A case against revenge

[TheWall]

How can I show people that revenge is wrong?

[Bill the Cat]

How can I show people that revenge is wrong?

By your actions and words. Forgive and speak truth. That's about it.

[Meh Gerbil]

Often times we try to get people to a conclusion before they've accepted the premises.
Teach a person to live in the Spirit and the fruits of the Spirit will follow - revenge is incompatible with those fruits.

[Paula]

How can I show people that revenge is wrong?

Teach them to love their enemies (which might be the hardest command in the Bible to obey). To learn how to love your enemies properly, you need look no further than Christ--His sacrificial death on the cross demonstrates it clearly.

Besides, all the proper renderings of justice are ultimately the domain of God. Our duty is to strive to be like Christ which means doing what doesn't come naturally--loving our enemies and being kind to those who hate us.

I wish I could say I was better at this, but that doesn't change what the Bible teaches, and besides, that's the great thing about being a Christian--you know God will redeem you.

[Rushing Jaws]

Teach them to love their enemies (which might be the hardest command in the Bible to obey). To learn how to love your enemies properly, you need look no further than Christ--His sacrificial death on the cross demonstrates it clearly.

Besides, all the proper renderings of justice are ultimately the domain of God. Our duty is to strive to be like Christ which means doing what doesn't come naturally--loving our enemies and being kind to those who hate us.

I wish I could say I was better at this, but that doesn't change what the Bible teaches, and besides, that's the great thing about being a Christian--you know God will redeem you.

If Poland had forgiven the Nazis for the Rape of Poland, the Nazis would simply have destroyed the nation entirely. When faced with people like Hitler and Lenin, forgiveness would have been suicidal, irresponsible, and wicked. The proper course of action against Nazi Germany was to bomb it into the Stone Age, which it could not complain of, since that is what the Luftwaffe had done. ISIS cannot be forgiven, because Islam is a supremacist ideology that takes kindness for weakness; the only good course of action is to destroy them, just as they intend to destroy us. It is us or them.

The Sermon on the Mount works only in small communities and undeveloped societies. It is hopelessly unhelpful in a society as complicated as the kind in the West. To keep ourselves secure we need capitalism, banking, armies, spies, prisons, police forces, politicians, political parties, voting, and possibly the death penalty & torture; and much more, that was either scarce or non-existent 1950 years ago. Rapists and paedophiles and traitors and murderers and similar vermin need to be punished, and punished properly - not forgiven. Jesus Himself called people "evil", and forgot all His fine words about love of enemies when He was giving the Pharisees and Scribes a tongue-lashing in St Matthew 23. So how can He have expected the S on the M would be any use to anyone, especially as a guide to a whole nation ?

St Paul adapts the Teaching of Jesus, as though recognising that ideas suitable to a backwater like Judea would be complete non-starters in places like Ephesus, Corinth and Philippi. Out go the Beatitudes and the preaching of social justice - in comes Christian morality.

[Adrift]

Totally off topic, but Rushing Jaws, do you intentionally look for old threads to resurrect at random or is there a method to the madness?

[Jedidiah]

If Poland had forgiven the Nazis for the Rape of Poland, the Nazis would simply have destroyed the nation entirely. When faced with people like Hitler and Lenin, forgiveness would have been suicidal, irresponsible, and wicked. The proper course of action against Nazi Germany was to bomb it into the Stone Age, which it could not complain of, since that is what the Luftwaffe had done. ISIS cannot be forgiven, because Islam is a supremacist ideology that takes kindness for weakness; the only good course of action is to destroy them, just as they intend to destroy us. It is us or them.

The Sermon on the Mount works only in small communities and undeveloped societies. It is hopelessly unhelpful in a society as complicated as the kind in the West. To keep ourselves secure we need capitalism, banking, armies, spies, prisons, police forces, politicians, political parties, voting, and possibly the death penalty & torture; and much more, that was either scarce or non-existent 1950 years ago. Rapists and paedophiles and traitors and murderers and similar vermin need to be punished, and punished properly - not forgiven. Jesus Himself called people "evil", and forgot all His fine words about love of enemies when He was giving the Pharisees and Scribes a tongue-lashing in St Matthew 23. So how can He have expected the S on the M would be any use to anyone, especially as a guide to a whole nation ?

St Paul adapts the Teaching of Jesus, as though recognising that ideas suitable to a backwater like Judea would be complete non-starters in places like Ephesus, Corinth and Philippi. Out go the Beatitudes and the preaching of social justice - in comes Christian morality.

