People killing people

I noticed there were arguments about the word genocide in the news this morning.  That prompted me to think about the words we use for things and how they can sometimes obscure what we believe about right and wrong.

It's pretty much always wrong to kill another human being, except possibly in self-defense.  When a government starts a war, it's pretty much never actually truly self-defense.

That about sums it up for me.

Dear Noah

Oh, God, how long?
Dear Noah,

I'm not writing to Noah, of course.  He is dead.  I'm writing to any other soldier who is fighting like he was, thinking that people in the States support the war, and feeling terrible about what he is doing.  I'm writing to all the Noah's who are still out there.

Please don't misunderstand.  We are not for the war.  Certainly some people are, but many of us are not.  My family despises the war.  If there were a button we could push that would end the war immediately and bring home every American soldier overseas regardless of the consequences, we would push it without hesitation.

We don't call you heroes because we don't believe in what you are doing.  But we do love you, and we want the best for you.  We pray that the wars will cease and that you will come home.  Please don't feel hopeless and don't despair.  Please don't do yourself in like Noah did.  Most of us have terrible mistakes in our past but we all still have the chance to have a bright future.  The last century plus has left us with gigantic missing hunks out of each generation.  We do not want to lose your contribution as well.  I want my grandchildren to grow up playing peacefully with your grandchildren.  We both know that peace has a lot less to do with fighting over there and a lot more to do with simply being over here.

I would encourage you to get out at the first legal opportunity.  Apply for conscientious objector status.  Don't re-enlist.  Come home.  Withdraw as much of your support for what is going on as you legally can.  We have withdrawn our support here and will continue to work to try to spread the word that many people oppose the war, so that more will come out and oppose it.

I am so sorry for what you are going through.  God bless you and bring you home safe and sound to your families.

Armistice Day / St. Martin's Day

Today is Armistice Day, a day for celebrating the only thing worth celebrating about war: when it's over.

Today's a good day to go read about The Christmas Truce.  Maybe even view Joyeux Noël.

More great viewing today is this amazing cartoon from 1939: Peace on Earth.  Or its 1955 remake, Good Will to Men.  Perhaps those who lived through the disastrous great wars of the twentieth century did not worship warfare as we are sometimes led to believe.

Today is also St. Martin's Day, honoring Martin of Tours, who refused to continue to fight in Caesar's army after he became a Christian.  Martin later opposed execution as a punishment for heresy, rightly recognizing that Christians could not support using the state to punish religious error.

Checks and balances

There are no genuine checks and balances in the American political system.  The only genuine check and balance would be "I don't have to give you my check if I do not agree with your agenda."  Since in the American system, the minority are forced to comply with the agenda of the majority, if only for a few years, there is no check and balance on government power, and as we have seen for over two hundred years, it grows without limit.

Imagine a world where nobody had to pay for a war they did not approve of.

Open letter to Jim Carrey

Dear Jim Carrey,

When killers from the Federal government come around demanding money, men, and resources to continue to kill more foreigners in U.S. wars abroad, I want everybody to be able to successfully resist, and I want them to have the right to be armed against the Federal government.  The reason I want this is because I care about the lives of those children abroad.  Rather than strengthening the monstrous institution responsible for these deaths (by giving the government the power to disarm people), I want to see it weakened, so that the deaths can stop.

Unlike you, I won't go so far as to say that anyone who disagrees with me is a "heartless motherfucker" who doesn't care about children and has penis-esteem issues, but I would like you to understand that I want people armed because I care about kids.

Jim, I don't think I support the right to gun ownership because I'm a heartless motherfucker, or because I have concerns about my penis, or because I get a thrill from hunting and killing animals.  In fact, Jim, I don't even own a gun.  I support the right to gun ownership because I believe people should have the right to resist tyranny, and because tyranny is, even now, killing people at your and my expense.  You make a lot more money than me, and I believe you should have the right to keep every dollar of it instead of having large pieces of it siphoned off to go into the war machine, usually at the request of the "Hee Haw" style people you are mocking today.

The number of children killed inside America's territory every year by privately owned guns pales in comparison to the number of children killed outside of America's territory every year by government owned guns.  Please join me in opposing the real killers: your government.  I don't know if you are "willing to bend" on the subject or not, but I hope you will at least think about it.

Here's a link to Jim Carrey's anti-gun video today, in case anybody missed it  I did take the time to watch the entire video to make sure I understood what he was trying to say.

Truce

I call for a truce. Conservatives will not ask Liberals to fund wars which the Liberals believe are murder, and Liberals will not ask Conservatives to fund abortions which they Conservatives believe are murder.

Why is it that so few people would agree to this completely rational proposal?

And why is anyone who disagrees with this principle allowed to have any say over my life at the ballot box?

Funding controversial causes

Is it right to take tax money and use it to fund abortions? Of course not. Of course, we know that the abortions are wrong, but unfortunately about half of society disagrees. But thankfully we can sometimes come to the agreement (though not often enough) that it is wrong to take "other people's tax money" and use it to fund causes that they find reprehensible and immoral.

