I do not know, however, if crisis would change that.

If presented with a real existential threat, to myself or--more pointedly--to my loved ones, I do not know if I would respond nonviolently.  Or if I could.

I have felt that primal surge of hormones, focusing me, shutting down both fear and inhibition.  Closing me off to the reality of another.  So far, it has proven manageable.

I cannot say, though, that if loved ones or neighbors were threatened, that I would be able to stand nonviolently and allow both their harm and my own.  I do not know.

Honestly, I don't wish to find out.

How Christians Go To War

Someone asked me recently what I think about war.  So let me share a story first, one that was shared with me last week.

An old and dear friend recently returned from a trip to Africa, and we sat, and we talked over some Dogfishhead 90 Minute Ales.  

He's a doctor, who juggles time between a practice that pays the bills and volunteering days of his time a week at free clinics in Southeast and in the DC jail system.  

And though he's neither Catholic nor a person of any avowed faith, he has for the last several years provided his services to a Catholic mission hospital in the Sudan.  But this time, it was not just the challenge of being the only hospital for a hundred miles in a desperately poor region that was at play.  One million people.  One hospital.  Total staff: one doctor, and a handful of nurses.  To add a twist, there is something new:

Sudan is at war.  Forces from the Sudan are pressing into the South Sudan, trying to clear out that region, with the stated intent of driving Christians and animists from their land so that Sudan can be fully Islamic.  And by "Islamic," I mean, "under the control of Bashir."

When my friend was there, there were two doctors, for a while.  But it was more than he could bear.  

There were overflights, regularly, by Sudanese Antonovs, and the Sukhoi fighters that Putin has so graciously provided to Bashir's regime.  Midway through procedures, the staff would have to flee to foxholes, as taking out the one hospital providing hope to the region might prove so demoralizing that folks would finally abandon hope.  He'd lie in that foxhole, and think about being a Daddy to his daughters back home, and wonder, why the hell am I here?

So there was that.

And then there was the day he was midway through a biopsy for a local man whose tumors had grown into a vast flesh collar around his neck...and then suddenly trucks roared into the hospital, filled with the dead and dying.  A barrel bomb had been dropped from a Sudanese Antonov right smack into the middle of a marketplace.  There were scores of the critically injured.  There were two doctors.  Both were general practitioners.

But they operated.  And watched teenage boys die, the life heaving out of them.  And tried to remove shrapnel from what was left of the faces of pregnant women.  There were many, many amputations. Blood was everywhere.  There were hours and hours of frantic surgeries, not in an army hospital with logistical support, but in the dust and dirt of a hospital with barely more supplies than your local MinuteClinic. 

Kids. Women. Fruit merchants.  Dead or forever shattered.  My friend took a long drink from his beer.

"I don't care what they say it is.  War?  War?  It's nothing but murder.  No different.  There is no difference."

And therein lies the challenge, I think, for Christians that wish to take up the sword.  We may equivocate, and find elegant ways to justify the territorial squabblings of nations, as if they are somehow more cosmically significant than two neighbors punching it out over where the fence runs between their properties.  

But the reality of shattered bodies and dying breaths, the ruined potential of a life, that is the great and noble reality of war.  That is the reality known by our Creator.  The shining romantic fantasies of nationalism are, in the face of the reality of war, just a form of insanity.

What do I think of what it looks like for a Christian to go to war?

For that, I turn to another story.  This one is from the Bible, a story of my namesake.  It is the story of a great victory, as the forces loyal to King David routed the insurrection of his son Absalom.  

David loved Absalom dearly, and wanted only that they be father and son again.

Although David had given direct orders that Absalom not be slain, his realpolitik-enforcer/thug/general Joab would have none of it.  Joab knew what war was, and when Absalom was found, Joab himself insured he was killed.

David, on hearing of the death of the recalcitrant child who he loved with all of his heart, was shattered.   He wept, overwhelmed with the loss of his beloved son.  Joab, of course, would have none of it.  It ruined the celebration, and demoralized the troops.  He forced David to stop his embarrassing and counterproductive mourning at the loss of a child with whom he hoped to reconcile.  "You show you love the ones who hate you," spat Joab, as he threatened to abandon David.  "That means you hate the ones who love you."  Then Joab bullied him into sitting before the troops as they marched by in triumph.

Joab is the spirit and truth of war.  But David?  

Joab said it best.  "You show you love the ones who hate you."

