Just War Theory...and then some

Today I went to a speaker who talked about "Just War Theory in the Contemporary World". Maj. Kevin Cutright was the speaker, he is currently teaching philosophy at the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY; he earned his undergraduate in international relations and earned his graduate degree in philosophy at Vanderbilt. I ended up going to lunch with him, his wife and son, the head of the philosophy dept. at USD, a retiring philosophy teacher who taught on ethics and philosophy, and the former student government association president for USD. Needless to say I was pretty stoked to have the head of the philosophy dept. to my left and a philosophy teacher from West Point to my right and be eating lunch with them. But here is a brief overview of my understanding of Just War Theory:

If you polarize the philosophies of war you end up with either the view that war is never justified in any circumstance or that war is always justified in every circumstance. Just War Theory, on a very basic level, states that at times war is justified and at others war is not justified. I find that this theory, though I truly don't know everything about it, is coherent and fits with reality and experience. What's interesting is that if you do believe this then you must acknowledge that:
1) Not every idea and action is equal to another.
2) Right and Wrong are based on standard.
3) Justice is not a convention of society.
4) All human beings have an equal inherent value (Every human being has certain rights...maybe intrinsic value is a better wording)

World War II is a prime example of a Just War. Hitler was had ideas that we say are logically incoherent and violate human rights. His ideas and actions were bad. He believed that not all humans were equal and we saw this played out in his belief in Nietzsche's idea of the Ubermensch or Superman. If every idea/action were equal, then we were not justified in going to war against Germany.
One might say: Nazi Germany was wrong because they violated basic human rights. I agree that happened, but why is that wrong? If those actions are wrong, why are they wrong and where does the idea of right and wrong come from? And if an idea/action is right or wrong must there not be a standard by which to judge what is right and wrong? "If," as Ravi Zacharias puts it, "there is a moral law, must there not, then, be a moral law giver?" Where do we get our standard for morality (right and wrong)? If right and wrong, or Justice, is a convention of society then who's society is correct? How can I say that Nazi Germany was wrong? Because there is a standard of right and wrong, and of Justice.
To sum up, I believe that our moral law comes from God. God's moral nature (Because God is completely good) shows us what is good or bad, right or wrong, just or unjust. God, by is own nature, is the moral standard. Because God is the moral standard and we are made in the image of God, we can understand why what Nazi Germany did to people was wrong and how their actions violated basic human rights: They not only went against God's moral nature but violated beings that contained the image of God.

I know this is a little sporadic, but hopefully you understand what I'm saying...and if not, then please question me...or do anyway.
Jordan

Social Christianity

Once again, I'm going to try to tie together too many ideas in too short a time to do them justice, but I want to put this down before I lose it.

This morning, our pastor spoke on Christ's command to be salt and light in the earth, to be influencing our world with a Christian point of view. I really appreciated his comments, and I may have to snag the MP3 to listen to them again. What I find most interesting is to compare and contrast his views to those of the liberal Christians (who want to do good things, even for sort of the right reasons (because we ought to), but may or may not believe Jesus is fully God and fully man, or that some will be condemned to spend eternity in hell, or what have you), or even the secular products of the Christian heritage of the United States (I have at least one friend who doesn't really believe in God, but she believes in helping people and doing service work, and these things). The latter groups would have us believe that things like helping the sick and the poor are things we ought to do, and rightfully so. We should be doing these things. But we should also have a reason for doing them. If the naturalists/physicalists are right, and this world is really all there is, why should I really do something to help someone else? In fact, when I help others, I'm not helping myself (at least not directly), so I'm doing more harm than good to myself, and isn't that who I should really be concerned with? It would seem so. Yet as Christians, we should be looking to serve others' physical needs as well as their spiritual needs; but we should be doing both.