In our society, a significant number of people oppose the war in Iraq. Is it right to take the money of these people and use it to fund the war? I submit that it is not. These people are being forced to fund an act that they find immoral and reprehensible. Sadly, people of faith are often at the forefront of justifying this coercive funding, which I demonstrated to be stealing in an earlier post.

Now I'm not saying everybody ought to agree with the opinion of the war protestors. I am personally a Christian pacifist, but I have to confess that a) the war against Iraq sounded pretty rational to me, as long as you accept the idea that we may use force to defend ourselves, which most people accept, and b) the people trying to make a case against the Iraq war honestly have yet to make a case that sounds rational to me. (And I've honestly tried to look. I even checked to see what Pat Buchanan said, because I assumed an honored Republican who opposed the war had to have some good reasons. But he couldn't get away from the same "Bush lied" nonsense I hear from complete non-thinkers. I was disappointed.)

But what I am saying is that we do not have the right to force our opinions on other people. Not in any way, and certainly not through forcing people to fund our causes. It would be wrong to forcibly take the money of other people to teach Christianity, to teach evolution, to fund abortions, to fund charities, to fund peace activists, or to fund wars, assuming the victims -- I mean taxpayers -- didn't agree with the cause and/or were not willing for their money to be spent in this way.

Here's a little fact that seems to be a big surprise to many on the Left and the Right: embryonic stem-cell research is not illegal in America. What is prohibited by George W. Bush's decision of 2001 is the use of federal funds for this research. The main reason is the justification I'm using in this essay: it is wrong to take money from people to use it for something that they are not sure is right, or are certain is not right. Private (and even state) funding of this research is still allowed.

So sometimes we recognize this principle. But violations occur all the time. The public school system might be the biggest example: we take money from "all of society" in order to educate "all of society" the way "all of society" wants. This means that our democratic institutions get to vote as to exactly what shall be taught: we can vote to teach evolution, or creationism; we can vote to teach homosexuality as abomination, or as alternate lifestyle. We can vote to teach history as leading inexorably toward liberty, toward democracy, or toward Marxism. We can vote to teach sexual abstinence and chastity, or fund contraceptives for children. Possibly every single identifiable group in society has their money stolen from them and used against them in our school system.

Want a more principled way to accomplish your goals? Do it with your own money. Honor what God said: "Thou shalt not steal." If you want something to succeed, donate your own time, money, and resources, and attempt to persuade others to do the same. If you do not have the resources to accomplish it, perhaps God does not want it done, or wants you working on something else. Concerned about underprivileged, uneducated children? Start a charitable work to help. Concerned about the lack some people have of health care? Start a charitable work to help. Concerned that some children who are existing with inadequate supervision (basically emancipated by default, which turns them into adults in my mind) don't have birth control and need it? Use your own money to provide it, not mine. (And stay away from my kids, while you're at it. They are not grown up yet, and I'm not turning them loose until they are.)

In so doing, you'll manage to accomplish whatever God wants to permit you to accomplish without committing the sin of stealing. You'll have a society where nobody is forced to fund something that they object to on principle. Moreover, you'll also eliminate the economic waste that taxation and socialism accomplishes: when we socialize an aspect of our existence, when we fund it collectively and coercively, we find that we always, always misallocate resources: some issues are overaddressed (meaning we spent too much to accomplish something that could've been accomplished for less), while other issues are underaddressed (meaning something we want done doesn't get funded). A collective, centralized system where decisions are made for everybody as a whole (rather than individually, as decentralized individuals pursuing the ends we believe in, independently) cannot possibly accurately calculate the relative worth of the needs that need to be addressed. But when we allow ourselves to function as God's ordained free market, we function as a gigantic distributed supercomputer that can and does do so, that outperforms any collectivists wildest utopian fantasy.

Are you worried that this won't work? Then let me ask you to do something: please support banning and terminating these annoying Susan Komen breast cancer marathons. Obviously private funding to cure cancer will never work, and these things are a major annoyance and inconvenience to me.

Obviously the Susan Komen foundation believes that something worthwhile can be achieved through voluntary funding. And since God commanded that we not steal, commanded that we respect private property even if we think we might be able to use it to do good like helping the poor (Acts 5:4), and promised to make sure that we always had an abundance (not that we could always obtain an abundance by taking what doesn't belong to us) in order to be able to perform every good deed He wants us to do (II Corinthians 9:6-12), God obviously believes this as well. Christians should never support funding "good works" of any sort through taxation.

But didn't God command us to pay our taxes? Of course He did. Pay them. Just don't tax other people. And once the money is taken, recognize it as Caesar's, not yours. Caesar was not one of God's people, and he certainly didn't use the money that he took from God's people for God's purposes. In fact, he used it to oppress God's people and fund immorality such as drunken orgies and idol worship. If somebody wants to take what is yours, do not resist them. But never pretend that God has authorized you to do the same.