Forgiveness is for offenses past, not ongoing attacks. It is for people not for abstractions like parties. I may forgive someone who trespassed against me, but if someone is still actively moving against me self defense is not refusal to forgive.

And this is sort of an old thread.

[KingsGambit]

I don't know if we can not apply it to military action, though. The early church unanimously condemned warfare, largely based on Jesus's teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. How that would apply to the Rape of Nanking (in your example), I can't say.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscr...e-in-violence/

[Darth Executor]

The early church unanimously condemned warfare

That's a pacifist canard with no resemblance to reality. And that article is rife with dishonesty (most pacifist diatribes are). IE:

But Tertullian is not distinguishing between different types of killing in the sense of murder vs self defense vs warfare, he is literally talking about the tools used to murder (he was also into RPGs apparently, because he covers warriors, rogues and mages alike). Tertullian is arguing that just because God made iron, it doesn't mean that it's ok to use iron to murder someone. He then drives that point in with another example (idols).

http://www.tertullian.org/anf/anf03/...tm#P900_353744

Why, all sorts of evils, which as indubitably evils even the heathens prohibit, and against which they guard themselves, come from the works of God. [8] Take, for instance, murder, whether committed by iron, by poison, or by magical enchantments. Iron and herbs and demons are all equally creatures of God. Has the Creator, withal, provided these things for man's destruction? Nay, He puts His interdict on every sort of man-killing by that one summary precept, "Thou shalt not kill." [9] Moreover, who but God, the Maker of the world, put in its gold, brass, silver, ivory, wood, and all the other materials used in the manufacture of idols? Yet has He done this that men may set up a worship in opposition to Himself? On the contrary idolatry in His eyes is the crowning sin. What is there offensive to God which is not God's? But in offending Him, it ceases to be His; and in ceasing to be His, it is in His eyes an offending thing. [10] Man himself, guilty as he is of every iniquity, is not only a work of God--he is His image, and yet both in soul and body he has severed himself from his Maker. For we did not get eyes to minister to lust, and the tongue for speaking evil with, and ears to be the receptacle of evil speech, and the throat to serve the vice of gluttony, and the belly to be gluttony's ally, and the genitals for unchaste excesses, and hands for deeds of violence, and the feet for an erring life; or was the soul placed in the body that it might become a thought-manufactory of snares, and fraud, and injustice? I think not; [11] for if God, as the righteous exactor of innocence, hates everything like malignity--if He hates utterly such plotting of evil, it is clear beyond a doubt, that, of all things that have come from His hand, He has made none to lead to works which He condemns, even though these same works may be carried on by things of His making; for, in fact, it is the one ground of condemnation, that the creature misuses the creation.

Tertullian may well be a pacifist, I don't remember. But the case is not made in that citation.

[Darth Executor]

Teach them to love their enemies (which might be the hardest command in the Bible to obey).

It doesn't seem all that hard, a good chunk, if not the majority of the Western population loves their enemy and hates their friend.

[tabibito]

Then again

http://www.christianitytoday.com/new...gypt-isis.html

[KingsGambit]

That's a pacifist canard with no resemblance to reality.

No resemblance to reality? Can you find any citations from early church writers in the first two centuries who state that Christians can participate in the Roman military?

To demonstrate that there is no resemblance to reality, you need to actually demonstrate that pacifism was widely opposed, not poke holes in one or two passages used to bolster the argument.

[Jedidiah]

. . . The early church unanimously condemned warfare, largely based on Jesus's teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. . . .

[RumTumTugger]

No resemblance to reality? Can you find any citations from early church writers in the first two centuries who state that Christians can participate in the Roman military?

To demonstrate that there is no resemblance to reality, you need to actually demonstrate that pacifism was widely opposed, not poke holes in one or two passages used to bolster the argument.

Not opposed but not actually prescribed. I've heard that in those times Roman soldiers had to swear and worship the Ceaser(emperor) could that have been why Christians were not supposed to join the military?

[Darth Executor]

No resemblance to reality? Can you find any citations from early church writers in the first two centuries who state that Christians can participate in the Roman military?

No, but that is not the same thing as support for pacifism. Pacifists routinely try to deceive people by showing quotes of early Christians opposing military memebership on account of its pagan reqirements as evidence of pacifism.

I should also note that early church writers are not the final authority on whether Christians actually DID participate in the military.

To demonstrate that there is no resemblance to reality, you need to actually demonstrate that pacifism was widely opposed, not poke holes in one or two passages used to bolster the argument.

The subject barely even comes up as evidenced by the drought of honest quotes coming from pacifists. It's not so much that it was widely opposed that it was largely never brought up in the first place.