Message #3498

[AndrewF]

lovely post AndrewF!
Thank you! I will try to answer your points in turn...

 as i was reading through i got to the point where i was wondering whether in apparent realpolitik terms whether so long as we did war and legitimised war we could get beyond the boys will be boys attitudes of them and us and our salvation is in how big our stockpile of weapons
Sadly probably not...
# .... does to start a war ever make sense? to join in war?
That depends on how you define 'making sense' - politically (and sometimess even more importantly, economically) it can sometimes be the only answer that does make sense, but morally I don't believe it ever does.
whatever do wars come to an end for? that's if they ever do.... i find myself wondering ! it;s been pretty peaceful this side of Europe
assuming you ignore little things like the Troubles in NI, the Basque separatist, the Baader-Meihoff and Red Brigades etc... not to mention the proxy wars we have fought
....  what view for civilisation unless we believe culturally followed by politically that we have less to lose by not going to war.... the jaw jaw factor it works some of the time but not all of the time the ugly legacy of the iraq war is tinged with economic opportunism whether it is oil or arms trade... and while we legitimise these exploitative activities we as a human race we will continue to have wars and a legacy of hate... jaw jaw it feels is not enough...
Sadly I think that you are pebbly right - because we are scared of what we don't understand and react by trying to fight it... But this is why the jaw-jaw is SO important, because the more we understand the 'others' the less different we realise they are..
some time ago i found myself pondering that football match you know  christmas day whenever it was during the first world war where troops from opposing sides put down their weapons and played footie and then went back to warfare////  if only lthey had refused to play on... the wargame i mean....
Indeed - but they would have been shot by their own side for certain if they had, as opposed to only probably being shot by the enemy if they returned to the fight... Not odds I would cheerfully chose! (but there again I hope I would not have been in that position in the first place...)
  do they need spiritual leaders ?
Clearly they do! - and rather better ones than they mostly had I would say - at least better than the 'top brass' of spiritual leaders who mostly stayed at home and pontificated.
 their need for personal salvation is ongoing is it something confined only to our culture? if not maybe the troops should stay at ho,me and the pardres/spiritual advisers sent to face eachother on the front line...  but that's from a backseat adviser who does not want the war in the first place and sees no point in it... if the spiritual leaders see the point let them fight it out after all is it not about who's god is the biggest winner?
I think you are missing the point here ecu. The two sides of the first war (and most other wars) had/have the same God(s), and the spiritual leaders on both sides were, in fairness, caught between a rock and a hard place. If they had not said that it was the duty of every able-bodied man to join up they would have been slung in jail (and executed) for treason. I doubt (m)any of them, in their heart of hearts, honestly believed that the mass slaughter of the First War was actually what God wanted - and in fact I do not believe that God has anything to do with the outcome of a battle let alone a war.
which is silly cos the bible shows that battle by battle the outcome is not always to be predicted or if it is then what on earth is the point of fighting it off in the first place....
Actually, I think the outcome of the battles in the Bible is fairly predictable - if the Jews had been behaving themselves and sticking to the covenants then they won and if not they lost! But I also think this is pretty irrelevant to the current debate, as even if you assume that the words we read in the bible are literally true (as opposed to the drift of the narrative being true) then the logic behind it is that God was establishing a nation who would lead other nations into a more Godly way of life, and they would not be able to do that if they were wiped out....
 folks not a part of the table negotiations having to put their lives on the front line is just pretty undercivilised in my opinion
[/i]Couldn't agree more - but it was ever thus - at least since kings stopped leading from the front in battle...