blaming the victims

When something happens like at Fort Hood yesterday, it's quite natural to view the victims as, well, victims, while the one who committed the act as one who was, to put it mildly, wrong.

Unless your a progressive, then you try to spin things so that the person who did it was really the victim. Such as how a person at Sojo has done.

Fort Hood Shootings and the Prophetic ‘IF’

In Fort Hood, if the reports and claims from the police and military are correct (we already know that a number of falsehoods were reported as facts), an officer, a physician, trained to heal traumatized people from the maiming of their souls, was refused an exit from the soul-destroying prison he begged to leave.

If the reports are accurate, it seems that he broke, choosing murder rather than the nonviolent forms of resistance he might have chosen. In that sense he replicated the violence of the war he abhorred and the violence that kept him in the Army against his will –- replicated the violence instead of resisting it in a deeper way.

I don't know what reports he's heard or read, and my own knowledge of the incident and the people involved is far from complete, but I've heard none of that. What I have heard is that the perp was already talking and writing about terrorists being in his mind people to admire.

It's simply crazy how people like those who write at Sojo are so quick to blame those like the police (as in the incident with the Harvard prof a few months ago, and even when it became clear that the office had acted correctly) and the military, while essentially making excuses for the person who committed the act.

No, it's not simply crazy. It's distasteful. Our soldiers are doing good work, more so than these Sojo elitists, actually putting themselves at risk for the sake of the freedom of a nation on the other side of the world, and this elitist progressive twit has nothing but sympathy for the one who killed some of them yesterday, and disparages their efforts in other places in the article.

If – IF, the prophetic word — If we seriously want to help grow a grassroots democracy there, we might send teams of women from American community banks to provide grassroots micro-loans to those who are prepared to use them, especially women, while abandoning the self-destructive effort to impose democracy with Predators. Then Fort Hood might help Americans grow into a new relationship with the hundreds of millions of Muslims who seek to shape their own futures in peace.

Yeah, because American democracy didn't come about through war, right? That whole American Revolution thing? War of 1812? Civil War? World Wars?

At least, not in this person's universe. In the real one, it's a bit of a different story.

jumping ahead

...First, those committed to nonviolence based on the teaching of Jesus--if they are wrong now--wil someday be right. If God's dream is to come true for planet Earth, someday we will not "learn war anymore" (Isaiah 2:4 ESV). If we disagree with people presently committed to nonviolence, we should at least appreciate them for their foresight...
McLaren, The Secret Message of Jesus, p. 155

To really make this work, I have to go into slacker-Cali-surfer-dude mode.

Duuuude!!!

I was, like, you know, just look through this, you know, book, and saw this, you know, thing he said here. And I'm, like, so into that, you know, cause if I had, you know, like, go be a soldier, I couldn't, you know, stay here on the, like, beach, and surf my life away.

Duuude, that would be, like, so ungnarly, you know.

But then I thought, whoooooa, duuuude, take a look at this.

And I thought, hey, dude, doesn't, like, the Bible say that, like, in heaven there is no marriage? That people will be, like, you know, not married?

So I thought, whooooa, duuuude, if that's so true, then maybe I should, like, be like those people this, like, guy is talking about, you know? I mean, it's not, you know, like he's making a bit deal out of if they're, like, you know, right or not, only that they're, you know, ahead of their time or whatever.

So, dude, I think I'm ahead of my time, too, so, you know, maybe I can, you know, be like them.

I mean, if someday we're not going to have, you know, marriage, then, you know, maybe I should worry about it.

Duuuude, I so like that way of thinking, you know!! I can, you know, sleep around as much as I want, and, you know, all I'm being is, you know, like, ahead of the times, see.

Ok, enough of the slacker dude act, thankfully.

Hopefully that little bit of an attempt at humor will show how dangerous McLaren's thinking is here. Mention has already been made of his attempts to read his extreme pacifism into Scripture, and for him to try to make such people "ahead of the times" seems rather a stretch.

going too far

In other words, he (John the Baptist) says, "Being a soldier gives you extraordinary power. Don't abuse that power by extorting money or falsely accusing people." Through Christian history, most Christians have chosen to take a similar approach regarding war. It's not that Christians should be pacifists, they say, but we shouldn't abuse power--including the power of weaponry. We may still have to go to war, but we should be just and restrained in the way we conduct ourselves.

Others, though, have not been satisfied with this approach. they have looked at Jesus' kingdom manifesto, and they have felt it is impossible for a person to simultaneously put Jesus' teachings into action and participate in war.
McLaren, 'The Secret Message of Jesus', pp. 150-151

That, in a nutshell, summarizes the whole problem with emergents (though to be fair, they are not the only ones who are not 'satisfied' with the Bible's words and try to add to them).

You will not find any place in the New Testament were a radical (I hate that word) pacifism is either commanded or encouraged; in fact, in the three instances where John the Baptist, Jesus, and Peter had dealings with military personnel (John giving advice to soldiers, Jesus healing the centurion's servant, and Peter at Cornelius' house to open the door to the Gentiles for the Gospel), we see no condemnation at all of the military. John does not call them 'brood of vipers', Jesus commends the centurion as having more faith then any He had seen in Israel, and Peter is send by God to Cornelius.

Factor in, then, the Old Testament, and we can say that the pacifists must add to what the Bible says in order to support their position.