That is truly what is wrong with this world today. Crimes need to be punished immediately and to the full extent. Not just pirates in Somalia but the pedophiles, kidnappers, thieves, scam artists, gang members and killers here at home. We are worried about other countries. Hey, let’s clean up this mess here at home.
An example has to be set. If, as you say, they are smashed right away, others may think twice before committing a crime. Over time the morals of this world have deteriorated. I am offended by what I see and what I hear coming from the media today. Free speech, bah! Rules need to be enforced, no exceptions. They should have never let boys wear long hair or the girls wear short skirts. And this foul language and explicit scenes on television, is bombarding young and sensitive minds with garbage. I don’t even bother turning it on anymore. Reality shows, my foot. The vulgar lyrics of the “music,” are offensive too. I don’t listen to radio much any more. They need to be regulated.

Hold on, Wait a minute...what commandment says anything about not violently resisting evil? That's not in my bible, anywhere. "Turning the other cheek" does not mean standing there and letting evil destroy you.

"Loving your neighbor as yourself" I reasonably interpret to mean stepping in to shoot someone who's trying to kill either your neighbor or yourself.

...what commandment says anything about not violently resisting evil? That's not in my bible, anywhere.

Doug, it is in your Bible, if you read it with reference to the original Greek rather than accepting the incomplete translations found in most English versions.

Matthew 5:38:

ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν μὴ ἀντιστῆναι τῷ πονηρῷ

(Ego de lego humin me antistenai to ponero)

I tell you, do not "violently resist" (antistenai) evil.

Antistenai does not mean simply resist but to draw up battle ranks against the enemy. In the Septuagint (the Koine Greek version of the Hebrew Bible), this word is used primarily to indicate armed resistance in a military situation (44 out of 71 times). This is how it is used in Ephesians 6:13. The noun form (stasis) is used in the NT for insurrection, rioting, and violent dissension.

What follows (the advice about turning the other cheek, etc.) is a set of examples of how one should resist evil: without adopting its own methods and thus perpetuating the spiral of violence that is otherwise inevitable, using a kind of spiritual ju-jitsu. You can find a good summary of this on Wikipedia here, under the section titled "Figurative Interpretation."

John, as for your statement that you advocate peace and are the real pacifist, well, Orwell had some pithy things to say about people who misuse language as you do there. And Tacitus described your kind a long time ago:

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

To larceny, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace.

Except in your case you call the slaughter not empire, which would at least be honest, but liberation.

Finally, my bumper sticker (Who Would Jesus Bomb?) makes you nuts because it holds up a perfect mirror to your absurdity as one who claims to follow Jesus while advocating violence. It is a koan for statists.

Dave,

I don't know if I should bother to answer this, since you've run away from the same answers before.

But, you are wrong for at least five reasons.

1. You don't believe this baloney yourself. You are protected day and night by armed men and women, who are paid by your taxes, and who will kill to save your life. And if the Quaker's neighborhood grows dangerous, does he practice "spiritual ju-jitsu?" No, he MOVES. He drives his Prius to a safer neighborhood, ie: one with better gunslingers. And he's glad to see violent criminals kept, by force, in prison.

2. On the international level, we and a few other countries are the cops. We keep the peace with armed force. It's a messy necessary job, just like being a cop in Boulder Creek. And you benefit from this every day, in your prosperity and imported goods and sound sleep. And you don't really want this to change, though you are not honest enough to admit it. You wallow in the benefits, and pretend you are on some higher spiritual plane, unconnected with what the grown-ups do. Pacifists are always found in safe countries, whose militaries protect order and peace with great big gobs of violence, potential or actual.

3. You have to buttress your arguments through the use of numerous lies. (I would consider your lying to me a grievous insult, if I didn't know you do it out of fear, and also lie to yourself.) For instance: "the spiral of violence that is otherwise inevitable..." "we are gaining an empire, not liberating." Right, sure. Let's look at some historical examples: Italy, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Greece, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Indonesia, Grenada, Panama, Malaysia, New Guinea, Austria......We didn't "liberate" them, we locked them in our empire! And all of them are "spiraling into violence!" Violence (American, that is) ALWAYS leads to that.......look at poor poor Luxemburg! "Backwards ran violence as spiraled the mind!"

