Loveable Vampires Don't Count

Sitaram · Loveable Vampires Don't Count

http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?for...ilosophy&show=0&cid=84925

This morning, I watched a PBS interview with Miroslav Volf ,
professor at Yale Divinity and a native of Croatia, on forgiveness
and nonviolence vs. war, lethal force, capital punishment,
retribution. It brought to mind the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who
chose during World War II to leave the safety of America, return to
Nazi Germany, and conspire to assassinate Hitler.

Miroslav Volf must have some acquaintance with Jaroslav Pelikan who
is also at Yale. How greatly I admire Pelikan's five volume "The
Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine."

HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS POST:

(see below) [SITARAM comments: I am reminded of the beautiful saying
of St. Isaac the Syrian (which I now paraphrase): "All the sins of
mankind through all the sprawling millenia of human history are as no
more that a handful of dust before God's infinite mercy and
forgiveness and compassion."]

Jalalu'l-Din Rumi says, regarding the various differing religious
viewpoints, that "the lamps are different, but the Light is the
same."

Sitaram comments:

I admire Rumi's sentiment, but I am also reminded of the final Surah
in the Qu'ran, the Surah of the Unbeliever:

Say therefore unto the Unbeliever:

The god which you worship is not the God which we worship.
And the God which we worship is not the god which you worship.
So therefore, unto us OUR God and unto you your god.

I can not agree with President Bush and many others who conclude that
Muslims worship the same God as others worship, if only for the
simple reason the Qu'ran comes right out and emphatically asserts
that Muslims should not believe that they worship the same God as
others worship.

Even the Jewish Psalms state that "The gods of the nations are
demons."

Even Paul of the New Testament says to the Athenians at the Hill of
Mars "ye worship ye know not what."

==========================

Huston Smith, in his PBS documentary, quoted what he must have felt
is potentially the most interfaith passage in the Qu'ran: (Surah V,
verse 48, paraphrased): "Had I (Allah) wished to create all people as
the same religion, I could have easily done so. But, for my own
purposes, I have created peoples as different religions. Therefore,
if you must compete with one another, then compete in doing good
works, and when you return to Me, I shall explain to you the reasons
for the differing religions."

Of course, the very next verse (Surah V:52) says "Therefore, do not
be friends with the Christians and Jews. They have each other to be
friends with. He who is friends with them is one with them, and Allah
does not help evildoers."

Sitaram is very pleased to become acquainted with the thought and
writings of Miroslav Volf through PBS broadcasts. Below, I will share
with you some of what is available on the Internet concerning
Professor Volf.

At the end of Volf's interview this morning on PBS, Volf states
that "people with radically different beliefs and views may still be
able not only to life in peace together but may even possible become
good friends."

I wonder if Miroslav Volf could read this post and still feel
friendship for me, since some of my views would seem so monstrous to
someone with Volf's convictions.

Lincoln once said: "when I make my enemy my friend, am I not
destroying my enemy?"

I actually wanted to write today about something which I find
distasteful but necessary. I would much rather spend all of my time
writing about mystical theology than about ethnocide and weapons of
mass destruction. I shall only speak in brief about that distasteful
subject and then allow you, the reader, to enjoy some excerpts below
regarding Miroslav Volf.

As I watched PBS today, I periodically saw excerpts from "Sesame
Street" showing all of their puppet characters.

There is one Sesame Street puppet, The Count, who is a vampire
helping kids learn "to count." He is portrayed as a very lovable,
kindly, harmless, innocent vampire, always smiling, always something
good to say, I imagine. It is amazing how the human mind is able to
take a creature such as a vampire, and find a way to portray it as
harmless and even lovable or cute. We all know that a vampire is
something which sleeps by day in a coffin filled with its native
soil, and comes out only under the cover and disguise of the darkness
of night (much like a terrorist) to seek out its unsuspecting victims
(perhaps women and children) and suck their blood.

http://www.highbastard.com/concept/sesamestreet.html

http://pbskids.org/sesame/number/index.html (click on The Count at
the top of the screen)

http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/1730

This lovable little Sesame Street vampire character reminds me of the
several occasions when I heard President George Bush say in speeches
that "Islam is a religion of LOVE." (I wonder how Pres. Bush knows!
Did he read the Qu'ran? Did some advisor advise him?)

