I say some scribblings because no amount of writing and arguing will ever get to the bottom of the topic. Specifically I want to discuss the “right” to take another’s life.

War. We see a lot of it these days. This is primarily the media’s fault because statistically we supposedly live in the most peaceful era of human history. Still – we know more about it in a broader sense than that previous era’s. I say broader sense because we who live comfortably an ocean away from the world’s most violent circumstances know nothing about it.

I was asked (perhaps challenged) recently about my role in the artillery and how that could be reconciled with a pacifist position. It was an interesting question. It was a good question. I am not a pacifist. I am not a just war theorist. I, like so many others, live in the mushy grey space of partially thought through positions and really don’t know where I stand on the issue of death and taking another’s life.

I do know a few things, history has taught us that unless you become a monster or forge others into monsters one needs to dehumanize people in order to effectively kill them. This is the point of most war propaganda…to comfort the population and let them know we are killing the enemy, and if a few innocents die in the process it cannot be helped really and we wouldn’t even be “over there” if it weren’t for the enemy so it is really their fault if any innocents die and not ours. It is like the mass free giveaway of indulgences.

As a Christian the question of death is particularly thorny. Who am I allowed to kill? It used to be “thou shalt not kill” until some clever linguists, overwrought with the frustration of that rule came up with the realization that it could also be translated “thou shalt not murder“. While subtle the difference is critical – to murder is to kill without provocation; without just cause; with no present threat to one’s own or another’s safety. To kill was so much broader – it meant what it said – don’t kill. What about…? No. What if…? No. But…? No.

I believe we have both systemic situations and individual contextual ones for virtually everything and both are required to some degree.

Systemically it is possible to say that Hitler and the Third Reich were enemies of the world. They were implementing state-wide systems of eugenics and reinterpretations of law and religion that, given time, would dehumanize whole segments of society and train up a culture and population of people incapable of seeing the moral wrongness in mass executions.

At an individual level I can say without so much as a twinge of guilt that should a grown man start beating a small child with a baseball bat I have an obligation to step in and try to stop it – even at the cost of the other man’s life. If I were the only one capable of defending the child and I simply stood there and said “You need to turn the other cheek and I am sorry but I cannot get involved because I do not believe in violence” I would serve only to have contributed to another’s death through my own inaction.

The problem of course is how do we bridge the gap between the systemic and the individual? We need to do this because the rationale for war exists not in the systemic but at the individual level.

The reality is we cannot bridge that gap. War takes massive leaps of faith. Leaders of one country make decisions based upon information given to them about a circumstance half the world away and than send, by proxy, warriors to theoretically defend the individuals who are currently being trodden upon. Than individual warriors must each come to the conclusion that these leaders and the populace who they represent are sending them overseas because they know that this war is just and required.

And so they go with the reality that taking an M16 and firing a bullet through the skull of the enemy combatant over the next ridge is not murder because that combatant represents a state that would over run the innocent. There is no sense that the enemy combatant is being motivated in the other direction with the same logic and that when he doesn’t have an AK-47 he scrapes out a living as a mechanic is a nearby community.

At an individual and contextual level it can be a simple decision to use whatever force is required to save someone’s life. At a national or international level it is never simple and frankly impossible to know for sure if this is the right and just thing to do.

Certain assumptions have to be made.

There is much more to be said on this for sure but it will have to wait. Stay tuned for part two.