David's reaction gets us to the truth of what it means for a Christian to take up the sword.  The one you are bombing or sniping is God's child, more deeply loved by God than Absalom was loved by David.  Maybe they are broken. Maybe they are wrong, or in the service of a tyrant. But that does not change the reality of God's love for them.  

If you are a Christian, you must believe this.  If you do not, then you should set aside the illusion that Christ is your Lord.

Can a Christian go to war?  Of course.  

But to be authentically Christian, you must love the one you take up the sword against, as if they are your own baby.  Your own daughter.  Your own son.

And that is hard and terrible.

Because war is real, and that reality is a hard and terrible thing.

An Audience of Orcs

So "The Hobbit: Part Deux" came out this week. I don't doubt that at some point in the hurly burly of this Getmas season I and the wife and the boys will see it, chunking down our contribution towards the second payment on Peter Jackson's new orbital yacht.

I will confess, though, that the front end reviews have me a little worried.  The first film had some significant flaws, which for me were rather different than the flaws that seemed to bug the rest of the filmgoing universe.

For most reviewers, the issue was pacing.  Meaning, it began too slowly, drawing out the opening arrival of the dwarves as painfully as a babalao winding a guinea worm.  Trust me, that's painful. 

For me, the most painful part of the first movie was the pacing of the action once the film got going on all eight cylinders, air howling through the intakes of its twin sequential intercooled turbochargers.  So much of the first movie felt absurdly hyperkinetic, over-violent and visually aggressive.

And Lord, but do I weary of the sameness of that meal, served up every time I go to the Circus.

Bam! Zow! Sockie!  Look at little Bilbo, bustin' open a can o' whupass on that orc!  Yeah, it wasn't in the book, and those orcs are obviously just bosses put in for when the whole thing gets turned into a game franchise, and it totally destroys Bilbo's character development, but we're too juiced on adrenaline to care.  Freakin' Hoooah!

Oh, sure, there are battles in Tolkien, battles aplenty.  And the Hobbit, as a book, does leap from one thrilling moment to the next.  That's what makes it such a hoot to read aloud to your children.

But as this story is being retold in film, it is being retold for a particular audience, cast to appeal to their expectations.  And what I'm hearing is that "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Benefit Cumbersplat" is even more relentlessly action-packed than the first film.

What I fear, as I go into what sounds like another groaning table of hack-n-slash, is what that says about us.  Where does this sort of storytelling place us, in the world of Middle Earth?

This does not appear to be a film made to appeal to the aesthetics of hobbits.  It is also not made for elves, who almost exclusively watch obscure French films in little art house cinemas.  Neither does it appeal to dwarves, who are far too practically minded.

It seems to me that a film that is relentlessly, endlessly violent and hyper-aggressive would only appeal to a select few of the races of Middle Earth.

Men, of course, who above all else desire power.

And Orcs.  Orcs, from what I have been told, would love this film.

Which are we, I wonder?

Monkey Santa Wants Revenge

Last night was my older son's choir concert, and it was woven into the great swirl of seasonal scurrying that makes up this time of year.  The younger spud needed to be at a rehearsal in Vienna at 6, and the choir concert was at 7:30 in Annandale, which meant I was slogging through the worst traffic in America for a good solid hour and a half at the height of rush-hour.  One appreciates the Prius for the traffic-appliance it is at such times.

I made it to the big guy's concert on time, and settled in near the back so's I could book out at 8:30 sharp to go back to Vienna for a 9:00 PM pickup.  The school choirs filed in, and like their high school, they were a wide and hopeful slice of contemporary America.  It was a veritable United Nations, with equal portions of kids of European heritage, Latinos and Asians and Africans.  They were a mix of all faiths, Christian and Muslim and Jewish and whatever they wanted to be.

The singing started, and unlike concerts in elementary school, this wasn't an endurance contest.  They were great.  These kids cared about what they were doing, and were having fun doing it, and it showed.

Well, it did for most folks there.  In the very back of the auditorium was a row of individuals--"students" seems like the wrong word here--who were not there for any discernible reason.  They hooted and catcalled at the girls choir when they came up.  They talked without stopping, through the quiet reflective pieces, in between the songs.

When asked to be quiet, they responded with aggression, to the point where they had to be asked to leave in ways that made it clear the adults involved were quite willing to press the matter.

The rest of the concert was lovely, although I had to book out right before the last song to race back to Vienna to get my youngling.

