pacifism

Two posts in one night: I'm catching up, I've been processing for a few weeks now...

So I've been thinking about pacifism. I think I've got part of it solved, part of it completely unsolved.

I watched Blood Diamond for the first time the other night. It was absolutely disturbing. Probably not one I'll ever need to see again..

A friend of mine who was in the army a few years ago said that in training he was taught little ditties to say (or yell like they do in the army) like this one:
What makes the green grass grow?
What makes the green grass grow?
Red blood makes the green grass grow.

Please tell me that that's as disturbing to you as it is to me. Couldn't we have an army (because we do, unfortunately need one, no one's going to say we don't, and I'd never say I don't appreciate them because I do) but could we not have one without brainwashing them? It's the same concept to me, as what the boys had to say in the LRA or whatever it was called in that movie. It's not a good thing to kill someone. It's just not, so don't pretend that it is.

Can violence solve violence? I'd have to say no. It cannot solve it; it may end it but the initial problem will not be solved until there is a change of heart. Eyes need to be opened. When Jesus spoke of turning the other cheek, of mercy, it was for a reason. So is it ever right to use violence to stop violence?

But when it comes to government issues and beyond personal ones, is it right to support that? This is the issue i haven't yet resolved for myself.

Violence instills fear and anger into hearts. Mercy, gratefulness?

Grassroots movements require unending patience.

So I think we can say that we are to show mercy, not violence to those who would harm us. As for war? well, ideally they'd never get to that point. Ideally, the mercy and grace would've been shown long before that point.

Interesting side note, I don't think I've written about this yet... I'm reading the Idiot by Dostoevsky right now. He added a bit of his own story into the beginning of this one. He wrote about a man who'd been pardoned at the very last second from death, as he had before he was sent to the Siberian prison camps like Solzhenitsyn. He wrote that he believed that capital punishment was a punishment much worse than the crime. His reasoning: when a man is attacked by another man he hopes to the last that he will escape or be rescued. For a man who is sentenced to death there is no hope whatsoever. He also reasons that death by torture is better than a quick death which you know is coming. He wrote that in a painful death your mind is drawn from your spiritual anguish to the physical. He uses the guillotine as his example of a painless death. Here there is no physical distraction from what is going on in your spirit. Interesting eh? I mean, not pleasant, but interesting how he reasons.

Well, I think I'm done for tonight. lol. blessings.