Welcome back to the 4th week podcast. We're continuing to discuss our rebuttals to Christian nonviolence. Today's episode, we are going to look at the supposed necessity of violence. I debated on whether or not I wanted to do this episode because I think it's gonna be pretty short. And, also, it's going to kind of run into the the previous episode as well as 1 or 2 of the upcoming episodes.

Nevertheless, I think that that this episode is gonna be important to pull out and isolate, just to kinda to give it its own its own space to be able to look at because I think that it is such a a strong argument, and it's it's unique enough that, it warrants its own look. So let's dive in and and see what this rebuttal is. One way to maybe look at the rebuttal is to watch the movie lord of war. And, again, I understand that I'm a I'm a adhere to Christian nonviolence, and, I probably shouldn't like all these violent movies, but I really like dark movies. And Lord of War is is a fantastic movie, that I wouldn't necessarily recommend to anybody, but I love it.

It's just it's cynical about the the way that evil is in the world and about the the power that we really have against it. And I don't know why I like those kinds of movies. It it's really, like, pessimistic and dark. I'm I'm just weird. I don't know.

But, anyway, Lord of War, you've got Nicolas Cage who's playing this guy who ends up getting into arms dealing. And in the course of his arms dealing, he meets up with lots of really bad people and dictators and and other sorts of things. And on one of these trips, he takes his brother with him. His brother has has gotten a pretty strong conscience, and he he's messed up from all of this this arms dealing because he recognizes the gravity of what he's doing. Cage, on the other hand, he is rationalizing at every turn, and he's like, well, if they're gonna just get the guns from somebody else, you know, they might as well get them from me.

I can make money off of it. And, I mean, they're gonna do what they do they're gonna do what they're gonna do regardless. So he takes his his brother on this trip, and his brother's pretty messed up in the head from from all of the stuff that they've done and and the consequences of of what their guns have on people's lives. As they're sitting there doing this one deal, they they recognize that, they're doing a deal with these warlords. And down below in the valley, there's this tent city of, some minority group, and they see the army trucks pulling in.

And Cage's brother knows what's gonna happen. Basically, these guys are ordering all these weapons. And as soon as they've made the deal, they're gonna use the weapons that they're selling to go ahead and slaughter the the the minority group in the tent city. And the brother just just can't do it and, ends up, doing something valiant and, getting killed. And the atrocity the atrocity happens anyway, at the expense of the brother's life as well.

Some people will will kind of point to this sort of, this sort of event. They'll say, let's say, kind of like this tent city here, you've got you see these, warlords and these ISIS trucks, this convoy rolling in, and they're going towards this tent city and they're about to slaughter everybody. You know it. Now instead of being 2 guys, Cage and his brother, you've got you've got a larger band of people, and you're you're pretty sure that you can take, this ISIS group. Why wouldn't you go and intervene by killing ISIS and stopping the massacre that's about to occur?

Why wouldn't you do that? Because to just let them go in and slaughter everybody seems not not just foolish, but it seems immoral to allow such evil to prevail. And before I get into into the discussion on this particular subject, I do wanna remind you that we did talk in episode 7, I believe, when we discussed Saint Cyril. We did talk about how you do have to remember that if you levy such a claim against the nonviolent for refusing to intervene, you have to levy the exact same claim against God because for every atrocity that occurs that a nonviolent individual allows, God allows the same atrocity plus billions of others throughout history and in the future. Every atrocity that occurs is an atrocity in which God could have intervened in his omnipotence and omniscience, but refused to.

So just keep that in mind as well. But let's get into the discussion at hand. So the first point that I would say to a refusal to intervene violently in a situation that is so clearly evil. ISIS, evil. The things that they do to people, evil.

K. That's that's clear. So why why is intervening a problem or lack of intervention not a problem? And first thing I would say, which isn't gonna be comforting at all, but is important, is that morality cannot be determined by the ends. If violence is wrong, it doesn't become right based on any perceived outcome, perceived or actual, and that's important.

So when I perform an action, if I were going to go and intervene with ISIS, with this ISIS convoy, the perceived outcome I'm shooting for is to defeat them and save innocent lives. I am not guaranteed that that is going to be the outcome. So any action I embark on is going to be an action based on perceived ends, not necessarily actual ends. 2nd, I would point back to the empirical evidence that nonviolence is a better course, because nonviolence proves to be more effective in the long run. And so if you're saying, I know the right thing to do is nonviolence, but I need to do this thing, I need to do violence to accomplish this outcome that I perceive will occur.