And now Iraq--We are SO eager to stay there and keep the place in our empire. And the violence... spiraling... spiraling... spiraling...down.) What a bunch of lefty bullshit.

(Ooops, I forgot the components of the Soviet Empire, liberated with big pushes by Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II. Yep, they are now just microbes in our empire. And spiraling, of course.)

And in Iraq, the now-ended "spiral of violence" was perpetrated by the people YOU supported, the Ba'athists and al-Qaeda. You fake-pacifists did everything you could to encourage them, and to discourage the forces of order--the US and Brits and the democratically elected Iraqi government. (And you Leftists have the grotesque effrontery to associate yourselves with the great anti-fascist wars of the past, while doing all you could to keep a contemporary Hitler in power! -- I remember you lauding someone who was in the resistance against Hitler--you the very guy who wanted to keep Saddam safe!)

4. You are inventing your own religion. You can concoct a religion that proves anything if you just pluck out Bible verses you happen to like. That's why Christ established His Church, because he knew that human pride and cunning were corrosive. He didn't just write a book and say "Here. Read it and get on with the program." The Scriptures can only be understood in intimate relationship with the Deposit of Faith guarded by the Church and handed down from the Apostles. People have rebelled against the Faith and Christ's Church from the beginning. Why? PRIDE. To be part of the Body of Christ requires humility and obedience.

5. And notice that Jesus sent the Apostles out into the great non-Jewish world with no specific instructions, though they were obviously going to be immediately facing new and puzzling situations. Was he a fool? Why didn't he make detailed studies of Greco-Roman sociology to help guide them? How stupid! Well, no. They were members of his Church, which is guided by the Holy Spirit. When new situations arose, they had His guidance. Situations like...like...being the cops! Christian cops. Being the soldiers, generals, judges, kings and emperors. That guidance is part of the teachings of the Church, which you have pridefully spurned.

6. "Who would Jesus bomb?" The real absurdity is you leftists, who are desperate to pretend that the world hasn't changed. In fact, war as it has been known in the past is extinct, and likely to remain so. Nations do not fight nations any more--the last time was the Iran-Iraq war in the 80's. The "wars" of today are internal slaughters and genocides within failed states. They are analogous to neighborhoods being taken over by criminal gangs. And what we try to do (when the "pacifists" don't succeed in protecting the killers) is not at all like wars of conquest in olden times. We are the cops. We go in and restore order, and hold elections, and open borders. And push for trade and investment. And repair schools and hospitals. THINK, dammit! How, exactly, is that like, say Frederick the Great invading Silesia? It's not. It's NOT WAR!

And one of the oddities of modern "war" is how the actual bombs are being minimized. No more do we flatten towns--now we can take out a single car or house while leaving bystanders unharmed. Our military is devoting huge efforts to this--we have new cannon artillery that fire 50 lb precision-guided shells, while our big guns are almost obsolete. [Link] What we are doing is exactly analogous to police snipers who can take out a single killer amidst a crowd or mob.

And you leftists don't dare to take note of this because your house of cards rests partly on anti-Americanism. You are self-worshippers. But the greatness and goodness of this country, and the ancient authority of our form of government, demands warm-hearted loyalty, and putting oneself second. That your ice-hearted pride rebels against. A rebellion which is precisely analogous (but on a lower level) to your rebellion against God and His Church.

... The Rationalist makes himself his own centre, not his Maker; he does not go to God, but he implies that God must come to him. And this, it is to be feared, is the spirit in which multitudes of us act at the present day... Our private judgment is made everything to us,—is contemplated, recognized, and consulted as the arbiter of all questions, and as independent of everything external to us. Nothing is considered to have an existence except so far forth as our minds discern it...

Just a few comments in response--there isn't room for everything I could say.

