Considerations about what to do with ISIS from a “Love thine enemy” perspective should also take into account that this is a subset of “love thy neighbor”, and ISIS is currently killing a bunch of our neighbors in every area they can get to. Augustine struggled with the problem of using violence in the cause of justice - which was a major criticism of the early Church in the Roman Empire - and IIRC concluded that while self-defense is not justifiable in his Christian framework, violence can be used to defend your neighbors, who you are protecting out of love. So “how does one love ISIS” will have different answers depending on one’s position relative to them, and also must be considered with “how does one love the people ISIS is attacking”.
In more recent times, it’s not uncommon for theologians to reflect on the ideals of love thine enemy and “turn the other cheek” in light of their struggles against oppression. See Black Liberation Theology, Womanist theology, Mujerista theology, etc. As a revolutionary act, the aim of this and other commandments becomes breaking cycles of violence and evil. As morally repugnant as I find ISIS, just killing them is not a practical solution to many of the underlying problems. The idea that humans have inherent value apart from their actions isn’t a bad starting point to work on those problems, IMHO.
ISIS’s embrace of sex slavery is not being done to goad the West into war, exactly, it’s being done because ISIS has declared a Caliphate re-established and so they claim to have the authority to take sex slaves in particular contexts as is clearly given in the early Islamic sources. They are ostentatiously doing it as a way to provoke attention to their larger claims of authority and legitimacy as much as to recruit depraved types or gain notoriety. For that specific rapist who is praying before and after his crime, it’s not that the girl is in the “infidel” or non-human out group, it is that she is in a specific category where he has the divinely sanctioned right to rape her - the slave category.
You can always go for the rest of the quote, which indeed refers to what are your standards for dealing with others and to be careful about proclaiming yourself an arbiter of their conduct:
Also, in a greater theological sense, it refers to how the standard of what is righteous or evil should be God’s, not “thine”. Don’t be self-righteous; check thy privilege, some would say these days.
Something obviously objectively wrongful is still wrongful and you still have to deal with it appropriately.
Good post by JRDelirious, but I think we need more context to really get it. I suspect that Jesus, in speaking to other Jews, was speaking in the context of - and in response to - contemporary Judaism, which was host to large and occasionally violent disagreements over the nature and interpretation of Mosaic law. The Pharisees, who emphasized the role of oral tradition and other sources alongside the Torah, and scholarly interpretation versus literal compliance with the law, clashed with the Sadducees, whom (it seems to me) they regarded as overly literal, over-Hellenized, and somewhat un-Jewish. The Sadducees rejected sources of law outside the Torah, interpreted the written Torah very strictly, and regarded the Pharisees (it seems to me) as unruly, overly Hellenized (I know, I know), and somewhat un-Jewish.
In this context, “judge not lest ye be judged” seems to be a criticism of both groups for their emphasis on judging others, and their failure to emphasize doing what is right. “God will judge you in the end,” he seems to say, “and will be less impressed with your speaking out against the other guys than with your own thoughts and actions.” Jesus seems to have shown little hesitation in judging others, which supports the thesis that he had no problem with judging per se, just strong doubts about some people’s right to do so.
I think this context also applies to “love your enemy as yourself.” If your “enemy” is a fellow Jew with whom you disagree, then escalating the disagreement or meeting violence with violence is foolish. It weakens Judaism itself in the face of Roman occupation, which had to be on his mind.
A fine sentiment, but how do we go about doing this? If your answer is, “training and arming the Iraqi army to fight for themselves,” well, you’re surprisingly wrong. Preparing the Iraqi army to fight means handing abandoned military hardware to ISIS. It is the comic height of counter-productivity.
If “defending our neighbors” involves military action in the Middle East, one of us is working from the wrong definition of “neighbors”. Beyond that, can one define what a war there would solve before we start it?
I try to kill as few people as possible FWIW
Ok, my point isn’t that the sex slavery is to goad the West into a land war in Asia, but rather the publicity of their atrocities is. They present a parade of atrocities that amounts to something just a little bit above the historical baseline for the region. Outrage, the intention goes, ensues. Somebody has got to do something!
But imposing yet another war on the region would be something quite a bit above the historical baseline for atrocity in the region. We already saw it play out, and that was a bungled attempt.
Probably best to just bomb them from a distance while we wait for about half of them to come down with cholera because they can’t effectively manage water infrastructure. Awful, but we can’t prevent the suffering of innocents under any scenario here. Why hurt ourselves, too?
As others have pointed out, the “judge not” verse is often taken out of context, and it’s about not being a hypocrite and holding yourself to the same standard as others. In fact, though it was said by Paul and not Jesus, the Bible also says to test everything and hold onto the good and reject evil. In my view, it is absolutely consistent to hold that a person or group of people that rape and murder are evil, as I personally hold myself to that standard, and I am rejecting that which I believe to be evil.