What you don't understand is that if you say violence is wrong and then you you use a perceived end to justify that, you're you're saying that your perceived end is more important than God's objective standard. But it's encouraging to know that nonviolence is in fact often more effective if you can just hold out. And so even this metric of of being effective in accomplishing a perceived end, is not necessarily true, is not usually true. 3rd, and and I think most importantly, I think there's this myth that violence res resolves things. And, I mean, yes, empirically, we we can see that.

But I think this idea of of resolving things long term can be shown a bit more clearly. And Gandhi has a a good quote I'll introduce this section with where he says, I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary. The evil it does is permanent. Now you might be thinking, that's really stupid because if I stop the sis's convoy right now, I know that I'm going to stop an evil act, and the end of saving the innocent and judging the guilty is gonna be done. What is there that's bad about that?

And to show this, I would and to kind of help explain point number 2, like, why is nonviolence in the end usually more effective than violence? I wanna point you to a movie called The Kingdom. Again, another violent movie and another movie that that I like. In the kingdom, there is this this terrorist act, and what ends up happening is this group of people goes to try to capture these terrorists, and in the end, they find them and kill them just as served. Right?

Well, the movie the the last couple minutes of the movie are are just the the best, the best part of the movie because the movie doesn't end. You know, you think you'd have this closure of the guilty being punished and the innocent avenged, and that's it. Right? Happ happy ending. But the last 2 minutes are just are just beautiful in that it shows the cyclical nature of what violence does.

So I'll I'll put a link to the clip below, but what ends up happening in the last 2 minutes is, you've got one of the actors who, at the beginning of the movie, when this lady found out that, I think it was her husband, had died in this terrorist act, this guy goes up and whispers something in her ear. At the end of the movie, they they asked this guy, so what did you whisper in in in her ear? And he said, I told her we're gonna kill them all. Alright. Well, right.

Fine. She's justified because those people committed a terrorist act, killed a bunch of people. They deserve to die. Right? They should all be killed.

So, but what's beautiful is that then the scene pans to a boy in whatever country they were in. I don't know if it was Iraq or somewhere over in the Middle East. And the boy, his grandpa or dad had just gotten killed by this American, American special forces team. And he's talking to one of his relatives, and he says, we'll kill them all. And that's such a beautiful scene because it shows the cyclical nature of violence.

So maybe those people who committed a terror terrorist act did deserve to die. Maybe that's true. Let me let me give you that. But what's what ends up happening is that in our avenging, when we go over and we kill them in what we think is is justice, we are just perpetuating this violence in the hearts of the relatives of those people that we killed. Their cause is now justified.

Their hatred for us is justified. And because we couldn't forego vengeance, because we thought it was in our hands to to make justice. And so what what you see is, going back to the the example of the ISIS convoy, we go and we slaughter the ISIS convoy who's on their way to slaughter innocent people. We are more justified than them because they are about to do something that is atrociously violent to people who don't deserve it. That's unjust.

They're they're going to shed innocent blood. We are shedding guilty blood. But what we do in this is we we have this temporary outcome that we perceive as good. But what we end up doing is we end up perpetuating hatred and violence, in in the hearts of the families of those ISIS members and people who are looking on and wanting to join ISIS. And, we just we create more violence than we do good.

And we see this in in a lot of examples. We can take a look at World War 1 and what came out of of that, when the Middle East was born and the relationships between various countries. We can see it with with all the proxy wars that we do, where I mean, we gave weapons to Afghanistan when they were fighting Russia, but now Russia's fighting, but but then Afghanistan ended up fighting us. You just see this all over the place where violence is perpetuated because we build up this animosity in our violent actions towards others. We justify in their minds.

We justify their causes, and we either water or plant seeds of hatred. That's what violence does. The Christian way, however, is to be the first to be willing to lay down our lives, to be willing to forego vengeance, and to be willing to love even our enemies. And we might not see any effect, and lots of Christians were martyred. Lots of people who tried to help in abolition, in, saving Jewish lives, in in, in fighting back in the civil rights movement nonviolently, lots of those people lost life or limb.

So we're not saying that this is necessarily going to be the most effective, but that isn't really what it's about. It's about doing the right thing. But even beyond doing the right thing, we do find that it actually may be more effective in some ways. It just takes patient, persistence, perseverance to be willing to lay down our lives daily, to forego vengeance, and to refuse to do violence to others. It's our our willingness to break the cycle as Christians that is what we're called to do.

And for as for as valuable and and effective as we might think violence is, generally, that effectiveness is very momentary and immediate, and it's not, it doesn't have the breadth, or the scope that it should. It doesn't truly restore. It just puts a band aid on on something. So, recommend watching that, the clip from the kingdom and thinking a little bit more about the cyclical nature of violence but for now that's all so peace because I'm a pacifist when I say it I mean you.