First off, and most revealing, you haven't addressed the plain statement of Jesus: don't violently resist the evil one. Instead you've immediately launched into a rant about evil pacifists and noble American warriors--because in your heart of hearts you know you--John Weidner, the individual--aren't obeying him. Because he's not speaking to collectives of any sort, least of all government, which is based on violence and thus cannot be the means of advancing the Kingdom. He speaks to individuals. But you have not even tried to listen to this hardest of all his commandments, instead indulging in mindless flag-waving and idolatrous nationalism.

You write that "the greatness and goodness of this country, and the ancient authority of our form of government, demands warm-hearted loyalty, and putting oneself second." Bullshit. Idolatrous, murderous, hell-spawned bullshit. Governments have no "authority." What they have is power, which is a very different thing. Here again we see your worship of the State, and the violence that is its foundation. You are trapped by your belief in false communities ("country" and "government") and have lost sight of what God demands.

And it doesn't do any good to hide behind the "Deposit of Faith" or the Magisterium, or any other ideology. As George Fox said: "You will say, 'Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;' but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?"

If so, what use the Deposit of Faith? If not, likewise. I would never deny the good done by Christians throughout the ages; neither will I deny the evil, much of which has arisen from the church's almost immediate surrender to statism and empire, in plain contravention of the words and actions of Jesus. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most of the good has come from individuals, and most of the evil from the institution and its efforts to survive--and that is true of every religion.

Secondly, pacifists (people devoted to non-violence), are not just found in safe countries. A prime example recently was Tom Fox, who was killed in Iraq in 2006--he was but one of many who live their non-violent principles in the face of danger. I am not one of these; as you correctly point out, I live in a very safe place, and my devotion to non-violence has not been tested in any significant way. One step at a time: for right now, I will concentrate on making a difference with each individual I meet, in my local community, and in selected empowerment efforts globally, avoiding coercion in all my affairs. I'll leave the ranting about the white man's burden to you and your ilk.

Thirdly, some of your examples of those countries benefiting from American empire are rather poorly chosen. Indonesia, for instance, where we supported the slaughter of about 750,000 people (in 1956 and 1975). And there were the murderous regimes we supported in Central America: Guatemala and Nicaragua to name but two. And let's not overlook the mess we've made of Haiti. As for Iraq, well, you can pick and choose your statistics to support your murderous fantasies, but it's plain to me that we were killing (with the sanctions) and have killed (in the invasion) far more Iraqis than Saddam ever would have--and that doesn't take into account the millions of refugees we created.

Finally, as for your foolish attempt to redefine war--well, one can only laugh in pity, remembering Dante's vision of those who have lost the good of the intellect. Play your word games all you want: people are dying because idolators like you trust violence more than they trust God.

"you haven't addressed the plain statement of Jesus: don't violently resist the evil one."

That's what I was addressing, but I'll try to make my response more clear.

1. You yourself and the Quakers do not do this, do not believe it. Your ordinary lives are predicated on having hired guns violently resisting evil on your behalf. (A few Quakers going to dangerous places just begs the question of what most of you do.)

2. You yourself do not follow various plain statements of Jesus. I remember well sending you an interesting essay I wrote, about how God clearly prefers working through physical stuff, including references to John 6. And you brushed this aside, and wrote that John 6 referred to a "spiritual eucharist," whatever that might be. But John 6 could not be more brutally plain. (In fact the Greek word translated "eat" is one that usually refers to the eating of animals.) Plain words, but you don't care about the words of Jesus, unless they please you. I could play the same gnostic game. Anything I don't like, I'll just call "spiritual."

3. The concept that underlies statements like "follow the plain words of Jesus" is false. That's the thinking that underlies all the 30,000+ Protestant denominations, including yours, and it is blatantly false. Why? Because you all derive different beliefs from "the plain words of Jesus." You guys pick and chose, and then say, "Ka-Ching! Inner Light! I know just what Jesus meant, and which sayings we can drag into the bushes and ignore."

4. "he's not speaking to collectives of any sort." Sez who? You are just making crazy stuff up. Jesus was constantly talking about government and the ruling elites, and criticizing them. He didn't tell Nicodemus to stop being a ruler of the Jews.

