An Issue With War and Poverty: A Christian Perspective

Anyone that knows me knows how I have come to feel about war.  I served six years in the armed forces and my mentality about war changed a couple of years before I separated.  What first started to turn my opinion about war and the military was how people regarded human life.  I learned that there was very little regard and respect for human life.  If a mission would require the loss of personel, then so be it, the mission is the most important priority.





Whenever we face an enemy of any kind, whether its someone that cuts us off in traffic, or someone that is facing criminal charges, the instinct comes in to dehumanize that person.  We start to take away the human element away from our "enemy" and give them an attribute of something less than human.  Anyone in the service knows that you call the enemy a target, or use slang like "hodgie" (which is a Muslim who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca).  Using such easy labels helps you make the moral decision to kill someone much easier.  After all, its a target or some other name that has a negative connotation to it.

Its this dehumanizing element that makes war possible.  We kill our enemies because they are bad, they are evil, they are sub-human.  If we didn't dehumanize them, we wouldn't have the justification to kill the person.

This is why I think Christians are not to kill other people, especially in war.  To a Christian, an enemy is still a human being, to be prayed for and to be loved.  We are under no obligation to dehumanize anyone for any reason, for to do so would be against the law of love period.  If the supporters of war would see the people as people instead of people who are less than human, I honestly believe that  the mast majority of the opinions would change.







People are people.

I found a common theme about humanity in general, the concept of the greater good.  Its a concept that we use everyday without even realizing.  We make compromises about things that we know are morally ill and we say, "I know its bad, but it's something that has to be done."  Whenever I hear this phrase, I think that its just a way to justify doing something bad.  It's our attempt to ease our conscience into doing an immoral act.

We can attribute this to the homeless epidemic as well.  We justify how we treat a homeless person by treating them as less than human.  It makes it so much easier to ignore them when you see them as under you.  How would your mind change if you saw them as people just like you though?  Thats the number one thing I remember on Skid Row, that of all the things they need and desire, they want to be treated as human beings above all.  Once that is accomplished the walls come crashing down.