When I touched base with my wife to debrief, I heard that things had not ended well.  Evidently the group that was asked to leave had not left through the main entrance, but had all filed down the hall towards the choir room before slipping out a back door.

The choirs returned to the choir room to find it ransacked, every bag gone through, dozens of items stolen.  Cops were called.  Police reports were filed.

Happy Holidays.

It was interesting meditating on my reaction.  My primate-self responds in a fairly consistent way to such things, mostly pitching out suggestions that involve Louisville Sluggers and unusual criminal sanctions from late medieval Germany.

My liberal and libertarian selves argued briefly about personal responsibility and the impact of socioeconomic status on social behavior, but considering that most of the choir members victimized were of the same ethnocultural and socioeconomic background, ultimately left and right started listening to my monkey brain as it talked about the how-to's of drawing and quartering.  Who do we know that can lend us us some horses?  Hmmm.

But then, for me, there is always the voice of Jesus.  Pesky, pesky Jesus, who always forces me to consider those places where the bright binary equation of retribution never has a positive result.  Meaning, reality.

Reality, where the role of the one true law is to protect those who are victimized, but also to avoid harming an aggressor--physically or spiritually--to leave open the possibility that they can change.

Because closing out the possibility for change shuts out the whole purpose of Advent, now, doesn't it?

The Sameness of Violence

Maybe it's because I'm getting older.  It's hard to say.  But three times this summer, I've had the same reaction to a movie, and it's wearing on me.  I've generally enjoyed all things sci fi, and so I'd been looking forward to taking a swing at three of this summer's blockbusters in particular.

The first: Star Trek.  I'd really enjoyed J.J. Abrams reboot of the franchise.  The casting was pitch perfect, the feeling both respectful of Roddenberry's world and taking it in new and productive directions.  

The second: Elysium.  Neill Blomkamp's District Nine was a breath of fresh air when it hit theaters a few years back.  Hard-edged and vigorously rooted in South African political culture, it was a fascinating variant on usual alien-invasion fare.  That, and it had a clear social conscience, mirroring the dark echoes of apartheid.  Elysium promised to be more of the same, casting light on the tremendous chasm between the wealthy few and the struggling masses on our planet.

The third: The World's End.  I've enjoyed Simon Pegg in just about everything he's been in.  Shaun of the Dead was a mischievous treat, and a far richer movie than the entertaining but more shallow Zombieland.  So Simon Pegg plus alien/robot invasion seemed to equal entertainment gold.

None of them really worked as I'd hoped.  

Star Trek was dialed up way too high, and what was meant to be an homage to Wrath of Khan ended up feeling cheap, manipulative, and predictable.  If we know you're not actually going to kill of that franchise-central character, and we can tell exactly how you're going to bring that character back because you've telegraphed it to us?  That death scene just ain't gonna mean anything, JJ, no matter how many Vulcans sloppily and incongruously weep.  Elysium started strong...Blomkamp is brilliant at establishing a sense of place...but descended into emotionally manipulative and shallow bathos.   The World's End was absurd and illogical, but it was a comedy, so I cut it a little slack.  The character dynamics were interesting, and complex psychological themes bubbled around under the surface.  Must be a British thing.

But what made all of them less watchable than I'd hoped was the violence.   All had the now omnipresent hyperkinetic, visually jarring style to conveying bone-crunching conflict.  It's ALL-CAPS exciting, visceral, and kinesthetically ferocious, or so it's supposed to be.

It's such a relentless part of moviegoing these days.  Running! Punching! Exploding! Action!  It's meant to stir our monkey-brain, kicking in deep fight-or-flight excitement.

But there's a dank sameness to it.  The uniform palette of cinematically rendered violence makes every movie into every other movie.  As the World's End dove into one action sequence after another, for example, the psychological complexity of the characters was washed out, and the narrative was obscured.  Too many moments were just, well, every other film.  Zachary Quinto could be going all half-Vulcan-loco on cybernetic Matt Damon, who could be firing an accelerator rifle at a Blank.  None of it matters.

And the feeling I was feeling during those moments was not excitement.  It was boredom.  It was tedious, because there is no pleasure to be found sitting through the same scene over and over and over again in every film we see.

It's a bit like the news, I suppose.

Syria, King, and Violence

Listening to the drumbeat of war...or of something war-esque...I find myself struggling to see the point of it.

