Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. Today, we are going to continue our look at the incoherence of just war theory. Since we've already assessed all of the tenants of Just War Theory, I'm just gonna ask a few kind of closing general questions here. The first question I have is related to Augustine and Aquinas. Now they're they're two of the most brilliant minds in Christianity, yet both of them diverge from our modern notions of just war in some significant ways.

Notably, Augustine Augustine thought that there's no way that you can kill somebody in, you know, in personal self defense or just self defense of your defense of your family because you have too many passions at play and you're gonna act passionately and end up killing somebody without loving your heart for them. Yet today, so many Christians, at least in The United States, are all for killing people in self defense. Not not only in self defense in one's home, but self defense even when you don't know if one's intent is to kill you. And that seems to be a problem. How do we use Augustine to justify just war and look up to him, yet we decide to discard some of the the serious questions he had about how we justify killing?

And I'd like to have somebody answer that. And same thing with with Aquinas. Aquinas didn't take killing somebody lightly. He had to come up with a a whole a whole rationale to be able to explain how somebody who died by your hands, how that killing could be justified. And it was justified so long as you weren't trying to kill them and the good that you were trying to achieve was better than the loss of or as good as the loss of their life.

So somebody comes into your home and you feel like as your last resort, you're going to shoot that person but you don't want to kill them. Right? You're not saying, okay, I'm gonna aim for a headshot so that that person has no chance to then come after my family. Instead you might say, I'm gonna aim for, his shoulder or his belly or whatever, but I wanna I wanna deter him, the aggressor, from coming and if I shoot him in the stomach, he has a chance to live and it's a it's a pretty easy shot as far as the body goes and so he'll probably get out of here if I shoot him in the stomach. But I don't wanna shoot him in the chest, in the heart, and I don't wanna shoot him in the head, so that's that's what I'm intending to do.

That's not what we see from American Christians. American conservative Christians, at least the the more conservative ones, the ones that I grew up with and the ones that I hear from a lot today, they're going to say, hey, look, somebody comes into your house, they're trespassing, they can't have a good intention, and there's no way I'm letting somebody harm my family. If he comes in, I've got my shotgun, I'm gonna blast him in the chest. And, not only that, but I'm not gonna let him I'm not gonna let him get away. I wanna make sure that he's dead so that, he can't get off my property because if he's off my property, then I incur different sets of legal issues.

Right? It's it's this idea that I'm gonna blast them to kill them and that's their problem because they shouldn't have stepped on my property. They shouldn't have made themselves my enemy. And for Aquinas who's more lenient than Augustine in terms of of what we can do for self defense, I I think Aquinas would be appalled at American conservative Christian gun ethics or a lack thereof. And we even see in a lot of movies and a lot of scenarios that you hear from people who maybe hear some noises in their house, it's like instead of barricading themselves in their room and getting their family all together and and trying to hunker down.

What do you see in the movies and what do hear from people who've gone and and heard noises in their house? They grab their gun and they go check on it. Why? Why would you do that? You do that because you think you have the upper hand, you have a gun, and you're willing to do violence and you're gonna make sure that somebody doesn't slight you by coming onto your property and thinking that they can enter your home without consequence.

Whether you say that or not, why else would you go after them? If violence was truly a last resort, what we'd see in movies and what we'd hear from people who check on noises in their house, we'd have people barricading themselves in their room and calling 911 if they really felt that they were threatened. It wouldn't be somebody going and being ready for a fight. That is not the Christian thing to do, but it is the Christian thing that's done and that seems problematic to me and I think it would seem problematic to Augustine and Aquinas as well. So our rationale for just war today in the conservative Christian community is is absolutely not the same as the rationale that we see from people like Augustine and Aquinas, the two whatever fathers of of just war theory if you will.