In a hasty conclusion, I leave you with the following article, some of which was quoted this morning, by Roy Hattersley, published in the Guardian Unlimited on Monday, September 12, 2005:

Faith does breed charity

Hurricane Katrina did not stay on the front pages for long. Yesterday's Red Cross appeal for an extra 40,000 volunteer workers was virtually ignored.

The disaster will return to the headlines when one sort of newspaper reports a particularly gruesome discovery or another finds additional evidence of President Bush's negligence. But month after month of unremitting suffering is not news. Nor is the monotonous performance of the unpleasant tasks that relieve the pain and anguish of the old, the sick and the homeless - the tasks in which the Salvation Army specialise.

The Salvation Army has been given a special status as provider-in-chief of American disaster relief. But its work is being augmented by all sorts of other groups. Almost all of them have a religious origin and character.

Notable by their absence are teams from rationalist societies, free thinkers' clubs and atheists' associations - the sort of people who not only scoff at religion's intellectual absurdity but also regard it as a positive force for evil.

The arguments against religion are well known and persuasive. Faith schools, as they are now called, have left sectarian scars on Northern Ireland. Stem-cell research is forbidden because an imaginary God - who is not enough of a philosopher to realise that the ingenuity of a scientist is just as natural as the instinct of Rousseau's noble savage - condemns what he does not understand and the churches that follow his teaching forbid their members to pursue cures for lethal diseases.

Yet men and women who believe that the Pope is the devil incarnate, or (conversely) regard his ex cathedra pronouncements as holy writ, are the people most likely to take the risks and make the sacrifices involved in helping others. Last week a middle-ranking officer of the Salvation Army, who gave up a well-paid job to devote his life to the poor, attempted to convince me that homosexuality is a mortal sin.

Late at night, on the streets of one of our great cities, that man offers friendship as well as help to the most degraded and (to those of a censorious turn of mind) degenerate human beings who exist just outside the boundaries of our society. And he does what he believes to be his Christian duty without the slightest suggestion of disapproval. Yet, for much of his time, he is meeting needs that result from conduct he regards as intrinsically wicked.

Civilised people do not believe that drug addiction and male prostitution offend against divine ordinance. But those who do are the men and women most willing to change the fetid bandages, replace the sodden sleeping bags and - probably most difficult of all - argue, without a trace of impatience, that the time has come for some serious medical treatment. Good works, John Wesley insisted, are no guarantee of a place in heaven. But they are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists.

The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand. The close relationship may have something to do with the belief that we are all God's children, or it may be the result of a primitive conviction that, although helping others is no guarantee of salvation, it is prudent to be recorded in a book of gold, like James Leigh Hunt's Abu Ben Adam, as "one who loves his fellow men". Whatever the reason, believers answer the call, and not just the Salvation Army. When I was a local councillor, the Little Sisters of the Poor - right at the other end of the theological spectrum - did the weekly washing for women in back-to-back houses who were too ill to scrub for themselves.

It ought to be possible to live a Christian life without being a Christian or, better still, to take Christianity à la carte. The Bible is so full of contradictions that we can accept or reject its moral advice according to taste. Yet men and women who, like me, cannot accept the mysteries and the miracles do not go out with the Salvation Army at night.

The only possible conclusion is that faith comes with a packet of moral imperatives that, while they do not condition the attitude of all believers, influence enough of them to make them morally superior to atheists like me. The truth may make us free. But it has not made us as admirable as the average captain in the Salvation Army.

Edit: What is my point? Christ commands us to be salt and light in this world, because the world needs it. We can do this by serving others, and we ought to, for they are made in the image of God as are we (as Hattersley mentions). But it's important that we keep Christ in all this. If I volunteer at a soup kitchen every weekend, and I'm doing it because I am infused with some Christian ethic, but I deny that Jesus of Nazareth was, in fact, the Messiah and Son of God, I'm still in trouble. We love others because Christ loved us, and he loves them, and they are human, and there is something beautiful about that. But it seems to me that the one who denies Christ's work on the cross will ultimately choose him/herself over others. Maybe he/she can fake it for a while (and perhaps even a long time), but when it comes down to it, the self will be chosen over others.