And as for loving our enemy, Jesus says to pray for them. We can love them by making efforts to try to resolve the issues peacefully and trying to reconcile with them. The difficult part isn’t loving them, it’s the commandment to not resist evil, to turn the other cheek. But even that, I think, is in the context of “eye for an eye” as in, we should not seek retribution, and mercy is greater than justice. That is, I don’t think it means just lay down and be a doormat, but we should only do what we must and we should go the extra mile–Jesus literally says that.
All of that said, I think a great deal of what he’s talking about is more about interpersonal relations. If someone steals from me, I shouldn’t seek retribution, but I should be merciful and forgiving, and I should pray for them instead. But I don’t think turn the other cheek means let someone intent on murdering me just kill me, but rather take only the minimum amount of force necessary, and don’t result to “eye for an eye” and kill them if I can.
I think it gets a LOT more complicated when it comes to taking these principles to foreign relations. In that sense, I think murder is more analogous to waging war and less to necessarily a few citizens dying. I’d guess that the manner in which to scale up this philosophy would be to not seek retribution by waging war against someone because they attacked us, but rather seek means to contain threats and negotiate. Escalating to war because of terrorism might be justified in “eye for an eye” international relations, but perhaps not so much with this philosophy.
I can’t say that this even really works scaled up at all. I’m just not sure that the way that two people do or should interact really works at all the same as two large groups of people or nations do or should interact.
To be honest I don’t have many solutions in the short-term. The most important objective, I would think, is helping the refugees and those held captive, and I would be open to an action that was dedicated to that, although I do not have the imagination to plan how that could be done realistically without doing violence to humans who I claim as my neighbors.
On the one hand, I want to make the analogy of a Civil War doctor, forced to do terrible amputation after amputation, nevertheless doing at least some good and advancing knowledge of medicine so his descendants could do better. On the other hand, I don’t want to be complacent with the bad status quo when I could be the one to do better. And if for no other reason, I value the “love your enemy” ideal for this, that it encourages me to be trying to do better in these situations, and not just keep on repeating the cycles.
Me too, but for some reason people are never appreciative of all those days where you didn’t kill anyone…
One of the grudges that ISIS and other reactionary Islamists have against contemporary society is that it is imposing a morality on the world that they see as man-made and incompatible with the only true morality, that given by God. Not only do they think society arrogantly chose to abandon the laws and morality given to humanity by God, they see it as always working to convince people that more and more aspects of God’s laws and morality are in fact immoral, like by trying to push religious freedom or gay rights as morally superior. They think it is aimed to make Muslims forget that they have the right and duty to fight for God, to cleanse corruption from the land and create a society that follows God’s law and morality.
So when they do these atrocities, what we consider atrocities, it is emphasized to be a shock and a challenge to various Muslim audiences, saying, “look, the man-made values you are currently living under, that they are telling you make what we do evil atrocities, what have they brought you? Corrupt societies, subjugation and vulgarity! Look at our victories, look at the truly Islamic society we are making, where we are proud, where we are dominant over others. This is because we are in fact following the law of God. Abandon their false ideas and fake morality, and join us!”
Making this message lose its resonance among various disaffected groups is the real challenge, rather than defeating ISIS or other violent reactionary movements by military means alone.
Yes, having an affair and raping a child are the same thing. No difference there. It’s one thing to be a hypocrite and an entirely different thing to be a child rapist.
I do. Westerners need to let go of their feelings about ISIS. They need to recognize them as manufactured. Consider:
Ask yourself why Westerners don’t have similarly strong feelings about these other separatist movements? I’ll tell you why:
The media. ISIS is covered obsessively, the others barely at all. Somebody has an interest in invading the ME besides ISIS.
All right. Come up with a plan and I will probably support it. I don’t like the idea of Yazidis or other groups being eliminated by ISIS. It shouldn’t be ok. But we’re not judging here so… genocide gets a pass? It’s tough to stick to the ‘religious quotes as lodestar’ approach.
Yah, violence may be necessary, but only when absolutely necessary. Maybe violence before the Civil War started could have spared a lot more violence later on. But maybe the violence had to happen, if only to make white people feel less guilty for what they’d done.
Ok, but if the West ever submits to such reasoning, it ceases to be the West. I have every right not to be a Muslim, and to understand that amounts to basing one’s life on a fairy tale, and to promote that notion though any and all media outlets. These people have not conquered my country, nor will they. I owe zero sympathy to the Islamic point of view.
Yah ok, yay you guys, you don’t have running water but you get to rape little girls. What’s to recommend? But, will our judgement hasten their doom by even one minute? Don’t they doom their own cause by such actions, such that intervention on a grand scale is really not required, at least not at this juncture?
Letting them get their way awhile will show disaffected groups how lousy a path it really is. I’m sorry, innocents will suffer and die no matter what, war or no war, intervention or no intervention, diplomacy or no diplomacy, or anything in between.
In the Biblical view, are not Arabs considered “the sons of Ishmael”, a second-class people? A religious co-worker taught me this, I don’t know if it is true, but if so, we should not hold the region to the same standards of humanity as elsewhere, as they simply aren’t up to it. Have compassion as but for the grace of God there ye go. Yet this is quite an irony to the topic of the thread, God Himself choosing favorite peoples. The judgement is kind of built-in, no?
