One of our most dangerous obsessions in the West is linear thinking. It works fine with computers and factual-logical processes, but humanity itself cannot be so handled. That we are capable of charting multiple paths for variables is not an improvement, because each item still follows a single path from beginning to end. Further, the mere concept of beginning and end does not fit everything which touches us.
We talk about peace and pacifism as if they were absolutes, when the crux of the matter is peacefulness. So obsessive are we that we automatically paint some people as heroes of peace, when the person involved may have been mean as a snake and quite the warrior (long article and highly recommended). We are intolerant of variations; we want our mythology clean and tidy.
It does not require a belief in the supernatural to see how reality refuses to fit that mold. Nor can we say it is simply too many people are irrational. Reality on a purely intellectual level refuses to fit into Aristotelian logical categories if you squeeze too hard. The very most logical scientific explorations of matter, such as Particle Physics, have long refused to make sense to such an epistemology. The greatest advances in the future will depart radically from such an epistemology.
When we attempt to explain the broader scope of humanity, Aristotle has no clue. The hard-headed rejection of the divine is just that — unreasonable. Just because you can’t explain it and put it in one of your neat categories does not justify saying it’s not there. Reason suggests at most it can’t be known satisfactorily by the established process, so I find agnostics more sensible than atheists by their own proclaimed frame of reference.
The danger of religion, of course, is the vast number of practitioners who are themselves utterly unreasoning. The vast wealth of unspoken assumptions about how God and His revelation must play out in our daily lives makes us more often an insult to God than a blessing.
The proper ground of approach is to spend sufficient time exploring the meaning of culture and intellectual traditions to allow some thin measure of objectivity about your own. As long as you take yourself and your background too seriously, you’ll never be in a position to know anything worthwhile, except by accident. Such a position eliminates alternative explanations of the results by categorical circular reasoning. If you cling to the Western Enlightenment assumptions, you’ll always get Western Enlightenment results. The damned secret of Western evangelical religion is the entire theology is deeply beholden to the “godless” Enlightenment, and not so much of the “holy” Reformation they claim.
This is why Westerners don’t understand biblical peacefulness. It’s too often a parody — a mindless absolutism — which is labeled “pacifism” or lip-service to peace while scrabbling to support every military venture anyone suggests, however improbable. The elite in our ruling class, who would never dream of going themselves to war, much less sending their own children, are loaded with evangelical chicken-hawks. Yes, I know a great many troops are evangelical, but those are the foot soldiers of the religion, too. The evangelical subculture has it’s own ruling class, and you have to be invited to join. The precious few evangelical leaders who actually faced the dangers of the battlefield are so rare, they are legends the moment they step into the pulpit.
So we get peacefulness from the biblical perspective all wrong in Western society, and in Western Christianity in particular. As noted by many, biblical peacefulness does not exclude all violence while on this earth. I would be a sinner before God if I were not ready to defend my wife from physical assault, as wrong as refusing to make room for His miracle hand making it unnecessary. The primary question is not the action, but the motive.
The proper approach to the question is not Western logic, nor Ghandi’s improbable self-contradictions under the guidance of his inner voices. That would be demons he was hearing from, and not because of the poor logic, nor simply because Ghandi was pagan. Rather, they are recognized by the failure to embrace the long revealed Laws of God. A great many pagan traditions happen to have held a reasonable mix which included things of which God approved on the level of His Laws. Not good enough to preserve outright, but good enough to make it into the record of Scripture, for example. The question is understanding revelation within its own cultural milieu.
So a true follower of Christ would know when to take up the whip and when to bear its lash. He would know when to submit and when to die refusing to submit. He would know the answer could not possibly be the same for everyone in the same situation. But he wouldn’t have to make it up as he goes along, because God has long since left a record, and the context for reading it, of examples which indicate enough frame of reference to be ready for all sorts of commands coming from His inner Voice. He would know most of the time the path of peace is best, but peace with God is more important than peace with any or all of mankind.
America has not the slightest clue what it means to be a peaceful people.
