The arguement, “what would you do if your mother was being raped?” is interesting. I pray that I would never be put in that situation and have to make that decision.

However, until that time, I will keep the peace testimony for “to obey is better than sacrifice.”

Please keep in mind that Quakers are not the only pacifists because of religious conviction. Mennonites, Church of the Brethren, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Christ Sanctified Holy Church and several Baptist groups also have this understanding.

Should everyone just stop carrying their weapons? When William Penn asked George Fox if he should stop carrying his sword, Fox answered, “carry it as long as you can.” Indeed, pacifism is a conviction of the heart. No arguement against pacifism can override the convictions of the Holy Spirit. Friends who engage in war should be held with love and should be supported. They should not, however, be allowed to hold membership in the Religious Society of Friends. To do so would go against everything Friends believe regarding the Kingdom of God.

That suffering may include enduring imprisonment and even death even though innocent of any crime, or living under an oppressive conditions as Friends did when they patiently endured severe corporeal and economic punishments rather than enlist in the army, pay war taxes, drill with the militia, be conscripted, pay a substitute, etc. While Friends used peaceful, political methods to partially mitigate their suffering (e.g., obtaining legal exemption of conscious objectors from conscription), they nevertheless accepted suffering themselves rather than to inflict it on others.

Is it realistic to expect everyone to accept such suffering? Friends do not necessarily expect everyone to share our scruples in this regard. We do not condemn individuals who defend themselves with violence when necessary, or Friends who have kept our Peace Testimony inconsistently. Neither do we necessarily condemn a state that does so, even if we cannot personally participate in such conduct, if the purpose is just, the means are lawful, and innocent blood is not shed.

Rather, we have learned from direct experience — individually and corporately — that by listening to and heeding the Inner Light (known by some as Jesus the Christ), human beings can live in a world full of injustice and violence without becoming, as Camus said, either victim or executioner. As President Bush has said, Christ can change your heart.

Thus, when we say “War is not the Answer”, we mean that it is not the answer to any evil, whether characterized as terrorism, poverty, injustice, or war itself. We mean that war always obscures and interferes with the ability of human beings — whether aggressor, defender, or innocent victim — to hear the true Answer and therefore does not truly solve the problem. So not only does our religious experience prevent us from personally participating in war, our love for others requires us to testify that war is not the solution to their problems (and to point them to the Prince of Peace who is).

This kind of understanding is obviously at odds with the a-theistic, secular world view that predominates the world today, a world view that denies any supernatural or eternal moral reality, that relies on human reason and technique to solve problems such as war and evil. Such a world view sees religion — and I would say human beings as well — merely as a tool to achieve certain ends rather than as an end in itself. The efforts of Osama bin Laden and George Bush to use religious language and symbols to sanctify the war they wage against other is blasphemous, though entirely logical from a secular point of view.

Even so, we have not been called to disengage from the World, to throw up our hands and say “You’ll never understand until you’ve been converted.” We are a practical people and have worked tirelessly to improve the concrete day-to-day conditions of human beings — from ministering impartially to the victims of war to abolishing slavery to achieving the political equality of men and women. We believe things can be better even if they cannot yet be perfect.

Regarding war, we make concrete political proposals that we believe, in good faith, will reduce the suffering that war has produced and prevent further suffering. Here is on such practical proposal on how to more effectively protect the innocent from terrorism: http://www.fcnl.org/pdfs/ppdc_booklet.pdf .

We are engaged in the political conversation, but our Peace Testimony is not rooted in politics and cannot ultimately be judged in political terms (or, I should say, we would not accept any judgment of it that made in solely political terms).

The questions we ask ourselves continually, the answers for which we hold ourselves responsible, are: “Do you faithfully maintain our testimony that war and the preparation for war are inconsistent with the spirit of Christ? Do you search out whatever in your own way of life may contain the seeds of war? Do you stand firm in our testimony, even when others commit or prepare to commit acts of violence, yet always remembering that they too are children of God? Do you endeavor to live in virtue of that life and power which takes away the occasion of all wars?” With Divine Assistance, we pray that our answer is “yes.”

Greene led the Continental forces against the British forces of Earl Cornwallis in the Southern States. His strategy of wearing down the superior forces of the enemy, without exposing his own inferior forces to destruction, finally led the exhausted British to head for Yorktown. And it’s there they finally surrendered.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to separate you out from the rest of the folks when it comes to defending the country–or the citizenry locally from bad guys–which is fortunate for you. And, I would guess, not something of which you are ignorant.