Syria, after all, is already a proxy war, as the forces of politicized Islam line up to assail one another.  It's not a manifestation of the "Arab Spring," in which good people of troubled conscience finally rose up against their oppressive despot.  That "Spring" was always something of a Western fantasy, an illusion masking a more complex and troubling reality.

Syria is now a sprawling, inchoate mess, in which there is no apparent side befitting the support of a republic.  Unlike the horrors in Bosnia, in which the intervention of the United States made a significant difference, it does not threaten to destabilize a region.  Syria is coming apart because the region is inherently unstable.  As the last of the standing secular Baathist regimes, it represents a worldview that is struggling for viability.

So they've gassed a town, which is a horror, although why several hundred dead from sarin is more of a horror than over 100,000 dead from shelling/shooting/beheading eludes me.  We must act, we say.  Military action is justified and inevitable, we say, although the "we" here seems paradoxically limited to folks on the far left and far-right neoconservatives.  The center of America...the sane part...is sick of war and the lie of violence.

The most peculiar thing for me, however, has been the juxtaposition of our seemingly inescapable march to violent intervention with the celebration of the March on Washington this week.  Here you have an administration celebrating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy.  Liberals lined up, speaking purple prose about justice and freedom and how we've not gotten there yet, but we're going to try.  And at the same time, some those very same human beings were preparing to throw a few Tomahawks into the bloody mess that is Syria.

What seemed missing there, honestly, was a recognition that Dr. King wasn't just fired up about racial injustice.  He also cared deeply and spoke...sorry, PREACHED...ferociously about the pointlessness of war and violence.

Here's an entirely representative quote:

And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace.  Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace.  What is the problem?  They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal.  We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.  All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.  "A Christmas Sermon" December 24, 1967

This was not a small or marginal part of his belief system.  King was deeply committed to the whole ethic of God's Kingdom.  The equality parts?  Absolutely.  But the radical nonviolence as well.

Honoring him while preparing for a self-evidently pointless act of violence is just plain odd.

Islam, Violence, and The Log In Our Own Eye

One of the inevitable outcomes of the Marathon bombing has been another round of yarping from that portion of the American vox populi that is eager to lay the blame for the event on an entire world religion.

Islam, or so it is argued, is an inherently violent religion.  When the radicalized elder Tsarnaev brother became obsessed with jihad, they say, it was because this is the natural outcome of his being a Muslim.  In my twitter feed, which is intentionally and wildly diverse politically, those on the right fringe describe the brothers as "Chechen Muslims," as if they hadn't spent pretty much their entire lives in the United States.

In the ultraconservative pundit silo, much of this anti-Islam talk comes from souls who have made a career out of saying and doing things designed to polarize and give offense.  Ann Coulter, for instance, suggested that the widow of Tsarnaev should have been imprisoned for wearing a hijab.  We can throw her in prison with all the Amish women, I suppose.  But coming across as a neocon Disney villainess pays Coulter's mortgage, so that's not a surprise.   Others got into the act.  In his talk show, Bill Maher suggested that the issue was that Islam was not like other religions.

"There's only one faith that kills you or wants to kill you if you draw a cartoon of the prophet," said Maher.

The challenge for a culture that has considered itself primarily Christian, though, lies in Christianity's own frequently violent holy book, and our own unfortunately bloodstained history.

There's a whole bunch of smiting/slaying/butchery in the Bible.  Divine instruction that the Amalekites be killed down to their last chicken, and God getting cheesed off when they weren't.  Oceans folding in on armies.  Mass Firstbornicide.

That's hardly just the "mean ol' Testament God," either, thanks in large part to the Book of Revelation.  Lakes of fire, anyone?

Maher's statement is true now, sure.  But honey child, we've got history.  Taking our texts and our past into account, Christianity has a whole bunch of mess on our hands.  This is a hard thing to miss.

And many folks don't.  In fact, when they read through the Bible, they have the same reaction to it that I frequently had in my cover-to-cover reading of the Quran.   Being liberal, I feel that you have to actually and openly encounter something in order to make any kind of definitive statement about it, and the Quran...well...

It's a hard read.

But so is the Bible.

The issue, as I see it, is not faith itself, and it is certainly not any encounter with the Deep Real of our Creator.

It is the degree to which faith becomes corrupted by the human desire for power over others.   It is the degree to which we confuse God with the coercive power of the state.  Particularly our own state.  It is the degree to which we allow ancient biases and fears to govern our actions.  It is the degree to which we make a text our god.

