I just saw an ad for a bumper sticker proclaiming: “Atheists don’t start wars.” In our local newspaper, a recent letter to the editor stated: “Nonbelievers are the most politically defiled people in America, yet we neither create nor fight wars and kill people.” And do you remember John Lennon’s song, “Imagine”? Imagine there’s no [...]
Category Archive for 'Violence'
In the introduction to his book, Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich*, Dan Bar-On tells of Andre, a 12-year-old boy in a small German town. One day in 1938 Andre comes home from a youth meeting and tells his father that the next day the children are supposed to throw stones [...]
Who Would Jesus Torture?
Posted in Justice, Peace, Transformation, Violence on May 8th, 2009
A Pew Research Center survey shows that “those who attend religious services at least once a week are much more likely than those who seldom or never attend religious services” to say that torture can often or sometimes be justified against suspected terrorists. (See “The Torture Debate: A Closer Look“) Negative Witness The results of [...]
One night many years ago, an employee of my extended Alabama family came home to find his wife in bed with another man. This is a very old story in human history, but it was a new one to Dale, who summarily killed the usurper. Needless to say, the friends of the other man were [...]
I ran across the following quotation from an interview with the theologian James Alison: At the resurrection, what the apostolic group began to understand was that there is no violence in God, no wrath, no desire for retribution, no need for vengeance or satisfaction” (James Alison, “Befriending a Vengeful God,” Encounter, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, October [...]