Perhaps you were not here when we discussed sheepdogs and sheep. One of the issues we discussed is the contribution pacifists make to increasing the chance of war, and Orwell’s famous observation that, effectively, the pacifist favors the fascist.

What about my point was a straw man?

Anyway, I don’t think you would be able to manage the discussion in the sheep-sheepdog thread.

Start right in.

“This is sort of like modern Christians attempting to fix the just war doctrine. It implies that Augustine and Aquinas screwed up.”

You could take the same logical approach to Augustine and Aquinas. They attempted to fix the “love thy enemy” doctrine, which implies that Jesus Christ screwed up, I guess.

I hope neo-neocon gets to the Mennonites and other peace churches, who’ve also been in the pacifist camp for awhile. I recommend she take a look at their Peace and Justice Series, which tracks the pacifist line a bit further back than the Quakers. The Way God Fights: War and Peace in the Old Testament and How Christians Made Peace with War: Early Christian Understandings of War. Good reading, and helpful in understanding Quaker experience as part of a longer trajectory.

The point is, this issue has been going for awhile. We (all here) are but 1 or 2 generations in a line of more than a hundred generations who’ve been wrestling with it and trying to find a better way. To say that Gandhi or the Quakers haven’t found an easy solution is kind of begging the question, isn’t it?

During the Cold War, we played a game of chess with the USSR. No particular fight was going to be decisive, but the accumulation would. That being the case, the perceived threat was not immediate.
T. R. Fehrenbach, in “This Kind of War” goes over the theory in detail, including the point that, if the other guy calls Mate, there is still the option of kicking over the board (going nuclear). He does this in the context of a bang-up history of the Korean War and its origins.
Example: How important is Cuba? If the ballon went up in Europe, half the stuff we’d need to get over there would go through the Straits of Florida. That’s how important Cuba is. Worse, the resources we’d need to fight the convoys through the Strait would be resources we could use–some of them–in the North Atlantic and the Western Approaches, or in the fighting in Europe. The stuff the Sovs would use would have been stuff not useful elsewhere, short-range missile boats (Komar), diesel-electric submarines, short-range attack aircraft (useful elsewhere, though).
If the Straits look to the Soviet planners as if they can be shut off, and if Iceland is taken out of NATO’s use for covering the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap, and if, say, Portugal will no longer base NATO aircraft for covering the Bay of Biscay, and Dakar can’t be used to base aircraft to cover the Atlantic Narrows, and maybe a few other items, like a Friend elected president, then the Sovs might think they could win. And if they thought that, they might try. And if they tried, we could have a real problem.
Try explaining this to a sophomore or a pacifist whose hands are over his ears while he yells “Lalalalalala”.

Over the years since, Quakers have included others who participated in war and then took an honest look at the system of violence that they had endorsed. In the past half century, as a Friend, I’ve known several handfuls of convinced Friends who had served as soldiers in WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, and other wars since, and when they joined the Quakers, it was with the feeling, “There has got to be a better way!”

The point is, there are plenty of people who have not themselves experienced violence, who can venture opinions about the merits of organized, governmentally sanctioned warfare. That includes many Friends, and it includes many who support America’s wars around the globe (also a fairly large portion of American armed forces who do not engage directly with the “enemy”). But in a sense there are people outside this middle ground, who have committed themselves personally to killing others, or who have committed themselves personally to *not* killing others, who have something in common.

I can understand the motivations of someone who supports violence, in a just cause, but can’t bring himself to do it personally. To my mind, that’s simply extreme squeamishness, but I can accept that. You would not want such a person to be forced to hold a gun and guard your back… especially when there are many other useful things for such people to do.

I would think that such people would be grateful to those who do stand between their beloved homes and the war’s desolation. I hope they do.

My difficulty arises with people who, with their “war is not the answer” banners and bumper-stickers, essentially say “I reject violence, and so should you”. Somebody’s got to fight off the wolves.

On a personal note: in basic training, I and my fellow recruits were indoctrinated to use “reasonable force” — which was always defined for us as “the minimum amount of force that solves the problem”. Our standing orders were consistent with that. Perhaps the “pragmatic Quakers” and the warmongering brutes in uniform aren’t that far apart after all.

respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline