Do we really think that our species has already evolved to the point where there are no people who will criticise us for speaking truth and no institutions which will kill us for speaking even more truth?

Following the discussion on CPT’s Response to the “War on Terrorism”, I have wrestled with how to compute the distress which CPT has evoked by saying some things which upset some people. Now I don’t think that writers on the list would explicity affirm that they think our species has evolved to this point. But when I encounter this deep, emotional horror at the prospect of some, or even many, people being offended by what we say, by our best witness to the truth as we see it, I wonder what assumptions this horror is based on. It seems to be based on an expectation that reasonable, middle class “moral” people should not be offended by what we say, and if they are, we have clearly said what should not have been said.

Then I try to lay that kind of calculus over the Jesus story, or rather, lay the teachings, the life and death of Jesus over that kind of calculus, and I always come up wondering: How is it that Jesus offended people, taught that his followers would offend people, be persecuted, and yes, he said, killed, and we, followers of Jesus, don’t think that should ever happen to us. Or, of course, we wouldn’t say that it could never happen to us, because we assume that there could be some extreme circumstance where it might happen, but certinly not here, definitely not now….

What would an extreme circumstance look like? What issues would be at stake there?

When some writers tell us how well they get along with people who justify the killing of people, and do this in the context of launching biting criticism of we who refuse to justify the killing of any people, I wonder what moral calculus is at work.

It may only seem to me, it may not really be the case, that it has been suggested that Republican feelings are more important to us than Afghani lives. But the point made was that CPT has seriously offended good people, and it seemed more important to discuss that than to focus on Afghani, , Arab, Colombian, Sudanese, Mexican, Angolan, East Timorese, and Aboriginal lives (deaths).

Since that is what came through to me, I lived for a while with notion that it is better to kill one set of people than to offend another set of people. I tried to enter into that. And where I came out is that until the moral difference between offending and killing is recognized by all of us in the debate, I think that the proper subject of the debate is not offending, but killing. We need a bottom line, a point beyond which we will not go. Lacking that, what have we done but rejected Jesus command to “love our enemies”, (which, all moral sophistry aside, excludes killing them) and answered his question “Is it lawful to save life or to kill?” by saying it is lawful to kill?

In summary, I keep trying to figure out why Jesus got into trouble for speaking his truth, expected us to get into trouble too, and we don’t expect to get into trouble (and, as a cultural Christianity in American, and much of the rest of the world, we really have kept out of trouble pretty much across the board.) Is it because humanity has evolved to this higher level? Or because we think it has, and we know that if we are criticized, we have done something wrong?

John Stoner —————————————— John K. Stoner, Coordinator, New Call to Peacemaking, PO Box 500, Akron PA 17501 EVERY CHURCH A PEACE CHURCH , Toward a Global Network of Creative Nonviolence ph/fax 717 859-1958 Web Site http://www.ecapc.org — A country which has dangled the sword of nuclear holocaust over the world for half a century and claims that someone else invented terrorism is a country out of touch with reality. –John K. Stoner