Thus, "social Christianity" (what I'm calling the idea of choosing a Christian ethic to live by (or accepting Christ's "good moral teachings") but not his work on the cross) doesn't work, and it doesn't have to, as long as the Church of God is being what He called it to be.

Knowledge

My posts are different (at least so far) than Jordan's. I don't know if this will always be the case (well, we're different people, so it probably will), but maybe not always thematically.

At any rate, I'm currently studying a book called Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, by J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig. The title fits the book perfectly, so I won't go into a detailed description. Instead, over the course of the next several months, I plan to slowly post my notes and thoughts about what I'm reading.

I'm currently mired in the study of epistemology, which the book breaks into five chapters:

• Knowledge and Rationality
• The Problem of Skepticism
• The Structure of Justification
• Theories of Truth and Postmodernism
• Religious Epistemology

I think I'm going to find all of this pretty fascinating. I am in the early stages of the "Knowledge" part of the chapter on knowledge and rationality, and would like to impart some of what I'm learning to the blogosphere. So here we go.

There are (approximately) three types of knowledge:

1. Knowledge by acquaintance (e.g., "I know the ball in front of me.")
2. Know-how (e.g., "I know how to play golf.")
3. Propositional knowledge, where someone knows that P, where P is a proposition (e.g., "I know that Ronald Reagan was a Republican president.")

Of the most interest to philosophers (at least in the study of epistemology) is the third. Since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, people in and outside philosophy have offered definitions for propositional knowledge. Plato offered (though he did not completely endorse) what has come to be known as the standard definition of (propositional) knowledge: knowledge is justified true belief (or JTB), sometimes called the tripartite definition. This makes sense, by and large. To know something, one must believe it to be true, it must be true, and you must be justified in that belief (i.e., have a good reason for believing it). While these are fairly obviously necessary conditions, Edmund Gettier showed in 1963 and they are not sufficient. He constructed what are now called Gettier-type counterexamples to the JTB definition. Unfortunately, it's late, so I am going to leave you hanging without an example, but they are on the Interweb.

More later.

How far do I have to follow?

I went to a men's retreat last night. Basically the evening was for college men to embrace their masculinity, our God given masculinity. I think this idea is amazing, especially in a society that seems to want to emasculate men from a young age. But that is a completely different discussion. I have only one problem with the night and I'll keep the criticism on myself. I personally am about five feet, ten inches and around 165 pounds. Friday night I consumed 4.4 pounds of ribs, fries, and root-beer. That seems to me to be a stark contrast even for the average American. What I'm getting at is that not only did I feel physically ill (yippee for pepto) but I felt bad. Bad, being that I believe what I did was wrong. I believe eating like that is glutinous...what I did was sinned. What's worse is that I had thought about this beforehand. The thing is, is that when Jesus talks about following Him no middle ground can be found, you either follow Him or you don't. Now, I'm not saying we can be perfect and don't make mistakes...because as you read above, and other posts, I'm by no means perfect and I've made plenty of mistakes and continue to do so. The problem comes when I willfully choose to do what I know to be contrary to God's will. I don't get to choose what is right and wrong, I get to choose whether or not to do right and wrong (or even recognize right and wrong or lie to myself). So the answer to the question "How far do I have to follow?"....WRONG QUESTION...It is whether or not I will follow.


Another question everyone should ask:
God loves me...Do I love God?

Jordan

Telos

As long as we're into Greek words on this blog, telos comes from the Greek word for "purpose." Teleology, then, is the philosophical study of design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in nature or human creations.

I find it interesting to consider purpose, not just as an abstract thing, but as something we need to understand. Do our lives have purpose? One Southern Californian pastor wrote a book about living life with purpose. What is the purpose of the church? Of government? Of the different types of relationships? How has naturalism destroyed our culture's belief that we have a purpose?