In our fantasy and romanticization, we may easily loose sight of what
a vampire really is and what Islam really is. Islam is today, for me,
the single greatest ideological enemy to democracy, free speech and
basic human rights. Islam, as is every other religion, is a MEME, a
pattern of thought with a life all its own which propagates itself
from generation to generation, using human minds and hearts and oral
and written language as the matrix and substratum of its existence,
as it evolves and mutates through the centuries.

I was going to write an entirely different post today, and entitle
it "Three Monsters in One Century." I was going to cite Nazi Germany
as the monster of the 1930's, Communist Russia as the monster of the
1950's, and the worldwide Umma of Islamic peoples as the monster of
the 1990's.

The other day, I was speaking to a gentleman from Scotland who
mentioned how Churchill was criticized for the fire bombing of
Dresden and the killing of many "innocent" women and children.
Churchill basically replied something to the effect that "this is WAR
and killing is the name of the game."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWdresden.htm

In 1941 Charles Portal of the British Air Staff advocated that entire
cities and towns should be bombed. Portal claimed that this would
quickly bring about the collapse of civilian morale in Germany. Air
Marshall Arthur Harris agreed and when he became head of RAF Bomber
Command in February 1942, he introduced a policy of area bombing
(known in Germany as terror bombing) where entire cities and towns
were targeted.

One tactic used by the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air
Force was the creation of firestorms. This was achieved by dropping
incendiary bombs, filled with highly combustible chemicals such as
magnesium, phosphorus or petroleum jelly (napalm), in clusters over a
specific target. After the area caught fire, the air above the bombed
area, become extremely hot and rose rapidly. Cold air then rushed in
at ground level from the outside and people were sucked into the
fire.

In 1945, Arthur Harris decided to create a firestorm in the medieval
city of Dresden. He considered it a good target as it had not been
attacked during the war and was virtually undefended by anti-aircraft
guns. The population of the city was now far greater than the normal
650,000 due to the large numbers of refugees fleeing from the
advancing Red Army.

On the 13th February 1945, 773 Avro Lancasters bombed Dresden. During
the next two days the USAAF sent over 527 heavy bombers to follow up
the RAF attack. Dresden was nearly totally destroyed. As a result of
the firestorm it was afterwards impossible to count the number of
victims. Recent research suggest that 35,000 were killed but some
German sources have argued that it was over 100,000.

============

Sitaram continues:

It seems to me that America has forgotten how to fight and forgotten
how to die. We no longer have the state of mind to drop a bomb on
Hiroshima or to firebomb Dresden. We spend too long licking our
wounds when just a few soldiers suffer casualties in a military
action. America no longer has the stomach for war and killing that it
once had.

I suppose it is fair to describe the fire bombing of Dresden as a
form of genocide or ethnocide. It was obviously also a strong
statement by the allies that they mean business and will not let a
squeamish little thing like morality or remorse get in the way of
victory at any cost.

Just imagine the rhetorical effect it would have on the Islamic world
if, after the 9/11 attack, the U.S. military had unleashed enough
nuclear fire power to totally annihilate Afghanistan, to render it
unfit for any sort of habitation. Had such an action been taken, I
hardly think that we would be looking for a hiding bin Laden.

One PBS documentary interviewed those citizens in Great Britain who
had been part of the secret defense plans in place in the event that
Germans actually invaded. The sheriff of a small town was asked to
select those men whom he felt would be best suited as secret
operatives in a resistance movement. Each of those men received a
sealed envelope containing instructions and were told to open and
read it ONLY if and when German troops actually entered their town.
One man, in the PBS interview, said that he opened his envelop after
the war was over. The first instruction in the envelope was for him
to assassinate the town sheriff, since obviously, the sheriff knew
the identity of the volunteers in the resistance movement, and were
he to be tortured by the Nazis, he might reveal their identities. If
the sheriff were assassinated, such a danger would no longer exist.
When asked in the interview if he would have willingly obeyed such
instructions to assassinate the sheriff, the veteran enthusiastically
responded "Yes, of course, I would have killed the sheriff. I would
have been my patriotic duty."