Another problem you have which which we've cited a number of times throughout all of our episodes is how do you deal with the early church tradition being opposed to all violence, whether that's abortion, capital punishment, self defense, war? How do you deal with that? It seems to me that that those individuals who are closest to Christ would have a pretty good idea of what Christ meant by by his life and his words. And it also seems to me that if there was any discrepancy there that they wouldn't have been they wouldn't have had this one voice that they had until Constantine. Yeah, I know that our very early sources aren't as numerous as later sources, but I mean we've we can see with the change, we've got a motive and a means as you have people entering power who are able to control definitions and ideas, and we have a reason for them to want to control those things, whether subconsciously or consciously, and that reason is to maintain and grab at more power.

We've seen how that power works out through the ages in books like Anatomy of a Hybrid, of a Hybrid and, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, On Torture and, I mean, Crusades, everything you can think of coming out of Christendom is just it's not a heritage that is convenient for us when we talk to atheists and other people who want to see how Christianity is different, not just hear how hypothetically it should be. Finally, last general question that stands out to me is how would not going to war or not preparing for war have impacted previous wars? We've talked about this a little bit in in regard to World War one, World War two, you know, War one and how that made issues with the Middle East, and led to Germany in World War two, and World War two, the creation of Israel, and and further dealings with the Middle East, and and how that kind of went downhill, and the issues there. We talked about that a little bit too. But I wanna I wanna bring up one other scenario that I I don't think I mentioned yet.

And this is it's interesting to me. It it just came up to me the other day when I was reading Victories Without Violence, and one of the stories just made something click for me because in story after story, one of the common themes that you see is that, peacefulness disarms violence. And in some of these situations, the reason in many of the situations, the reason an individual ended up being safe was because when they didn't have a weapon, they weren't viewed as a threat, and when they weren't viewed as a threat, the armed people were disarmed in their posture. So even though the aggressors or armed individuals had arms, they're disarmed against people who aren't armed because of their posture of, not maybe not deference but, just their posture of peacefulness. When you're not a threat, your chance of not being harmed is is, better.

So that made me think, of course, to World War two, because I've had discussions with a lot of people who, who will say, well, what were we supposed to do? We were attacked by Japan. Right? Shouldn't we have have, attacked them and entered the war? And there were a couple thoughts that went through my head.

The first thought after having read Victories Without Violence is, I wonder if Japan would have ever attacked us had we not had a very powerful navy. If we wouldn't have had a navy, would they have attacked us? Or even, let's say we had a navy but instead of aircraft carriers which are, as far as I understand, extremely aggressive because you have aircraft carriers so that you can so you can get to other countries and other places with your air force. If if we didn't have an aggressive navy but only a defensive one or if we didn't have much of a navy at all, would Japan have really attacked us? Maybe they would have.

I I can't answer that question. But victories without violence really made me think, it seems like places that end up getting attacked are often places that seem like threats for some reason or another to to other countries. And I just don't think The United States would have been attacked had we not had an offensive navy or had we not been seen as a threat. And it makes me wonder today how how much we are attacked because of how powerful and militaristic we are. Yeah.

The the conservative Christian idea is that people hate us because we're so awesome and because we've we've got so much money and we're so we're so free. Right? People must hate us because of all these things we have. And maybe there's some truth to that. I don't necessarily doubt it.

But, Neom Chomsky and and a lot of other people might might say there are lots of different reasons that people hate us. Right? We meddle. We've we've planted politicians and dictators in in other countries, just the ones that we want. We've subverted other governments.

We've we've done a lot of things with our power, and I think it's it's our actions that have brought hatred on us as well as as well as our position, our power, the fact that we we spend so much on our army, and I think that that paints a target on our back because we don't disarm people with our posture. And of course, the other issue I have there with with World War two was that we we did end up basically joining the war for revenge, not for some moral moral soapbox that we were standing on. We wanted to get Japan back, and the Doolittle raids helped to prove that. And we we didn't really get involved for moral reasons. We got involved because revenge was our excuse.

Those are just a few of my general questions and observations. In our final episode on looking into Just War, we are going to evaluate some of the different wars and how they met or did not meet the Just War criteria as far as I understand it. That's all for now. So peace, because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.