Once we get that log out of our own eye, well, then maybe we can talk.

The Toys We Don't Need

As our seasonal festival of consumerist gorging comes to an end, that big pulse of buybuybuy that pushes the retail industry into the black for the year seems to have worked again.  Our houses are once again overloaded with material possessions that, by and large, we don't actually need but have been convinced we require for our happiness.  There's been a peculiar aspect of the surge of purchasing this year, though, one that is beyond me.

It's the great rush of gun purchases following the Sandy Hook shootings.  You remember that, right?  Yeah, I know, so-five-minutes-ago, but it's still having an effect, eh?  And the most immediate effect has been that assault-style rifles...meaning semi-auto, large magazine firearms that evoke actual combat weaponry...have been roaring off of the racks of gun stores this holiday season.  It's so intense that the profiteers are out in force, as folks pick up semi-auto AR-15s and Kalashnikovs and resell them for a healthy margin.   

That's not unusual for interesting new firearms, like the speculative rush on Keltec's KSG home defense bullpup shotgun over the last year, but this is another thing altogether.  This is actually a familiar trend, as the threat of gun regulation following mass shootings tends to lead to hoarding and panic buying.  It's always seemed a bit odd, but we're an odd people.

What has struck me in this current feeding frenzy is how peculiarly it meshes with another truth known to responsible gun owners.   The appearance of a gun is meaningless.  Oh, calibre matters, as do a range of other factors, particularly magazine capacity.  But in terms of lethality, a rifle is a rifle.  Urban leftists who are oblivious to the nuances between weapons look at all the pseudo-mil-spec farkling and tactical doodaddery, and assume that somehow makes a rifle more lethal.

It does not.  

Case in point: the most lethal soldier in the whole of the blood-soaked horror that was the twentieth century was a Finnish sniper by the name of Simo Hayha.  He used a Finnish version of the Mosin-Nagant hunting rifle...bolt action, five round magazine, iron sights...to kill over five hundred Soviets.   It's a sturdy, reliable, low-rate-of-fire weapon.  That rifle was the most lethal individual firearm in the history of modern warfare.  Lord have mercy.  It is also the kind of weapon that would be utterly unaffected by even the most stringent firearm regulations.

Of course, that's a hunting rifle, and not so handy in close quarters.  But for close quarters combat...the type of staving-off-the-serial-killing-burglar-rapist-Democrat fantasy scenario that sells so many American firearms...there's pretty much nothing better than a scattergun.  In the typical home on a typical quarter acre lot, you'd need nothing more.  And there's no better way to put shot on target than something like the humble but utterly reliable Remington 870, which happens to be...if those who I know who know guns are to be believed...a fine hunting shotgun as well.  Again, unaffected by gun regulation.

So here's what I don't get.  

If...as folks who know guns better than I will invariably tell you whenever a mass shooting happens...there is no functional difference in lethality, why the rush on the tactical semi-auto farkle-guns?   These aren't real military-grade assault rifles.  They just pretend to be.  Why the panic buying of guns that are all about ego and threat-display, but are functionally no better at hunting/defending against invading armies/home-defense than far less showy firearms?

Why? Because they are the toys that we want.  They are toys that appeal powerfully to our egos, and to our fears.  They happen to be lethal toys, sure, but they are more about what they whisper in the ear of their owner.  

"Look at how fearsome I am," they say.  "You're strong and powerful," they say.   "You are a warrior," they lie.  "You could kill anyone who messed with you," they say, mixing a dark truth with the fantasy.  Because like all toys, they are mostly about fantasy.  They are all about the fantasy of war, of violence, and of power.  

And as my dear friend Wayne LaPierre put it recently, "Isn't fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?"

Perhaps that's what makes these toys so dangerous.  

Gaming and Violence

Today, I'm standing down from gaming in all forms that in any way simulate violence.   There will be no shooting, first person or otherwise.  I will not jump on the heads of any Koopas.  I will not upgrade my archers in Kingdom Rush.  There will be no in-game violence, whatsoever, period.  In this, I'll be joining with thousands of other gamers who are choosing not to play any games that evoke combat, as a way of marking the impact of actual violence.

Which is fine by me, particularly the shooting part.  I've found that after Sandy Hook, my tolerance levels for media that involves firearms has diminished significantly.  It's a visceral, naturally occurring emotive response.  I just can't find any fun in it, not over the last week.  I'm not in the mood, any more than I was after 9/11.  One evening in October of 2001, I found just couldn't even watch this scene, encountered at random on cable, without thinking of all of those first responders.  I had to turn it off.  It just didn't seem fun any more.