It seems to me that everyone would like their lives to be meaningful, to count for something, to have a purpose. I would even argue that, even though he was mentally ill, that guy who caused all that trouble on the campus of Va Tech last week lacked purpose in life. I think the lack of purpose does that to people -- it destroys them, destroys their humanness.

Of course, that doesn't mean we have a purpose, or that any institutions or relationships have an intrinsic purpose.

But what do you think? Does life have a purpose? Do institutions and relationships have purpose? I'm not asking how we might know what that purpose is. But does it have a purpose?

More later.

Mike

So my friend Mike is going to be another administrator on here, so he will be making posts. Hopefully there will be more people than just he and I having discussions (hint, hint). We want to hear what you think.

Discussions...

I forgot to mention that anyone wanting to start any kind of discussion with me that has nothing to do with any of my posts can simply write on any of them and I'd be more than happy to make a new post that's only purpose is to have a discussion using the "comments" thingy.

Background in bullets

Not sure if anyone will actually come across this, or read for that matter, other than my friend Mike. But I guess that's not the point (or any). Some background:
-I'm the youngest of four. (by four years)
-Small town South Dakota(Wow a creeper who came across this blog would be happy)
-I am going to school to go to school (ELED)

-I am not aware of having a fear of anything or anyone save God (and Snuggles...yeah, the Downy bear: I used to have nightmares...maybe I'll tell more later) and actually I don't fear God enough.
-I'm arrogant (see above)
-I have trust issues (also see above)
-I'm average at basically everything I do.
-I really like to talk to people (more so on a one-to-one basis)
-I like bullet points.

-When I was growing up I was always part of the "cool" kids group, but I was friends with just about everyone I met (my mom is to thank for the latter part)
-The summer after my 7th grade year I was baptized...
-A year after that I started drinking and smoking pot (but I went to church--sometimes hungover or still drunk--and youth group and went on missions trips...I was a "good" kid)
-Started treating girls poorly (thinking of them as merely a means to fulfill my sexual desires)
-Hit my low the Spring of my sophomore year in high school.
-Started regretting what I had been doing a year later (phased withdrawl of the party life begins Summer after Junior year...stopped smoking pot altogether)
-Finally was fed-up with the actions of my life and stopped drinking January of my senior year
-Started reading the Bible to find answers (started with Revelation...I don't recommend that...it would be better to start with one of the Gospels: my suggestion is John)
-Remembered some of the ideas I was told growing up (Jesus Christ died for my sins-- see above--all I needed was to put my faith in Him and I would have eternal life...honestly, I never forgot that; I chose to disregard it)
-Went to college
-Met a guy and he told me about having a relationship with God...no kidding, I just spent my whole life disregarding this fact.
-Finally I put my FAITH (not just knowledge, but action also) in Jesus Christ and began my new life.
-Hard realizations came: Just because Jesus Christ takes the judgement of my sin for me doesn't mean that when I accept the gift He gave me that I instantly become holy and am never tempted again...
-Got together with some friends from home a few weekends in a row and drank again (except that this time I was sorry for it...Praise the Lord)
-Ended a relationship with a girl (well, she actually stopped it before it started...sort of)
-About a month later I was extremely satisfied with being single (yes, it took me a month) and was looking forward to not having to deal with a girl for quite some time.

-Yeah well that didn't happen...
-I met a girl (I'll tell you more about her later)
-Life was great the Spring of my freshman year (granted I wasn't perfect and had problems, just as I do now, but I could see that I had grown and was growing spiritually)
-Started dating that girl finals week (after she turned me down once)
-Then a lot more happened that I would fill up another post (and probably will) and now I am where I am at the moment.

-Oh yeah: God was there for it all...being patient with me so that I could have eternal life.
-What's really scary to think about is that if I had died before I put my faith in Him I would be suffering for eternity (never ending).


There ya' go,
Jordan