That PBS documentary went on to describe the very efficient tactics
of the invading Nazi forces. Whenever they found a Nazi soldier
murdered by a local inhabitant, they would round up all the men women
and children of the town into the town square and publicly, summarily
execute them. Such tactics may be morally objectionable, but they are
unarguably 100% effective in extinguishing all opposition.

Obviously, the people of Great Britain were perfectly capable of
equaling the Nazis in brutality and ruthlessness for the sake of
survival.

If an admirable, spiritual person like Dietrich Bonhoeffer was able
to see his way to participate in an attempt to assassinate Hitler,
rather than to "turn the other cheek" as Jesus recommends, then it is
also conceivable that one day the American people will come to see
the use of weapons of mass destruction and ethnocide in a different
light.

http://www.geocities.com/tulsidas_ramayan/page375.htm

Sitaram wrote on March 5, 2001 :

War is never moral; it is at best unavoidable and expedient.
When a nation, or an alliance of nations, perceives some threat to
their sovereignty, and when strategic targets or measures have been
defined, whether it is of the scale of surgically precise missile
strikes at bases or plants, in which a few dozen lives are lost, or
whether it is of the scale of the landing at Normandy in which
thousands of lives are lost, or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in which millions of lives are lost, the fact remains that there is a
price to be paid in terms of human life, both for the enemy and for
the invading forces, and the magnitude of loss is defined and deemed
reasonable and necessary. That price is in terms of human lives lost,
on both sides. Casualty and death is an unavoidable aspect of
military actions. Whether only one life is lost, or ten lives or one
thousand lives, or a million lives, is not an issue. We tend to think
nothing of the news report of ten fatalities. We are alarmed by one
thousand fatalities. Should the fatalities reach one million we are
revolted by what we perceive as a morally reprehensible destruction
of human life. Yet the simple fact remains that any human life is of
inestimable value, and taking one life is no more or less disturbing
than the sacrifice of 100,000 lives or even a million lives, provided
the strategic goal justifies the magnitude of the loss. It is NOT the
number of lives lost, but the justification of such losses from a
strategic point of view. If the loss of human life amounts to an
entire city, or even an entire nation, we categorize the event as a
genocide or ethnocide or holocaust. But, from a strategic military
perspective, the value of the objective is weighed against the loss
of life, and hopefully, strategists are motivated to take no more
lives than might be considered necessary and justified to achieve a
victory. Military and strategic victory will never be equivalent to a
MORAL victory. War and killing is never moral. And there is no war
without the taking of human lives.

In retrospect, with historical hindsight, we can say that IT WAS NOT
necessary to destroy the entire German or Japanese people in order to
put an end to Hitler and the Nazis in World War II. We can see that
the German and Japanese people of today are not the same kind
of "ideological" threat as they were in the 1930's. Times change,
people change, nations change. Even the peoples of the former Soviet
Union are not quite the same as they were in the 1950's. Chinese
ideology poses a threat today, but I dare say one does not yet think
of the annihilation of China as a solution to ensure world peace and
democracy.