That, more than anything, is why I'm standing down today.

Much has been made of the linkage between violence in media...particularly gaming...and the relentless dirge of gun violence in our culture.  The last two decades have seen the rise of increasingly involving and realistic virtual worlds, in which war and combat are a significant factor.  Battlefield 3 isn't Combat or Outlaw.

The depth, realism and immersive quality of modern gaming seems of a different character than any form of media that has preceded it.  The capacity to interact and participate in a virtual world is a new thing for humankind, and it's a little unsettling.   For many adults, it is also an alien thing, not a part of their experience of life.  As the United States flounders about grasping for some explanation for Sandy Hook that doesn't involve us having to regulate firearms, gaming has arisen as one possible cause.

We know, for example, that Adam Lanza gamed.   But what does that mean?  What does it mean that he was really into Starcraft?  It means that in that part of his life, he shared something with the vast majority of American kids. Objective research shows that 89% of American boys own game consoles...and 70% of girls.   Gaming is so pervasive that establishing a causal link between gaming generically and violence in our culture is not possible.

The linkage...based on data, objectively assessed...between gaming and societal violence seems tenuous, too.  That's not just because the rise of gaming as a cultural phenomenon tracks with a twenty-year decline in US crime rates.  When the United States Supreme Court took up the issue of banning violent video games last year, they found no evidence of a linkage.  You can read Antonin Scalia's opinion here.   When Antonin Scalia and Sandra Sotomayor exhaustively look at the evidence on an issue and come to the same conclusion, that says something.

That observation...that there is not enough evidence to come to find a causal or even a correlational link between gaming and actual violence...has been reinforced by the Journal of Pediatrics.

What we also know is that gaming is not a uniquely American phenomenon.  It is cross-cultural, totally pervasive throughout the developed world.  I know this on because I game, and I'll find myself occasionally on a server gaming with Aussies, or Brits, or Quebecois, or Germans.  None of those cultures come close to matching our rate of gun violence.  But I also know it statistically.  Presumably, a link between gaming and murder rates would manifest itself cross culturally, and it has not.  Gun violence is, in the developed world, a particularly American phenomenon.  We are the outlier.

Take, as a particularly potent example, South Korea, where gaming borders on being a national obsession.  Koreans are arguably the gamingest people on the planet.  What impact does that have on gun violence in South Korea?   None.   South Koreans have been known play video games until they die of starvation, to the point where time limits were put into place by law.   And yet gun violence is functionally nonexistent in that free and democratic society.  Their murder rate is just about half of ours.  Lord knows it's not because the broader Korean culture is calm and measured.   Sweet Mary and Joseph, is that not the case.  There's not a more fiery, passionate people on the face of God's creation.  Although nearly every Korean male must serve in the military, and is trained in firearm use, they don't kill each other with guns because they just don't have guns.  No guns? No gun deaths. That's why their gun-death rate is a tiny fraction of ours.  Period.

Still and all, that doesn't mean that gaming itself is without ethical challenges.  The potential impacts of gaming on an undeveloped or unstable child has never been a risk that I've been willing to take.  So over the years, I've monitored my boys and their gaming, something that I as a gamer am particularly able to do.  I know the dynamics of games, and which ones are less compatible with healthy spiritual and ethical development.

I've listened and watched their mental states, and seen as they've developed the capacity for empathy and rational thought.  I've talked with them about the difference between the real and the virtual, and listened to them as they've talked.   What types of games I've permitted them to play...and what movies I've allowed them to see...has been contingent on their development and their ethical awareness.

And while I'm comfortable having my intelligent, creative, inherently impulsive and inescapably hormonal pre-teen and teen sons around my PS3, I could not say the same for a gun.  One could, in a moment of foolishness, kill them.  The other could not.

For me, that seems Occam's-Razor-simple enough.

Reading the Quran: War, Violence, and Jihad

Talking about an encounter with the Quran without talking about violence and jihad would be an act of intellectual and spiritual cowardice.  Tempting, mind you, as the easy way out is always tempting.  Just don't talk about it, whispers the voice of weakness.

But that wouldn't describe the encounter, and mincing words does no-one any favors.

