Good Words, and from a Conservative, No Less (3)

My response to this email.

Twelve years ago we had a Republican president and a Republicanj Congress that did a pretty thorough job of exactly what you say here you want. Click here to see what else they did.

The weapons your heroes used were so effective against the women who survived them that the Iraqi minister of health recommended that people in the affected areas not have children at all because the rate of birth defects was so high.

I would submit that any reasonable person whose family or friends were blessed with these children and who connected Christianity in any way with what happened to them would be well within his rights to consider Christians bad neighbors and do everything in his power to get those Christians to convert, leave, or die.

I remember hearing of no evangelical Christian going to Kuwait in the name of Jesus before Desert Storm to save the babies from being thrown out of the incubators. I do know that a Republican administration told Saddam it was no biggie if he invaded Kuwait to begin with, and their friends in the arms industry made gigabucks (not to mention winning a publicity landslide) out of Desert Storm.

I've heard of no evangelical Christian going to either Washington or Baghdad in the name of Jesus to stop the deaths (500/week) from the Clinton sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, but I've seen a Clinton administration official tell the world that they knew what they were doing and considered it worth it.

I've read the fatwa Osama issued in 1998 declaring jihad against the US government, not the American people, but I have never heard of an evangelical Christian going in the name of Jesus to try to put Ken Sande's principles into practice in conversation with him.

And, of course, after 9/11, instead of suggesting that Americans look at the beam in their own eye before taking out the mote in the Muslim world's eye, Mr. Evangelicalism Himself, Billy Graham, simply told us to pull together as a nation.

Maybe the reason jihadists don't respond to anything but dominant force is that that's all they ever get from our side. And no, I don't think the billions in "humanitarian aid" we've sent there over the years counts: the purpose of bread and circuses here and abroad is to keep the slaves from revolting, and everything that didn't go to bread and circuses over there was taken from the pockets of middle-class Americans (as was the bread-and-circuses budget) and put in the pockets of rich, compliant foreigners. The people over there who aren't in the crony loops hate the US puppets, and ISIS has a golden opportunity to provide an alternative. (Being a state -- in fact, as the powers that be ordained of God in much of Syria and Iraq -- they will fail, but not for lack of opportunity to punish those who do evil and commend those who do right, as Peter's epistle has it.)

Conservatives and liberals, among others, know no language but brute force. It's how you fight prostituion, pornography, homosexuality, substance abuse, loss of income from unemployment and retirement, illiteracy, disease, hunger, racism, and just about everything else. The result has been the bloodiest century in the history of the world, and the carnage shows no sign of ending. What will it take to get you to question your presuppositions and consider putting Romans 13 in the context of the Golden Rule and 1 Samuel 8 instead of vice versa?

The main article in the American Conservative sounds a warning that patriotic conservatives regard us Christians with suspicion. I don't know about you, but I think that if Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, Paul Wolfowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinsky, Donald Rumsfeld. Barack Obama, Janet Yellen, and the rest of the establishment who walk the corridors of power no matter who's in office had the opportunity to shut the churches tomorrow, they'd take it. If I were Satan I would want the evangelical community to forfeit the moral high ground by going along with their barbarity as long as they don't close churches. Once no one who would otherwise defend us wants to have anything to do with us, they'll close the churches and that will be that.

Well, no it won't. A few weeks ago [the preacher at my church] read from the pulpit the testimony of a Syrian Christian suffering from the blowback from the war we started. God will use people like that Syrian Christian to do the work of evangelizing the nations we passed up the opportunity to do so we could feed Uncle Sam so we wouldn't have to have testimonies like his. We will reap what we've sown. "Give and it will be given to you, pressed down, shaken together, a full measure.

Take another good long look at those pictures. Those may be our great-grandchildren..