WHY I'M A PACIFIST
`Now let me tell you something - pacifism is not an option! Look at the current situation with this camelhumper in Iraq...' says Walter in The Big Lebowski, a film set at the beginning of the Gulf War when George Bush was declaring war on Sadaam Hussein.
So far, no sequel to Lebowski, but the Gulf War fiasco is being remade with an even bigger budget, again by Sadaam and a George Bush.
And so, no, Walter - let me tell you something - for me, pacifism is an option, and it's my option. No war or violence under any circumstances. I can't appeal to `common sense' to justify being a pacifist. I'm a pacifist because of my Christian faith.
For most people faith is about a private, inner realm. It kicks in when something bad happens; hence there were a lot of people in the US and Australia praying after the terrorist attacks last September. But more than just trauma management, I want to suggest that Christian faith also has something to say about believers' attitudes to war.
I believe that Christian thinking (and there's a lot of people who call themselves Christians, even if there's not enough thinking on their part) means following Jesus' example of pacifism, even and especially when that involves defying one's country. For Christian pacifists, the lives of our enemies are worth as much to us as our own. We believe that no end can justify using the wrong means. Thus this means pursuing non-violent solutions to conflict even in the face of bullets.
According to the gospels, Jesus told us that when someone hits us on one cheek, we should turn to give them a free shot at our other cheek. Indeed, Jesus submitted to execution rather than allowing violent resistance to his arrest. But Perth Anglican Archbishop Peter Carnley thinks it would be a bit crazy to try doing this in the `real world'; he says something to the effect that, `There comes a time when you run out of cheeks to turn.' I refuse to live in his `real world' if that `real world' involves making ethical compromises - e.g. killing people - to achieve results.
Alas, making ethical compromises to achieve results has been what many `Christians' have being doing for the last sixteen centuries. I like to trace it back to Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. He had a vision of shields painted with crosses on them, and decided it was Jesus sending him a message. `Damn good idea,' he said, and got the Roman army to paint crosses on their shields and go out and slaughter their enemies in the name of a Jewish criminal pacifist-cum-Roman military mascot. Basically, Constantine was about as Christian as George W. Bush.
After that, Christianity became a state religion and got seriously messed up. Instead of Christians being a small minority who put their loyalty to Jesus ahead of the emperor/king/president/prime-minister, everyone in the whole country was now born into Christianity and thought being loyal to Jesus meant being loyal to whatever the leader of the state was telling them to do. Since Christianity no longer had anything to say to the state except maybe, `Heil Hitler!', Christianity got relegated to the private sphere of inoffensiveness and neighbourly `niceness'.
I say, better the small minority keeping the faith than the large majority perverting it! Now that state religion's nearly dead, I and many Christians in Australia - and even some in the USA - stand with the peace movement. I call the rest to join us.
Actually, I'd like everyone to join the peace movement, but I haven't offered any reasons on ground common to everyone reading this. Indeed, the one concern that comes close to being ground common to everyone is self interest. I'll leave an argument on that criteria to someone who has more faith in it than me.