Where am I heading with this train of thought? I am simply posing a
theoretical situation in which one part of the world perceived
an "ideological" threat of such magnitude, that the wide-scale
annihilation of an entire nation might be proposed as the only
certain method to ensure a victory and peace. Current weapons of mass
destruction are too damaging to the environment to be deployed on
such a large scale as to achieve the annihilation of an entire nation
in an efficient and timely fashion, and yet leave the land habitable
and the natural resources useable. But, let us imagine, for the sake
of argument, that clean, environmentally safe weapons of mass
destruction were developed. And let us FURTHER imagine that an
alliance of nations perceived an ideological threat of SUCH MAGNITUDE
that a simple military defeat and occupation would NOT ensure world
peace. In such a hypothetical situation, IT IS CONCEIVABLE that a
strategic decision might be made to destroy the population of an
entire country, and that the importance of the military strategic
objective would outweigh the price in human life in the minds of
those making the decision in favor of such a preemptive strike. No
matter how heinous such a military action might appear to us, in
terms of loss of human life, it is NOT MORE immoral simply because
millions of lives are involved, rather than only thousands or
hundreds of lives, since the taking of even one human life
unnecessarily is in some sense no less worse than taking a thousand
lives or a million lives.

Strategists weigh the strategic importance of the victory against the
price in casualty and mortality which must be paid.

It IS NOT inconceivable that one day an ideological threat of
sufficient magnitude might develop which would make the deployment of
such weapons of mass destruction seem a reasonable, or perhaps even
unavoidable, solution.

(end of quotation from March 5, 2001)

==================

Sitaram continues:

If the retribution for the recent act of violence in Iraq were the
utter annihilation of the entire town and its surrounding
inhabitants, I do not say that it would put a stop to terrorism
(though it would stop terrorism in that particular town, indeed) but
it would put the entire game in a different ball park, with different
rules, and a different price to be paid for losing.

Right now, there is no price to be paid for acts of terrorism. When
we go to war with a nation, we bomb them with food and medicine and
economic aid.

The objection that is always raised about the destruction of a city
or a nation is all the "innocent women and children" which perish.

For me, it is quite obvious that the women and children are the REAL
enemy. Oh, I realize this sounds quite monstrous. Yet the truth is
that it is the women and children, and their culture and language and
beliefs, which will serve as a breeding ground for generating after
generation of terrorists and tyrants.

I want to say at the outset that I greatly admire both sorts of
people; people like Miroslav Volf who are towards the extreme of
forgiveness and nonviolence as well as heroic and martyric people
like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who are closer to the opposite end of the
pacifist-militent spectrum, that side which says as the Sikhs say,
that "there are times when it is honorable (and necessary) to take up
the sword."

Miroslav Volf has a wider agenda: he wants to write theology that is
rooted in the church but speaks to the world. When I met him in his
Fuller Seminary office, he was in the final week of considering
professorial positions at Duke, Yale, and Heidelberg, Germany-likely
the first time that a professor at an evangelical institution has
been sought by Duke, Yale, and Heidelberg. He eventually chose Yale,
because he thought it represented the best chance to address a wide
audience.

Volf has a remarkable gift for illuminating vexing issues in
theologically fruitful ways.

(In the interest of making this very long post shorter, I am
including below only the URLs which point to the passages in
question. - Sitaram)

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1058/1_120/96555083/p1/article.jhtml

But that can be only partly right. The priestly benediction is given
for the here and now, not for the then and there. It speaks of a God
who can make God's face shine on people in the midst of the darkness
of their sin. But how can that be? How can God's face shine on a
sinful creature? Miracle of miracles, it turns out that God is not
completely unlike my son in the moment when his face shines upon
mine. What does the forgiving God do with our sins? Here is what the
scripture says: God covers them, God disperses them like mist, God
puts them behind his back, God hides them, God forgets them. As Soren
Kierkegaard puts it: "The one who loves forgives in this way: he
forgives, he forgets, he blots out the sin, in love he turns toward
the one he forgives; but when he turns toward him, he of course
cannot see what is lying behind his back."

[SITARAM comments: I am reminded of the beautiful saying of St. Isaac
the Syrian (which I now paraphrase): "All the sins of mankind through
all the sprawling millenia of human history are as no more that a
handful of dust before God's infinite mercy and forgiveness and
compassion."]

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1058/10_120/102140731/p1/article.jht
ml

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1058/2_120/97174022/p1/article.jhtml

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1058/20_119/92589380/p1/article.jhtm
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Loveable Vampires Don't Count

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