Tony Blair prayed to god over decision to oust Saddam. Suddenly the anti-war camp is left with a ridiculous dichotomy - two tasty slices of pie from which they must (but ultimately cannot) pick one and one alone. On the one hand there are the atheists who seek to deride faith as a weakness and who would suggest that it has no part in the decision making process, on the other the condemnation of other Christians about the validity of Blair’s choice.
Here’s my take.
Anyone making the first assertion can go take a running jump. Anyone making the second has an argument but the assertions such as “A good Christian wouldn’t be for this war” are unnecessarily judgmental and quite frankly ridiculous.
As a Christian you have two points to straddle:
1) The non-violence preached by Christ
2) His assertion that “Whatsoever you do to the slightest of my brothers you do to me”.
The former prohibits violence, the latter makes a sin against god and your fellow man of disregarding the plight and suffering of others.
It’s a tough moral question and suggesting for one moment that a good Christian could only be against the war (and thusly that someone who is against the war is a bad Christian) is utterly spurious. It ignores the suffering and torture of the Iraqi people at the hands of the most brutal dictator to tread the earth since Hitler. Likewise upholding a path of non-violence and pacifism in place of seeking to aid the people of Iraq certainly does not make one less of a Christian - abhorring violence is a vital aspect of our faith.
The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of Christians in the United Kingdom and the more we hear the shrill cries of intelligentsia deriding prayer as a superstitious practice, particularly prayer regarding in issue as important as this, the more we become disenchanted with the prevailing liberal climate.
Britain has a tolerant culture. Let’s see how willing we are to tolerate a PM asking for help from the man upstairs.
Later
John
Posted by John Swaine at March 4, 2006 04:09 AM