5. God never provides a hard-and-fast template for the whole world. He starts with a small group, and gives them lots of free will to develop into a big flowering mustard plant. Think of a certain tribe of herdsmen led by a guy named Abram. Weren't they a bunch of ignorant brutes! But God worked on them over a thousand years or so, and He let them make mistakes and grope and slowly develop into something very different, under the guidance of the prophets. (And no "inner light," no going off and forming your own denomination--that was called........idolatry.) They became the Israelite church, state, rulers, armies...and if someone like you said that God really wanted Jews togo back to being wandering herdsmen, well, that would just be silly.

Same with the Church. Jesus talked to a few men and women in Palestine, and then let them develop from there. Since the Jews of his time were on a hair-trigger of violent revolution against Rome, he told them violent resistance was a bad idea.) But that does NOT mean that he intended for his followers to remain as a small group of counter-cultural Jews. He expected the mustard seed to grow into something big and glorious. And for his doctrine to be developed for many different situations. Such as Christians being themselves the government.

Imagine someone inventing Judaism today by just using the "plain words" of the Torah. Would that work? Would he come up with anything like the real Judaism? No way. It would just be a version of current thinking. That's exactly what you are doing. You are fudging-up what David Gelernter called "an ice-your-own-cupcake" religion.

"some of your examples of those countries benefiting from American empire are rather poorly chosen..." You are using one (allegedly) bad example to avoid dealing with my statement. Fact is, we are NOT adding anybody to an empire. All those nations feel free to be as anti-American as they like. Your talk of "empire" is a ploy to avoid the plain facts.

What did those Quakers who served so bravely in WWII think about our liberating Japan and Europe? Did they sneer at America? Call us an empire? No way. They were filled with patriotism, and were glad that we had freed peoples from tyranny, and ended genocides. They were proud to call themselves Americans. So Dave, what happened to their version of Quakerism?

You dumped it! You tossed that Quakerism in the trash and invented a new version.

But wait! There was another group that changed their religion at the same time. In exactly the same way. Leftists were patriotic Americans who were glad that we had liberated many lands in the 1940's. And then they dumped that religion and discovered a new one, in which they stood aside from this country (while continuing to enjoy all the benefits she provides). Suddenly, sometime in the 1960's, they started sneering about "empires" and were happy if America made any mistakes. And became ice-hearedly indifferent to the sufferings of other lands unless they could make an anti-Amercan point.

Gee, I wonder what happened? Ah, of course--all the world's leftists were copying the Quakers!

In fact you invented a new religion then and there. Leftism changed, so "Quakerism" changed. And you continue to change your religion year by year. If Leftism endorses abortion or infanticide or gay marriage, then all you Quakers suddenly "get the inner light," and believe the same. You still haven't responded to my several statements on this, except for a vague reference to Quakers "wrestling" with the issue, with no evidence provided.

I say you have no "inner light," you have an inner Lenin.

America is not "the state." An example of that would be the old Yugoslavia, which evaporated the instant the government ceased to exist. Similarly, America is not a volk, as Germany is...If all Germans vanished, then Germany would cease to exist forever.

America is an idea. If the current America and all American citizens and all government were to vanish, BUT our founding documents still existed, then America could be re-born. If a few refugees fled to a distant planet with a CD holding Declaration, Constitution, Federalist Papers, etc, they could re-create America in its true essence. (Actually they would probably need information on America's traditions also.)

And, if you were in that group, that CD would be more valuable than you are! That's why you are anti-American. That's why you savor any American flaw like a child sucking on a candy---it's your excuse to avoid something that's bigger than yourself. You are a really a self-worshipper, disguised as a leftist disguised as a Quaker.

Old time Leftists and Quakers did not need to be anti-American. At least when America was allied with the Soviet Union, they could be as patriotic as anybody. They were not self-worshippers; they were comfortable with having things that were bigger than them, be it Christianity or Liberalism or Socialism.

(And if you Quakers were really opposed to statism and empire, it would be reflected in your politics. You would be conservatives or libertarians, and push for smaller government. And oppose totalitarian states instead of supporting them. What a joke.)