Reading through the Quran, it is impossible to miss the explicit martial language used to describe both the defense of the faith and the spread of the faith.   It was created in the context of conflict, and by conflict I do not mean the dynamic tension between ideas and concepts.   War is a part of its ethic and worldview, and the call to warfare...again, not spiritual or metaphorical, but actual...is as clear as the moon in the sky on a bright cold morning.

Like the Judges in pre-Davidic Judaism, the Prophet actually took forces into battle.  The Quran describes several clashes, including the Battle of Badr (Al-i-Imran 123-125) and the Battle of Uhud (Al-i-Imran 152).  These were not large scale conflicts by the standards of the ancient world, but involved Muslim forces that were...in the case of Badr...fewer in number than the average Presbyterian congregation.   We're not talking a megachurch battle here.

But it is war nonetheless, albeit on a tribal scale.

An entire sura is dedicated to providing instruction for the spoils of war (Al-Anfal).  Again, this was not  initially intended as metaphor.  It assumes conflict with actual physical opponents who no longer need their stuff, because you've killed them.

From this foundation of expansion and conflict, the Quran is considerably more expressive of non-spiritual, non-symbolic violence than the Gospels.   Conflict with unbelievers is repeatedly and consistently articulated in terms that seem to encourage some pretty unpleasant stuff.

It goes beyond Al-Baraqah 191 and 217, which suggest...depending on the translation...that it is better to kill someone who opposes Islam than to permit discord.   Violence in defense of the faith seems presented consistently as a virtue, particularly in opposing unbelievers/backsliders (An Nisa 89).  Although killing other believers intentionally is forbidden, that's an easy one to get around.  (An Nisa 92) It's not a huge conceptual leap from disagreeing with someone to deciding that the source of that disagreement lies in their obvious departure from the One True Faith, in which case, well, there you go.   As a theme, it's consistent and sustained.

And yet this is hardly missing from the narratives of the Bible, either.  The stories of the Exodus and the tales of conflict in the Deuteronomic History are pretty legendarily splattery, filled with plenty of the old ultraviolence.  Much of that is given divine sanction or support by the authors of the narratives.  The Gospels have references to violence as well, although it tends to be clearly metaphoric.   The embrace of war or force of arms is explicitly and consistently rejected, and replaced with a clear and radical ethic of nonviolence.  The Epistles are that way as well, with even the legendarily unpleasant martial imagery of John of Patmos clearly extant in the heavenly/eschatological realms.

From that foundation, early Christianity was almost entirely pacifistic even in the face of violence, to the immense frustration of Roman critics like Marcus Aurelius, who viewed it as weak and devoid of manly warrior virtue.   When St. Augustine wrote the City of God, which lays out the distinction between the Kingdom of God and human governments, it was at least in part intended as a response to those Roman traditionalists who blamed Christian faith for weakening the martial spirit of the Roman people.

Christianity did catch up in the violence department, of course, pretty much the moment Constantine misinterpreted his vision and drove Maximus and his army into the bloody Tiber.   Now THAT was a battle.  Whenever faith mingles with coercive social or economic power, bad things happen.  Empires are not so good at turning the other cheek.

So the question is: Is Islam inherently a violent faith?

If Islam is not just a faith but also a philosophy for governing a nation-state, then the answer must be yes.  Coercion is an inherent part of maintaining collective order.  Wherever there are laws that establish the parameters of what is and is not acceptable in a culture, the threat of coercion exists to insure compliance.  I say this not about Islam alone, because that is true for every faith, in every place and time.  

Christianity is the farthest thing from a violent faith, and it is also not a system of governance.  Understood correctly, there can never be a Christian nation.  But we're great at misunderstanding, so whenever the sword has stood behind my faith to enforce conversion and compliance, plenty of blood has been spilled in the name of Jesus.  When jihad is understood as the war to insure not internal spiritual integrity but external material control over land, property, and the behavior of others, then bad [stuff] will happen.

For Islamic fundamentalism, the answer is also yes.  Reading the Quran through the lenses of a rigid, ultraconservative literalism would provide plenty of grounds for violence, oppression, and coercion, just as it has in Christianity.  If there are no texts in the Quran whose authority is mediated by/interpreted through higher order values, then violence will be the result.

But for Islam inherently?  The answer is no, from both my readings of the Quran and my experience of Muslims more broadly.   If a Muslim is guided in their reading of Quran by the Spirit, and not by the desire for material power or control over others, I am convinced that they will be guided to interpret it in a way that is conducive to both peaceful coexistence and nonviolence.  Understood in historical context and interpreted through the lenses of every human being's inner struggle,  jihad can be a positive thing.

That is not, of course, what we see in much of the Arab world, which is why that word is now almost indelibly and perhaps irredeemably connected with violence in the minds of the West.  But that violence is a result of the use of the standards of the world as the framework from which a violent jihadi understands Quran.

From all of this, the question arises:  Is there any ground for nonviolence in the Quran?  And for that, another post.

Anders Breivik, Violence, and Violent Software

Last night, as we ate a late dinner following drum practice, I ran something by my eleven year old.  He and I both share an enjoyment of first person shooter games, and so I ran a bit of challenging FPS news by him.

That news came out of Norway, where the trial of mass-shooter Anders Breivik is underway.  Breivik, in the event you don't recall, is the man who walked into a youth camp with automatic weapons and proceeded to methodically kill seventy-seven unarmed individuals.

He's utterly unrepentant, viewing his actions as a necessary act of resistance against the forces of Marxist/Islamism, which he sees as all part and parcel of the liberal agenda.  In trial this week, Breivik claimed that he'd used FPS games to train for his attack, particularly Modern Warfare 2.  Video games facilitate violence, went the headlines.

So I asked my son what he thought of this.  He was skeptical on two fronts.  First, he noted that Modern Warfare 2 bears only a passing resemblance to actual combat.  It's frenetic, hyperkinetic, and not particularly representative of the dynamics of battle.   My eleven year old has a love of history, and knows that warfare itself looks and feels very little like the gaming experience.

Second, how much "training" do you really need to kill unarmed kids?   My son noted that the mass killing of helpless, terrified, fleeing civilians is not generally part of FPS games.  There, the game is about competition with equals, and testing your skills and reaction times against those of others who are equally empowered.   And it is simply a game.  It is not violent, because those playing it know and mutually assent to the rules of the game.  No physical or actual harm is inflicted to opponents.

The issue is not gaming software.

Nor, quite frankly, is the issue that Breivik is insane.  As the court has found, he is not.  We might like to think that the problem lies in some deep seated neurological problem, but the pathology of his monstrous acts has nothing whatsoever to do with that.   I've spent much time with schizophrenics in my life, and gotten to know those living with real clinical mental illness.  Some have been my friends.   From that context, it is clear to me that there is nothing wrong with the hardware of his mind.

I spent some time reading through portions of Brevik's 1,500 page manifesto yesterday.  Lord have mercy, what is it with these people and their manifestos?  It is "rambling," as they tend to be.  But it is not the work of a broken mind.

It is not the most original work.  In fact, it reads remarkably like the writings of other ultraconservative mass murderers, like also-not-insane Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh.  It also reminded me a bit of Ayn Rand.   It is utterly self-absorbed and convinced that it contains the One Great Truth Only The True Believers Know, wrapping a fundamental selfishness and disdain for other human beings in concepts like liberty and freedom.  It is the work of a mind in isolation, tuned only to those who echo its hatred.

The issue is the software.  Not the gaming software.  The wetware software.

What it is not is insane.  It is not mental illness that drove Breivik to kill, but a pattern of thinking that lead him down that path.  That pattern of thinking is not insanity.  It is better described as evil.  And it's OK to say that word.

Much has been made of Breivik being "Christian."  But his Christianity bears no resemblance to the teachings of Jesus.  Searching his manifesto for the keyword "Jesus" gets you some angry invective about how liberals have stolen Jesus, or are misusing Jesus to excuse being kind to and tolerant of Muslims.   The name of Jesus is dropped when he talks about being a Crusader or a warrior.  Where Jesus himself is mentioned at all, it is not in his core teachings of love, self-giving, or the Kingdom.  Instead, we get two painfully familiar proof-texts about how Jesus gives us the right to armed self-defense.

I say painfully familiar because a skim of Breivik's fulminations reads remarkably like the fury in the American ultraconservative blogosphere.  The same enemies are cited.  The same arguments are made.  The same anger is expressed.   Ultimately, it's an anger rooted in a transition-resistant culture, and its fear of loss.   Clearly, he was an isolated soul, who became so lost in anger and the silo of ultra-right-wing aggrievement that he stopped viewing other human beings as human.   That is true of any extremism.

And it is that programming, diametrically opposed to the love ethic, that has always been the heart of violence.